On the day Barack Obama takes over as US president, he may draw some inspiration from a little known address by his ideological guru Martin Luther King on All India Radio in 1959.
On the day Barack Obama takes over as US president, he may draw some inspiration from a little known address by his ideological guru Martin Luther King on All India Radio in 1959 in which he appealed to India to take lead to achieve "universal disarmament".
King, in a rare address to the state-run AIR, said "it may be that, just as India had to take the lead and show the world that national independence could be achieved non-violently, so India may have to take the lead and call for universal disarmament".
In the audio tape, found recently by AIR staff, he said "we must come to see in the world today that what he (Gandhi) taught, and his method throughout, reveals to us that there is an alternative to violence and that if we fail to follow this we will perish in our individual and in our collective lives".
"Mahatma Gandhi may well be God's appeal to this generation, a generation drifting again to its doom. And this eternal appeal is in the form of a warning: they that live by the sword shall perish by the sword," the civil rights activist said further.
"For in a day when Sputniks and explorers dash through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war," he said in the clip spread across the Internet widely.
"Today we no longer have a choice between violence and non-violence; it is either non-violence or non-existence," he said in the address.
King recalled the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, another of Obama's idols, and noted that he was shot for the same reason that Gandhi was shot for, namely, "for committing the crime of wanting to heal the wounds of a divided nation".
He, who spoke on AIR after a visit to India, said "if this age is to survive, it must follow the way of love and non-violence that he so nobly illustrated in his life".
"Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of non-violent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity," King was quoted as saying in a press release of Indian Embassy in Washington.
Inspired by the life and work of Gandhi, King said "in a real sense, Mahatma embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe and these principles are as inescapable as the law of
gravitation".
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