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Anti-War Up - A time to break the silence



 
 
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Old January 17th 10, 06:57 AM posted to rec.aviation.military,rec.aviation.piloting,sci.military.naval,alt.war.vietnam,us.military.army
Dr. Vincent Quin, Ph.D.
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Posts: 56
Default Anti-War Up - A time to break the silence

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/spee...eaksilence.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.
  #2  
Old January 17th 10, 12:32 PM posted to rec.aviation.military,rec.aviation.piloting,sci.military.naval,alt.war.vietnam,us.military.army
redvet
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6
Default Anti-War Up - A time to break the silence

On Sat, 16 Jan 2010 21:57:58 -0800, "Dr. Vincent Quin, Ph.D."
wrote:

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/spee...eaksilence.htm



And I don't believe anyone can complain about his speech being 'off
topic' for alt.war.vietnam...-redvet
  #3  
Old June 1st 10, 12:22 AM posted to rec.aviation.military,rec.aviation.piloting,sci.military.naval,alt.war.vietnam,us.military.army
Brian Whatcott
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 915
Default Anti-War Up - A time to break the silence

Dr. Vincent Quin, Ph.D. wrote:
redvet wrote:

/snip/
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above his own.


Excellent! Here's the audio of MLK making this speech:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/spee...eaksilence.htm




Good grief! Quoting hundreds of lines of prior posts in five groups,
to add TWO lines??

Brian W
  #4  
Old June 1st 10, 09:36 AM posted to rec.aviation.military,rec.aviation.piloting,sci.military.naval,alt.war.vietnam,us.military.army
Dr. Vincent Quin, Ph.D.
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 56
Default Anti-War Up - A time to break the silence

brian whatcott wrote:
Dr. Vincent Quin, Ph.D. wrote:

redvet wrote:


/snip/

Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above his own.



Excellent! Here's the audio of MLK making this speech:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/spee...eaksilence.htm




Good grief! Quoting hundreds of lines of prior posts in five groups,
to add TWO lines??

Brian W


Did you listen to that MLK speech?


--
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.
 




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