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MLK's Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
This
anti-war speech was delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April
4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside
Church in New York City. It is among his least known speeches and he
would be killed almost a year to the day after delivering it.
By Martin Luther King, Jr.
I come to this magnificent
house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other
choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest
agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought
us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent
statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own
heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines:
"A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in
relation to Vietnam.
The truth
of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us
is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner
truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their
government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human
spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of
conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding
world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they
often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the
verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
Some of us
who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found
that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must
speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our
limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for
surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a
significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond
the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm
dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of
history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us
trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be
sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way
beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the
past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own
silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have
called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many
persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart
of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are
you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of
dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you
hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them,
though I often understand the source of their concern, I am
nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the
inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling.
Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in
which they live.
In the
light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance
to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the
path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery,
Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary
tonight.
I come to
this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation.
This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation
Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.
Nor is it
an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the
need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is
it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front
paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a
successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have
justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United
States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that
conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both
sides.
Tonight,
however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my
fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in
ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.
The
Importance of Vietnam
Since I am
a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven
major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision.
There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection
between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been
waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that
struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the
poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There
were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in
Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were
some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew
that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in
rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam
continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic
destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the
war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps
the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear
to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of
the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and
their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions
relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young
men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight
thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which
they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have
been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white
boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has
been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch
them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we
realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I
could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the
poor.
My third
reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of
my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years
-- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the
desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov
cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to
offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that
social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But
they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our
own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its
problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit
home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the
violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken
clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my
own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this
government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our
violence, I cannot be silent.
For those
who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby
mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further
answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of
America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to
certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction
that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the
descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles
they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that
black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Now, it
should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the
integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If
America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read
Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest
hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet
determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and
dissent, working for the health of our land.
As if the
weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not
enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964;
and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a
commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked
before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me
beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would
yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of
Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of
peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I
am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that
the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist,
for their children and ours, for black and for white, for
revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry
is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died
for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao
as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or
must I not share with them my life?
Finally,
as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from
Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid
if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share
with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the
calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and
brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned
especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come
tonight to speak for them.
This I
believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem
ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and
deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined
goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the
voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for
no document from human hands can make these humans any less our
brothers.
Strange
Liberators
And as I
ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to
understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the
people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each
side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have
been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades
now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be
no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them
and hear their broken cries.
They must
see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed
their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese
occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were
led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration
of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to
recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its
reconquest of her former colony.
Our
government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for
independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance
that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that
tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking
self-determination, and a government that had been established not by
China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly
indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this
new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs
in their lives.
For nine
years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of
independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in
their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.
Before the
end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs.
Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to
despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them
with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even
after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full
costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.
After the
French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform
would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came
the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily
divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of
the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem. The
peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all
opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to
discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this
was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of
U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods
had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but
the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change
-- especially in terms of their need for land and peace.
The only
change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in
support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and
without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets
and received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land
reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their
fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically
as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps
where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or
be destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children
and the aged.
They watch
as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops.
They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to
destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at
least twenty casualties from American firepower for one
"Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of
them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands
of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the
streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers
as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to
our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do
the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we
refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform?
What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the
Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration
camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we
claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have
destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the
village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have
cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist
revolutionary political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have
supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted
their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?
Now there
is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only solid
physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and
in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets.
The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on
such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must
speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too
are our brothers.
Perhaps
the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those
who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National
Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or
Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize
that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to
bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they
think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up
of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of
"aggression from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to
the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence
after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while
we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must
understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions.
Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their
violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of
destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.
How do
they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less
than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the
blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are
aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear
ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized
political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can
speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and
controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder
what kind of new government we plan to help form without them -- the
only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our
political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from
which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly
relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and
then shore it up with the power of new violence?
Here is
the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps
us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know
his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the
basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may
learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are
called the opposition.
So, too,
with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our
mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable
mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in
Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions
now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against
the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the
French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the
willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second
struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were
persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth
and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954
they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would
have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and
they realized they had been betrayed again.
When we
ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be
remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered
the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have
been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning
foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in
any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved
into the tens of thousands.
Hanoi
remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the
earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president
claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh
has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces,
and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of
American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and
shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion
strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him
when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of
aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more
than eight thousand miles away from its shores.
At this
point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few
minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand
the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned
about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what
we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing
process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek
to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they
must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim
to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know
that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese,
and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of
the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.
This
Madness Must Cease
Somehow
this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God
and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam (Iraq). I speak for those
whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose
culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are
paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and
corruption in Vietnam (Iraq). I speak as a citizen of the world, for
the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an
American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this
war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.
This is
the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of
them wrote these words:
"Each day the
war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese
(Iraqis) and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The
Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies.
It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the
possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process
they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image
of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and
democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."
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 cause us to question the fairness and
justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we
are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that
will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the
whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not
be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's
highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it
is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice
which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of
values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and
wealth... The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to
teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true
revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war:
"This way of settling differences is not just." This business of ...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.
America, the
richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way
in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death
wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the
pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There
is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with
bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of
positive revolution of values is our best defense... War is not the
answer. (Terrorism) will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs
or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through
their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its
participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise
restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a
(terrorist). We must not engage in a negative anti-(terrorism), but
rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest
defense against (terrorism), is to take offensive action in behalf of
justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions
of poverty, insecurity and injustice, which are the fertile soil in
which the seed of (terrorism), grows and develops.
The
People Are Important
These are
revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old
systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail
world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The
shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never
before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We
in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that,
because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our
proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated
so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now
become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel
that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism
is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow
through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in
our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a
sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty,
racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly
challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day
when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall
be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough
places plain."
A genuine
revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties
must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now
develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to
preserve the best in their individual societies.
This call
for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's
tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an
all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft
misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by
the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now
become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of
love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am
speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as
the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that
unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This
Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality
is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:
Let us love
one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God
and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected
in us.
Let us hope
that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer
afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of
retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the
ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of
nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate.
As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for
the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death
and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope
that love is going to have the last word."
We are now
faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the
fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history
there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the
thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected
with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not
remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to
pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on.
Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations
are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book
of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The
moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a
choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
We must move
past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for
peace…and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that
borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down
the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who
possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength
without sight.
Now let us
begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but
beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons
of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say
the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard?
Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against
their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will
there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with
their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The
choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose
in this crucial moment of human history.
As that
noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:
Once to every
man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Off'ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the
cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above his own. |
