April 4 of this year will be the 34th anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination. It will also be the 35th anniversary of King's excellent "Beyond Vietnam" speech. King was a pariah among most liberals by the time he was assassinated and "Beyond Vietnam" had a lot to do with it. Not only did he thunderously denounce the brutal US led war against Vietnam (and Laos at the time and eventually Cambodia). He denounced the United States government as the world's greatest purveyor of violence and enunciated a principle that has even more relevance today as Washington prepares to embark on 50 Years War against any defenseless opponent it can find.

In defending his position against the war in Vietnam King said, "I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."

The Soviet deterrent to U.S. hegemony over the world has been a thing of the past for more than a decade. In response to the disintegration of the Soviet Block the U.S. government has extended its power in the world mainly with its military might and mainly for the purpose of allowing us to continue to gorge ourselves on a disproportionate share of the world's resources. Now the U.S. can mercilessly pummel defenseless opponents on multiple fronts thousands of miles apart, as was the case in 1999 when the U.S. led a bombing campaign against Serbia while continuing its permanent state of war in the Persian Gulf with periodic bombings of Iraq. There isn't much the rest of the world can do about this and that's not a good thing. Our tax dollars help finance the manufacture of a majority of the world's weapons of mass destruction. Yes, indeed, the United States government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.

And where has the anti-war movement been as Washington has carried out its campaigns of military aggression around the world since 1990? We all got a taste of the hope that we could prevent so much blood being spilled in our names during the immediate build-up and the initiation of hostilities with the Gulf War protests. But that was back when the Republican Bush the Elder was president. Since then much of the anti-war left has become lap top bombers, as was the case when the Democrat Clinton led the bombing campaign against Serbia. Today, much of left either cowers in fear of being labeled a "terrorist" for voicing opposition to Bush II's 50 Years War, or they have become vehement mad bombers, as is the case with Christopher Hitchens.

As devastating as the toll of the attacks on September 11 were, they should serve as a reminder of how safe and secure we really are here in the United State. It was the first attack on the U.S. mainland in nearly two centuries and it wasn't even a military assault. It involved the highjacking and crashing of a few planes. Meanwhile, tens of millions of people in the world today constantly live under the hammer of our violence. Whether it is Colombian peasants or Palestinians in the West Bank dodging the bullets and bombs we arm proxy armies with, or the 40 million or so Afghanis and Iraqis who live in fear of getting cut to pieces by our air and naval forces, all of this violence has one source: the Pentagon, i.e. our wallets.

All of this points to our military might and political weakness. We don't have the political will to stop being the biggest bully in the world. Without an effective anti-war movement here in the US, people of conscience around the world will continue to do little except watch on while the military forces we fund continue to terrorize defenseless people who can't fight back (except maybe with a totally ineffective terrorist attack here and there).

There was also a fine principle King was stating in "Beyond Vietnam" (a completely foreign concept to mainstream liberalism): We should denounce the violence of the powerful first before we denounce the violence of the oppressed. So how might we apply such a principle today? How about: I will not denounce the violence of a Palestinian suicide bomber until I have first fully denounced the violence of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my government, which arms the Israeli war machine? Or how about: I will not denounce the violence of a Colombian guerrilla until I have first fully denounced the violence of the greatest purveyor of violence today: my own government, which arms the Colombian military and paramilitaries? Or how about: I will not denounce the violence of the Taliban and al-Queda until I have first fully denounced the violence of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government, which did, after all, fund and train Afghanistan's Muslim partisans during the Soviet occupation in the '80s.

Yes, "Beyond Vietnam" now more than ever. No wonder why King was hated by so many liberals at the time of his assassination.