The Great Martin Luther King

Tolstoy was a great man. So was Gandhi. So was Martin Luther King, whose day is tomorrow. I say this confidently because they all agreed on one thing that I now totally concur in: the human race cannot go forward except on the basis of true non-violence as taught by the Lord Jesus Christ. (But denied in effect by most people and clerics who call themselves Christian. Woe to them.)

The man who taught me all this, while I was writing a book about my experiences in WWII, was the Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy. (website here: http://centerforchristiannonviolence.org/)

Fr. McCarthy is an incredibly persistent soldier for the Lord in the face of the bland, maddening refusal of his church (he is a Catholic of the Melkite rite) to do anything but truckle before our statist barons of the warlike U.S., the world's flamboyant model of a military-industrial-congressional engine of world violence and oppression.


King did some things you could quarrel with, but he was utterly steadfast in his non-violent stand. Fr. McCarthy supplies a quote:


I am committed to nonviolence absolutely. I am just not going to kill anybody, whether it’s in Vietnam or here. I plan to stand by nonviolence…(because) only a refusal to hate or kill can put an end to the chain of violence in the world and lead toward community where people live together without fear. Humanity is waiting for something other than blind imitation of the past…If we want truly to advance a step further, if we want to turn over a new leaf and really set a new man afoot, we must begin to turn humanity away from the long and desolate night of violence. May it not be that the new person that the world needs is the nonviolent person…A dark, desperate, sin-sick world waits for this new kind of person, this new kind of power. 

I believe that to be true.