[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 1]
[House]
[Page 477]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1840
                          DISTORTING THE DREAM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. WOOLSEY. Earlier this week, Mr. Speaker, we recognized the 82nd 
birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., perhaps the greatest moral and 
spiritual leader in our Nation's history. Each of us in our way 
reflected on Dr. King's teaching, and his message had more relevance 
than ever in light of the tragic shootings in Tucson.
  It's a sign of progress that a man whose ideas were considered 
revolutionary during his life has achieved mainstream iconic status in 
death. But as we all share his legacy, there is a very real danger that 
some people will, in a self-serving way, distort King's vision to 
justify the very policies he gave his life opposing. In fact, 
Department of Defense General Counsel Jeh Johnson has a bizarre, 
unsettling interpretation of Dr. King's dream.
  In a speech last week, Mr. Johnson suggested that this great agitator 
for peace would have endorsed the war in Afghanistan. And I quote him, 
he said, ``If Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that our 
Nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the 
American people vulnerable to terrorist attack.''
  Mr. Speaker, this strikes me as a presumptuous and manipulative 
distortion of everything Dr. King represented. He was fierce; he was 
resolute in his opposition to the Vietnam War. It was a courageous, 
controversial stand that cost him friends and allies.
  He believed nothing as strongly as the idea that nonviolence was the 
only route to social change. He left little ambiguity about his 
feelings on war: ``The chain reaction of evil wars producing more wars 
must be broken,'' Dr. King once said, ``or we shall be plunged into the 
dark abyss of annihilation.'' I don't know how you get much clearer 
than that, Mr. Speaker.
  Violence, he preached, ``is a descending spiral, begetting the very 
things it seeks to destroy. Through violence you may murder the hater, 
but you do not murder the hate. In fact, violence merely increases 
hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence.''
  Mr. Speaker, we've seen exactly this in our misguided struggle to 
defeat terrorism through warfare. Killing one Taliban or al Qaeda 
insurgent emboldens the movement and simply creates more terrorists. 
Dr. King added that ``a nation that continues to spend more money on 
military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching a 
spiritual death.'' These are the words we ought to reflect on as we 
continue a debate about Federal budget priorities.
  Far from supporting the war in Afghanistan, I believe Dr. King would 
be much more likely to embrace the principles of the SMART security 
platform that I've spoken of from this podium many, many times. It 
calls for cooperation, not conquest; dialogue, not destruction; 
engagement, not invasion. It pursues the goal of global peace and 
security by focusing on our common humanity. It is an agenda that 
respects human rights, that seeks to empower and lift up the poor 
people of the world instead of dropping bombs on their villages and on 
their communities.
  Mr. Speaker, Mr. Johnson of the Pentagon couldn't be more wrong about 
the lessons of Martin Luther King's life. I have every confidence that, 
were he alive today, Dr. King would join me in a loud and unmistakable 
call to bring our troops home.

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