Dr. Vincent Quin, Ph.D.
January 17th 10, 05:57 AM
redvet wrote:
> A Time to Break Silence
>
> by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>
> This speech was given by Dr. King at a meeting of Clergy and Laity
> Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, one
> year before he
> was killed. It is reprinted from I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches
> that Changed the World by Martin Luther King, edited by James M.
> Washington
> (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).
>
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child
> of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. 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. 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 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.
>
> If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of
> the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will
> become clear that our minimal
> expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not
> refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a
> war so that we may bomb her
> nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of
> Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative
> than to see this as some
> horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.
>
> The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to
> achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the
> beginning of our
> adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the
> Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to
> turn sharply from our
> present ways.
>
> In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take
> the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to
> suggest five concrete things that our
> government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult
> process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:
>
> 1.End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
> 2.Declare a unilateral cease fire in the hope that such action will
> create the atmosphere for negotiation.
> 3.Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast
> Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our
> interference in Laos.
> 4.Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front
> has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role
> in any
> meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
> 5.Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in
> accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.
>
> Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer
> to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new
> regime which included the
> Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the
> damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly
> needed, making it available
> in this country if necessary.
>
> PROTESTING THE WAR
>
> Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task
> while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful
> commitment. We must
> continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse
> ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by
> seeking out every creative
> means of protest possible.
>
> As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify
> for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the
> alternative of conscientious
> objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen
> by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College,
> and I recommend it to
> all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust
> one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up
> their ministerial
> exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the
> times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when
> our lives must be placed on
> the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of
> humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his
> convictions, but we must all protest.
>
> There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and
> sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular
> crusade against the war in Vietnam. I
> say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say
> something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of
> a far deeper malady within the
> American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find
> ourselves organizing clergy and laymen concerned committees for the
> next generation. They will be
> concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about
> Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and
> South Africa. We will be
>
> marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies
> without end unless there is a significant and profound change in
> American life and policy. Such
> thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of
> the living God.
>
> In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to
> him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution.
> During the past ten years we have
> seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the
> presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to
> maintain social stability for our
> investments accounts for the counter revolutionary action of American
> forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used
> against guerrillas in
> Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already
> been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind
> that the words of the late
> John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those
> who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution
> inevitable."
>
> Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation
> has taken the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible
> by refusing to give up the
> privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of
> overseas investment.
>
> 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. 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." It will look at our alliance
> with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just."
> 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 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.
>
> 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 against
> communism. War is not the answer. Communism 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 Communist or an appeaser who advocates the
> seating of Red
> China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria
> are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We
> must not engage in a
> negative anti communism, but rather in a positive thrust for
> democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to
> take offensive action in behalf of
> justice. We must with positive action seek to remove thosse conditions
> of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in
> which the seed of communism
> 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 judgement 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 moutain 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 deperately
> 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 in Vietnam 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
> callling 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.
Excellent! Here's the audio of MLK making this speech:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
--
Each person has an individual responsibility to determine if his actions are moral, and
no government or army may ever take that responsibility away.
definition:
murder - the unjustifiable and intentional killing of people, NO EXCEPTIONS.
> A Time to Break Silence
>
> by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>
> This speech was given by Dr. King at a meeting of Clergy and Laity
> Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, one
> year before he
> was killed. It is reprinted from I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches
> that Changed the World by Martin Luther King, edited by James M.
> Washington
> (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).
>
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child
> of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. 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. 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 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.
>
> If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of
> the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will
> become clear that our minimal
> expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not
> refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a
> war so that we may bomb her
> nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of
> Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative
> than to see this as some
> horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.
>
> The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to
> achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the
> beginning of our
> adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the
> Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to
> turn sharply from our
> present ways.
>
> In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take
> the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to
> suggest five concrete things that our
> government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult
> process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:
>
> 1.End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
> 2.Declare a unilateral cease fire in the hope that such action will
> create the atmosphere for negotiation.
> 3.Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast
> Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our
> interference in Laos.
> 4.Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front
> has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role
> in any
> meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
> 5.Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in
> accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.
>
> Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer
> to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new
> regime which included the
> Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the
> damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly
> needed, making it available
> in this country if necessary.
>
> PROTESTING THE WAR
>
> Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task
> while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful
> commitment. We must
> continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse
> ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by
> seeking out every creative
> means of protest possible.
>
> As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify
> for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the
> alternative of conscientious
> objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen
> by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College,
> and I recommend it to
> all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust
> one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up
> their ministerial
> exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the
> times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when
> our lives must be placed on
> the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of
> humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his
> convictions, but we must all protest.
>
> There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and
> sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular
> crusade against the war in Vietnam. I
> say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say
> something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of
> a far deeper malady within the
> American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find
> ourselves organizing clergy and laymen concerned committees for the
> next generation. They will be
> concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about
> Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and
> South Africa. We will be
>
> marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies
> without end unless there is a significant and profound change in
> American life and policy. Such
> thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of
> the living God.
>
> In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to
> him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution.
> During the past ten years we have
> seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the
> presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to
> maintain social stability for our
> investments accounts for the counter revolutionary action of American
> forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used
> against guerrillas in
> Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already
> been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind
> that the words of the late
> John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those
> who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution
> inevitable."
>
> Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation
> has taken the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible
> by refusing to give up the
> privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of
> overseas investment.
>
> 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. 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." It will look at our alliance
> with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just."
> 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 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.
>
> 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 against
> communism. War is not the answer. Communism 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 Communist or an appeaser who advocates the
> seating of Red
> China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria
> are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We
> must not engage in a
> negative anti communism, but rather in a positive thrust for
> democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to
> take offensive action in behalf of
> justice. We must with positive action seek to remove thosse conditions
> of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in
> which the seed of communism
> 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 judgement 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 moutain 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 deperately
> 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 in Vietnam 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
> callling 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.
Excellent! Here's the audio of MLK making this speech:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
--
Each person has an individual responsibility to determine if his actions are moral, and
no government or army may ever take that responsibility away.
definition:
murder - the unjustifiable and intentional killing of people, NO EXCEPTIONS.