C'mon, just say it. I assure you that my friend NSMA is nowhere in sight ;)
I like your list (MLK added of course) but wanted to mention these modern day heroes:
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/especially S. Brian Willson
S. Brian Willson became a legendary figure in America's peace movement in 1987, when he attempted to block a train carrying military supplies ((to Nicaragua)) and lost both his legs when the train sped up and ran over him. But his speech in San Diego on February 23 went far beyond a simple call for opposition to the threatened U.S. aggression against Iraq. Willson's speech included a slashing attack on the entire history of human 'civilization' and a call for a simpler form of existence. Describing himself as a 'nonviolent anarchist bioregionalist Buddhist', Willson called the George W. Bush presidency a 'cosmic gift' whose function is to educate the population of the U.S. and the world in the unsustainability of the 'civilized' lifestyle.
You can read his essays here:
http://www.brianwillson.com/I met him in real life and the man is inspirational.
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For most people, what S. Brian Willson went through in 1987 when a train carrying military supplies in Concord, California ran over him and cut off his legs as he lay across the track trying to stop it with his body would be the defining moment of their life. For Willson, however, the defining moment of his life had occurred 18 years earlier, when as a U.S. Air Force officer serving in Viet Nam, he visited a village after an American bombing raid and came face to face for the first time with the real-life effect of America’s war on the Viet Namese people.
"I went to Viet Nam right after Tet ‘69 and one day the base commander asked me to check out a bombing mission because he'd heard South Viet Namese pilots were intentionally missing their targets which were villages," Willson recalled in a speech at the World Beat Center in Balboa Park February 23. "He sent me with a
lieutenant who spoke both English and Viet Namese. We went to our first village in April 1969 and I saw, amidst the smoke from the destroyed houses, a water buffalo with a three-foot gash emitting a shriek of pain."
"As I shifted my head to the left," Willson continued, "I saw 120 corpses. I was so shocked I nearly stepped on a woman who had tried to protect her three children from the bombing by shielding them with her body. The napalm from the bombs had literally melted the skin off her face, and as I saw what was left of her eyelids at first I started gagging and then I started crying. The Viet Namese lieutenant asked me what my problem was he was grinning at the sight and I just said something, I didn’t know where it was coming from, but I said, "I’m looking at my family." He just laughed and said, "Well, they were Communists, and we’re happy these pilots didn’t miss their targets."
For Willson whose only previous political involvement had been in the 1964 Presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, and who had grown up with the same Right-wing ideas as his parents "I knew something had happened to my psyche" when he saw those 120 victims of the U.S. military involvement in Viet Nam. "I really looked at these people as part of my family and I remember thinking, I’m in their village. They aren’t in mine. It seemed like everything I’d been taught was a lie. There seemed to be something so fraudulent about the way I was taught, about the way I could come to Viet Nam and kill people with no idea of what their struggle was about."
<snip>
http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/2003/02/4395.shtml
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Also interesting is his book "On Third World Legs":
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SA/en/display/369
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Waging Unconditional Peace with S. Brian Willson
By Frank Dorrel
I first heard about Brian Willson back in 1986 when he was fasting with 3 others veterans on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building. Charlie Liteky, George Mizo, Duncan Murphy and Brian were protesting U.S. military involvement in Central America. We were supporting deaths squads in El Salvador, the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua and a murderous military government in Guatemala, just to name a few of the countries our government was brutally interfering with. These men had fought for their country but now they were fighting for something bigger! They called their action the Veterans Fast for Life!
Then, in 1987, Brian and other veterans took part in a demonstration at Concord, California. They were peaceably blocking the tracts where naval trains were traveling, carrying lethal weapons that were going to Central America to kill innocent people! Unbeknownst to the veterans, the FBI had identified them as suspected terrorists, somehow related to their earlier fast in Washington DC. The engineer sped the train to three times its legal speed limit and ran over Brian, cutting off his legs and fracturing his skull. The other veteran narrowly missed being hit. Brian was lucky to have lived through this terrible assault. Nevertheless, he continued on with his activism! Only now, he was much more famous in the Peace Movement, as well as to the people of Central America, who considered him a hero!
<snip>
In 1986, he went to Nicaragua to see for himself. He found that the U.S. backed Contras were terrorizing the people of Nicaragua. The Sandinista government was labeled as being Communist by the Reagan administration, which justified the U.S. attacking innocent Nicaragua civilians. Brian asked, "Why are we once more, killing mothers and fathers and children! How could we let this happen again?"
Now, Brian began to understand that this was the American way. Killing and oppressing peoples of the third world was nothing new. As he read the real history it became very clear that our civilization has a long history of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. From the genocide committed against the Native Americans, to the holocaust exacted against millions of Africans to facilitate slavery, to our global "Manifest Destiny" doctrine, a pattern of racism and ethnocentrism produced a grisly path. And then he realized that the U.S. demands access to cheap natural resources, expanded markets and wage slaves, thus controlling the destiny of millions of our fellow brothers and sisters on the planet, in order to preserve our disproportionately privileged way of life.
<snip>
http://www.change-links.org/SWillson.htm
Here's a photo of him with Ron Kovic
Ron Kovic (author 'Born on the Fourth of July')
and S. Brian Willson (also born on the Fourth of July)