Universalist? Doesn't being universalist lead to a non-violent vision of our world?

Singer and activist Harry Belafonte on Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s turn against the war in Southeast Asia and toward cross-racial, anti-poverty organizing:

'It was controversial, but controversy wasn't something he shunned; controversy became the system through which disagreement and debate could be heard. He was comfortable with that. He welcomed it. That aspect of his history is never really discussed.

'... The vested interests don't want us speaking of Dr. King in radical terms. The great tragedy and irony of it all is that the public hungers for voices that are driven more by these moral concerns.'






  Lyndon Johnson had already "declared unconditional war on poverty"  when King came out against the war and began talking about a poor people's campaign.   King's spoke about the war as a immoral policy that drained resources that could be used to assure a genuine democracy, inclusive and equitable.  King's radicalism was a advocacy of social and economic democracy, and it was consistently non-violent.  To argue, as King did, that violence was the way of the oppressor, and that the liberatory response was non-violent and required embodied love (a movement of millions) was an idea that could not be contained.  King could not advocate non-violence as a tactic of protest limited to assuring that African Americans could sit in the front of the bus.  For King,  non violence was a vision of a new way of living for us as a people, a people of this planet.  King's vision was necessarily universalist.