Showing posts with label nonviolence.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nonviolence.. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr was born 90 years ago today

"Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals." - Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1964
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. born 90 years ago today
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was born 90 years ago today in Atlanta, Georgia but never saw his 40th birthday because he was assassinated on April 4, 1968. A little over a year before his untimely death the nonviolent icon made an important speech at Stanford University which is worth listening to and studying.
"Let me say as I've always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I'm still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve." 
Dr. King's message remains relevant today and his family continues  to work at The King Center in  training new generations in the ways of nonviolence, and sharing his writings and speeches.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a radical critique of American society. He repeatedly challenged the United States to live up to its own aspired ideals and sought through nonviolent action and democratic norms, reforms to end segregation and ensure voting rights for African Americans. 

Reverend King's political outlook could best be described as falling within what is called Christian Democracy. This school of thought occupies the center with parties on the center left and the center right, but like Reverend King based on a Christian view of humanity in which "every individual is considered unique and must be treated with dignity."  In his April 4, 1967 speech, Beyond Vietnam gave full expression to this outlook:
"We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. "
Mohandas Gandhi, who greatly influenced King, also spoke of social responsibility and trusteeship. Gandhi, a self-described socialist, was not an enthusiastic proponent of an expanded social-welfare state as commonly understood arguing: 
"The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence. Hence I prefer the doctrine of trusteeship. [...] What I would personally prefer would be not centralization of power in the hands of the State, but an extension of the sense of trusteeship, as, in my opinion, the violence of private ownership is less injurious than the violence of the State. However, if it is unavoidable, I would support a minimum of State-ownership."
Furthermore the critique made by both King and Gandhi of a "thing-oriented" society or the state as a "soulless machine" looks to the person or the individual not an economic mechanism  or economic class. The focus is on the human person and polices that recognize and respect the uniqueness of each human being and their dignity.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s daughter Bernice King over twitter offers a thread of tweets with a few things to consider about her dad of which an essential part was understanding that, "He was not passive. Nonviolence is not passive. It is active, principled, love-centered noncooperation with evil."

Last year, on the fiftieth anniversary of his funeral procession, on April 8, 2018 I visited the King Center in Atlanta and was a participant in the March for Humanity. There members of the King family and friends of Reverend King described having known him, and their experiences in the Civil Rights struggle and the continuing struggle for freedom and justice today.


When he was alive the civil rights leader was considered a controversial figure. The American FBI wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr., monitored the Civil Rights Movement, and carried out active measures against him. Many have heard about this, but not of the other campaign waged against the civil rights leader by Soviet intelligence, also known as the KGB. It is also important to remember that today when Russian intelligence operatives seek to sow discord, division and hatred in the United States between citizens that they did it before.

March for Humanity in Atlanta, Georgia on April 8, 2018
In 1992 a high ranking Russian intelligence officer defected to the United Kingdom and brought with him notes and transcripts compiled over the previous thirty years as he moved entire foreign intelligence archives to a new headquarters just outside of Moscow. The Russian intelligence officer’s name was Vasili Mitrokhin and the information he gathered became known as The Mitrokhin Archive.

In the book The Sword and the The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin published in 1999 details were obtained from the Mitrokhin Archive on Soviet efforts to replace Martin Luther King Jr. with a “more radical and malleable leader” such as Stokeley Carmichael to provoke a race war in the United States.

Pages 237 and 238 of The Sword and the Shield excerpted below detail elements of the campaign waged by Soviet intelligence and the active measures arrayed against the civil rights leader:

“In August 1967 the Centre approved an operational plan by the deputy head of Service A, Yuri Modin, former controller of the Magnificent Five, to discredit King and his chief lieutenants by placing articles in the African press, which could then be reprinted in American newspapers, portraying King as an “Uncle Tom” who was secretly receiving government subsidies to tame the civil rights movement and prevent it threatening the Johnson administration." 
          [...]
"King’s assassination on April 4, 1968 was quickly followed by the violence and rioting which the KGB had earlier blamed King for trying to prevent. Within a week riots erupted in over a hundred cities, forty-six people had been killed, 3,500 injured and 20,000 arrested. To “Deke” DeLoach, it seemed that, “The nation was teetering on the brink of anarchy.”86 Henceforth, instead of dismissing King as an Uncle Tom, Service A portrayed him as a martyr of the black liberation movement and spread conspiracy theories alleging that his murder had been planned by white racists with the connivance of the authorities."
 University of Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew, who coauthored The Sword and the Shield with Vasili Mitrokhin was interviewed by Charlie Rose on PBS on September 28, 1999 about the book and towards the end of the interview discussed how the Soviets celebrated when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray.  The Russians celebrated because they did not want an independent African American leader, that they could not control, who was a principled nonviolence practitioner.

Taylor Branch, in the third book of his trilogy on Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, At Canaan's Edge wrote about the Reverend's views on the militant call to armed struggle in the streets of the United States in January of 1968.

“Riots just don’t pay off,” said King. He pronounced them an objective failure beyond morals or faith. “For if we say that power is the ability to effect change, or the ability to achieve purpose,” he said, “then it is not powerful to engage in an act that does not do that–no matter how loud you are, and no matter how much you burn.” Likewise, he exhorted the staff to combat the “romantic illusion” of guerrilla warfare in the style of Che Guevara. No “black” version of the Cuban revolution could succeed without widespread political sympathy, he asserted, and only a handful of the black minority itself favored insurrection. King extolled the discipline of civil disobedience instead, which he defined not as a right but a personal homage to untapped democratic energy. The staff must “bring to bear all of the power of nonviolence on the economic problem,” he urged, even though nothing in the Constitution promised a roof or a meal. “I say all of these things because I want us to know the hardness of the task,” King concluded, breaking off with his most basic plea: “We must not be intimidated by those who are laughing at nonviolence now.”
Unlike others, who were funded and supported by the Soviet Union, Martin Luther King Jr was targeted by both American and Russian intelligence agencies because he was his own man, and not controlled by anyone, save his conscience. He didn't advocate or engage in violence and changed the United States and the world.

Let us remember him today on what would have been his 90th birthday, and recommit ourselves to continuing his work "to shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society."
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Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Chinese students overseas call for transparency over Tiananmen Square

On the 26th anniversary of the Beijing massacre that brought to an end weeks of mass, nonviolent protests demanding an end to corruption and democratic reforms, students outside of China address an open letter to their counterparts still in-country. Over the years have silently observed this anniversary. With respect and in solidarity, below is reproduced an English translation of the letter taken from China Change.

Tiananmen Square prior to the June 4, 1989 crackdown and massacre

On the 26th Anniversary of Tiananmen Massacre – an Open Letter to Fellow Students in Mainland China  

By a group of overseas Chinese students, letter penned by Gu Yi, published: May 27, 2015
This letter, written in Chinese, has been circulating through email groups and on social media since May 20. Yesterday the Chinese Communist Party-run Global Times gave it a free publicity push – double strength (here and here). – The Editor

We are a group of Chinese students born in the 1980s and 1990s and now studying abroad. Twenty-six years ago on June 4th, young students, in life’s prime with innocent love for their country just as we are today, died under the gun of the People’s Liberation Army in Beijing’s streets. This part of history has since been so carefully edited and shielded away that many of us today know very little about it. Currently outside China, we have been able to access photos, videos and news, and listen to the accounts of survivors, unfettered. We feel the aftershocks of this tragedy across the span of a quarter century. The more we know, the more we feel we have a grave responsibility on our shoulders. We are writing you this open letter, fellow college students inside China, to share the truth with you and to expose crimes that have been perpetrated up to this day in connection with the Tian’anmen Massacre in 1989.

Around 9:30 on the night of June 3rd, 1989, gun shots tore the tense streets of Beijing. On that day, troops enforcing martial law opened fire on students and residents who had protested peacefully for nearly two months. The demonstrations were initiated by college students but people from all walks of life participated, numbering over 300,000 at the peak. The center area of the peaceful sit-in was in Tian’anmen Square. It was a time when the nation had been encouraged by the relatively freer and more open political atmosphere throughout the 1980s, people had had trust in the Communist Party and held expectations of a government that called itself “the people’s government.” At a time when economic crisis threatened and corruption worsened, students and residents wanted to have a dialogue with the nation’s leaders to make the country a better place. Never for a moment did the peaceful demonstrators dream that a planned massacre was awaiting them.

Per orders from Deng Xiaping, Li Peng and other Chinese leaders, the PLA forced its way toward Tian’anmen Square to clear out the student occupiers. They drove tanks with machine guns mounted on top, and they shouted “I will not attack if I am not attacked” while opening fire on civilians. On its route at Muxidi (木樨地), several hundreds of unarmed civilians fell in streaming blood shouting “Fascists!”, “Murderers!” Among them was Yan Wen (严文), a 23-year-old mathematics student at Peking University, shot dead by bullets to his thigh. He was there with a camera to record history.

Another was the 17-year-old high school student Jiang Jielian (蒋捷连) who had been determined to go to the Square to be with older brothers and older sisters there. 19-year-old Wang Nan (王楠) was yet another who fell, and the bullet-holed helmet he wore is now on display in Hong Kong. The 21-year-old Wu Xiangdong (吴向东)had with him a death notice that read, “For democracy and freedom, for the fate of the nation, every ordinary person has a responsibility.” According to witness accounts, the troops that had entered the Square beat clusters of students with batons even though the two sides had already agreed on the student withdrawal; at Liubukou (六部口), tanks chased, and ran over, a column of students who had left the Square and were walking back to their campuses. Fang Zheng, a senior at Beijing Sports University, lost his legs to speeding tank tracks. There had been unconfirmed reports that pockets of protesters were encircled and executed en mass. Around June 4th, massacres also occurred in Chendu, Sichuan province, and elsewhere.

In mid and late June that year, the government issued three versions of a “report on quashing the riots.” It portrays the civilians as a rioting mob and presents precise numbers of dead and wounded among the troops and the loss of vehicles, but at the same time, it is vague and contradictory on the number of civilian deaths.

Questions remain: why were the weaponized troops unable to defend themselves [if there was indeed a riot]? If they were unable to defend themselves, how did they break through the blockade of hundreds and thousands of civilians? What caused the people of the nation to gather in the streets of the capital to prevent the troops from moving forward? The report claims that the civilian deaths were few. If so, why repeatedly alter the number of death and never publish an accurate count? If the report is to be believed, the civilians attacked the soldiers first. If so, why was the first death among soldiers not reported until more than three hours after the troops opened fire and blood bathed Muxidi?

During the protest, police once confided to Zhou Fengsuo (周锋锁), one of the student leaders in the Square, that “Beijing’s public order has never been so good” as the last two months of “disruption” and “riot.” According to the memoir of Hou Dejian (侯德健)，[the Taiwanese poplar singer] who stayed until the last moment in the Square, students insisted on non-violent principles even at the last moment of forced withdrawal and threw away any possessions that could be used to attack.

Meanwhile, the atrocities of the troops were recorded in photos of bleeding wounded and stacked bodies, videos of shooting civilians, hospitals’ body identification notices and body counts, shocking reportage by Wu Xiaoyong （吴晓镛）of Central People’s Radio Broadcast, not to mention the persistent questioning of Tiananmen Mothers over the last twenty-six years. If all of these are lies as the government claims they are, what is making these parents, now white-headed and frail, seek justice for so many years while sacrificing a normal life?

Last year on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, this writer met with some of the survivors of the massacre. The MC read aloud a partial list of the dead, and people proceeded in a long line to pay respects with flowers. From hundreds to thousands, there have been different numbers and we might never know exactly how many died that year in Beijing. But people witnessed many shocking crimes, and perhaps many more occurred at unknown corners without witnesses. Some witnesses have grown old, others have passed away, and still others dare not speak even though they now live safely overseas. The Chinese government has never dared to publicize the exact number of deaths, and in dealing with a historical event of such magnitude, it first portrayed it, solemnly, as an “anti-revolutionary riot,” and then over the time it downplayed it as a “political ripple,” systematically erasing it from the collective memory of a generation. June 4th has become a “sensitive” time each year, an unmentionable date. Such an enforced taboo is a reverse proof that the atrocities against civilians in 1989 are something the Communist Party would rather keep mum about, although this is a Party with a murderous history of civil war, anti-rightist movements, and the Cultural Revolution.

A classmate of this writer believes that the events from twenty-six years ago are too far back, today’s China is getting better and better, and he lives a very happy life.  As I walked on the Avenue of Eternal Peace two years ago, I saw no trace of blood or bullets but skyscrapers and the bustling of people and cars. We live in prosperity, but what kind of prosperity it is – our imagination is constantly challenged by the astonishing scale of high and low ranking officials, the marriage of power and money that the students opposed twenty-six years ago has become the prevalent model of the state economy. Xi Jinping’s regime waves the banner of anti-corruption, but ordinary people are thrown in jail as trouble makers for holding signs asking officials to disclose their assets.  The clans of Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng, whose hands were stained with the blood of students, have become filthy rich.
We are shocked to discover that we are governed by officials whose family members live abroad. In other words, we are ruled by a bunch of foreigners, and China is merely the goose that lays golden eggs for them.

Twenty-six years ago, students wanted freedom of the press; and twenty-six years later, all media are still controlled by the Party’s Propaganda Department, and journalists and lawyers are being put in jail for invented crimes. Gao Yu’s crime was leaking state secrets, or the ruling party’s latest ideological guidelines. Some of my friends are of the opinion that those who draw the Party’s ire do so because they are famous and conspicuous. We, on the other hand, are mere ordinary people who don’t care about politics. But are ordinary people safe from harm? Think about Xia Junfeng (夏俊峰), Xu Chunhe (徐纯合), and the daughter of Tang Hui (唐慧). No one is safe in a dictatorial system.

When North Korean soldiers crossed the border and killed innocent Chinese, and when Burmese bombers bombed Chinese territory, this government merely “protested.” Come to think about it, the PLA’s only military victory in the last thirty years was the bloodbath in Beijing’s streets on June 4th, 1989!

This is fragile and distorted prosperity. Stability maintenance expenses are as big as the military budget; the Great Fire Wall is being stacked ever higher. They all indicate that, at any moment, truth can come to broad daylight, and the prosperity can collapse.

A voice inside China that says, the Tian’anmen Massacre was unfortunate, but the Chinese Communist Party has learned a lesson, and we don’t want to obsess over it. But the suppression has never stopped: the truth about June 4th is still covered up, the dead still do not have closure, some survivors have served long prison terms, Tian’anmen Mothers are prevented by security police from paying visits to their children’s burial sites. Last year, a group of scholars was detained for having a home seminar to remember that day, and a female student at the Beijing International Studies University was disappeared for proposing a technology to spread the truth about the Tian’anmen Movement.

Meanwhile, the man who made the decision to open fire on students and civilians has been admired and extolled as the chief designer [of China’s economic rise], and neither officers nor soldiers who directed the killings have been tried in a court of law. Do not expect this regime to plead guilty. Nor will they confess to errors as they did after the Cultural Revolution ended, because they know all too well that, once they acknowledge their crimes, they will likely be engulfed by the people’s wrath. They claim they have the ownership of a “universal truth,” but they have built high walls on the Intenet, and they hide in dark rooms to delete news as well as comments. Such is their “confidence in guiding theories” and their “confidence in the path chosen.”

This is the killer’s regime. The gun fire on June 4th shot dead their legitimacy, and what they have accomplished since June 4th is not important. We do not ask the CCP to redress the events of that spring as killers are not the ones we turn to to clear the names of the dead, but killers must be tried. We do not forget, nor forgive, until justice is done and the on-going persecution is halted.

This writer and the signers of this letter know very well that there are consequences in writing and signing this letter. But this is our responsibility, and we hope fellow students inside China know this part of history, and reexamine the violence and atrocities since the Communist Party’s beginning in 1921. From Jingangshan (井冈山, one of CCP’s early bases in Jiangxi province) to Tian’anmen Square, millions of innocent people have died, and we must remember them, but also reflect on wave after wave of sufferings. We have no right to dictate your minds or ask you to do something, but we do have a dream: we dream that, in a future not too far from now, each one of us can live in a country free of fear where history is restored and justice realized. This is the China Dream we have – we, a group of Chinese students studying abroad.

Written by:
Gu Yi (古懿, University of Georgia, slmngy@uga.edu)
Co-signed by:
Feng Yun (封云, University of Central Lancashire)
Chen Chuangchuang (陈闯创, Columbia University)
Zheng Dan (郑丹, Adelphi University)
Chen Bingxu (陈炳旭, Missouri State University)
Jin Meng (金萌, Northwest Missouri State University)
Lu Yan (卢炎, University at Albany, SUNY)
Wang Xiaoyue (王宵悦, University at Albany, SUNY)
Wang Jianying (王剑鹰, University of Missouri)
Meng Li  (St. John’s University)
Wu Lebao (吴乐宝, Melbourne, Australia)

You can sign it too:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1mXmqrVd-rmeahW9j8lrBMwupdfIaS3KE2bbKfW5r2sY/viewform

Related:
Chinese students in the west call for transparency over Tiananmen Square, Guardian, May 25, 2015.

(Translated by China Change)
Chinese original 《海外中国留学生六四26周年致国内同学的公开信》
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