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Published on Thursday, January 15, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
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Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam
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Delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
April 1967
At Manhattan's Riverside Church
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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 the
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 misunderstanding, I deem it of signal
importance to try to state clearly why I believe that the path from Dexter
Avenue Baptist Church, the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my
pastorage, leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform 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 reasons 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.
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, 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. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and
I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle
political play thing 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 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 young black men who had
been crippled by our society and sending them 8000 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 grows out of my experience in the ghettos 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 non-violent action. But, they
asked, 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 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
from the shackles they still wear.
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.
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 or all
men, for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black
and 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 hem? What then can I say to the Viet Cong 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 hem my life?
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam, 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. 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 their broken cries.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese proclaimed
their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese
occupation and before the communist revolution in China. 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 re-conquest 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 re-colonize Vietnam.
Before the end of the war we were meeting 80 per cent of the French war
costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to
despair of their 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 to do so.
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.
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their
crops. They must weep as the bulldozers destroy their precious trees. They
wander into the hospitals, with at least 20 casualties from American
firepower for each Viet Cong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a
million of them, mostly children.
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 out 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?
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 NLF, 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? 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 new
weapons of death into their land?
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less
than 25 per cent 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.
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and non-violence, when it
helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know
of 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. 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 at Geneva
to give up, as a temporary measure, the land they controlled between the
13th and 17th parallels. 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 the increasing international rumors of American plans for
an
invasion of the North. Perhaps only his sense of humor and 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 8000
miles from its shores.
At this point, I should make it clear that while I have tried here to give
a voice to the voiceless of Vietnam and to understand the arguments of
those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our own 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 our troops 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 a
hell for the poor.
Somehow this madness must cease. I speak as a child of God and brother to
the suffering poor of Vietnam and 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
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 hearts 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.
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 her people.
In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the
initiative in bringing the war to a halt. 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 nightmare:
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 build-up 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 on which 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 NLF. Then we must make what reparations we can for the
damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed,
in this country if necessary.
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 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 70 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. 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 that 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. We will be marching
and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and
profound change in American life and policy.
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. The need
to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the
counterrevolutionary 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. With such activity in mind, the words of 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, 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.
When machines and computers, profit 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. 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 easily 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 the veins of peoples
normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields
physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled
with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to
spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is
approaching spiritual death.
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 re-ordering 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 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 the 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 those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are
the
fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.
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 ad just to injustice, the
Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the
modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven
many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore,
communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and
follow through on the revolutions that 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.
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 re-dedicate ourselves to the long and
bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the
sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say
the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will
our message be that the forces of American life militate against their
arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be
another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings,
of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and
though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment
of human history.
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