Monday is the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King and a national holiday. And yet, the FBI, in the 1960s, called him “The most dangerous negro in America,” and Time magazine called him a “demagogue.” How ironic it is that he was vilified in his lifetime and yet today has a national holiday in his honor.

How can that be? He was always hated by racists, but he became an enemy of the government when he turned against the war in Vietnam. That is why his speech from the Riverside Church condemning the war is rarely played on the media or in history classes. His image has been sanitized. This is a slander on his memory.

Here is a sample of his words, as profound and fitting today as they were in the 1960s:

“A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, 'This way of settling differences 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 the veins of peoples 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.”

What has changed? We are still spending 57 cents of every dollar on the Pentagon. We are shooting third world peoples as if they were objects in a computer game, young men are coming back damaged physically and mentally, and we are coming closer to spiritual death.

Nelson Strasser lives in Kelseyville, Calif.