http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/speeches/Beyond_Vietnam.pdf
One truth about history is that any event, movement, or figure can be invoked in the name of any modern cause or idea. This is especially true about important figures with controversial opinions: it's simply easier to ignore statements one finds inconvenient. Everyone associates Martin Luther King Jr. with the civil rights movement, but few laud his anti-capitalist, anti-war views. In this time of economic turmoil and useless two-front wars, King's sentiments appear prophetic:
(from page 9 of the link)
"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. 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, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
"A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: 'This is not just.' "
"This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
In these passages from "Beyond Vietnam", King emphasizes an undeniable link between a lack of compassion for one's fellow man, and one's zeal for war. If one stops seeing people as as human beings and instead as numbers on a chart, the consequences are disastrous and wrong.
King used this speech to speak out against the war in Vietnam and advocate for social welfare. He argued that it is spiritually impossible to be pro-war and pro-social reform, as a country can't mass-murder civilians and still claim moral superiority.
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At the heart of King’s protest for the Vietnam War and his call for social reform in the United States lies a sense of social justice. In his speech he says that, "A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: 'This is not just.'” King is concerned with social justice abroad and at home. Furthermore, when King approaches two moral issues of war and poverty, he does so in light of his belief of social justice and intrinsic human dignity for everyone. I believe that he is able to approach these two different issues and find a lack of social justice in each because of his underlying religious values that he expresses further in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
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