Conghaileach
7th April 2003, 16:26
[April 4 7, Honor the Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr: Stop the War Now! Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was
our country's foremost spokesperson for peace and
justice. He understood how an immoral war abroad meant
racism and injustice at home. For this he was vilified
and eventually assassinated on April 4, 1968. From April
4 to7 of this year, in commemoration of the death of Dr.
King and in celebration of his legacy, United for Peace
and Justice calls for nationally coordinated local
antiwar actions to be organized throughout the country.
We issue this call in cooperation with the Campus Anti-
War Network, Citizen Works, and Direct Action to Stop
the War, which are all organizing nationwide protests
during the same period. Please organize appropriate
actions in your community. We must stop the war NOW.
More http://www.unitedforpeace.org/ ]
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLKapr67.html
"Beyond Vietnam"
by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam,
at Riverside Church, New York City
4 April 1967
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to
say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how
very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern
about the issues that will be discussed tonight by
turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say
that I consider it a great honor to share this program
with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, some
of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our
nation. And of course it's always good to come back to
Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had
the privilege of preaching here almost every year in
that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding
experience to come to this great church and this great
pulpit.
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight
because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join
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 statements 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 perplexing 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, 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 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, 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 must play in the 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 National
Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.
Since I am a preacher by calling, 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 this 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 a 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 hardly live on the same
block in Chicago. 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
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 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 the 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 until 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 1954.* And I cannot
forget that the Nobel Peace Prize 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 explain 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. 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 the victims of our
nation, for those it calls "enemy," for no document from
human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within
myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion,
my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula.
I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the
ideologies of the Liberation Front, 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
1954 -- in 1945 rather -- 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 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. 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 Agreement. 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 rooted out all
opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and
refused even to discuss reunification with the North.
The peasants watched as all of this was presided over by
United States influence and then by increasing numbers
of United States 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 dictators 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
the 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 on 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 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? 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 noncommunist 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.
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 a 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 the United States of 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
not have a 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 upon the power of a 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 could 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 Agreement concerning foreign troops. They
remind us that they did not begin to send troops in
large numbers and even supplies into the South 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.
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 hundred, or rather,
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 in 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 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 a 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 dealt 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 one
who loves America, to the leaders of our 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, and I
quote:
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.
Unquote.
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. 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
horrible, 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:
* Number one: End all bombing in North and South
Vietnam.
* Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the
hope that such action will create the atmosphere for
negotiation.
* Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other
battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our
military buildup in Thailand and our interference in
Laos.
* Four: 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 any future Vietnam
government.
* Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign
troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954
Geneva Agreement. [sustained applause]
Part of our ongoing [applause continues], 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 must provide the medical aid that is
badly needed, making it available in this country if
necessary. Meanwhile [applause], 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 and our lives if our nation persists in its
perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match
actions with words by seeking out every creative method
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. [sustained applause] I am pleased to say that
this is a path now 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. [applause] Moreover, I
would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up
their ministerial exemptions and seek status as
conscientious objectors. [applause] 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.
Now 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 [applause], 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. [sustained applause] So 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 has now
justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in
Venezuela. This 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 Cambodia 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."
[applause] 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 investments. 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 [applause],
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, extreme 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
comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars
needs restructuring. [applause]
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 South 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 hand 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. [sustained applause]
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. [applause] 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 engage in
a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive
thrust for democracy [applause], 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 wounds 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 antirevolutionaries. This has driven
many to feel that only Marxism has a 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. With this
powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status
quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when
"every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and
hill shall be made low [Audience:] (Yes); 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 worldwide 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 mankind. This oft
misunderstood, this oft 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'm not speaking of that force which is just emotional
bosh. 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-Muslim-
Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality
is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint
John: "Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God.
(Yes) And every one 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." Unquote.
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, 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 flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately
for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to
every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and
jumbled residues 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. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger
writes, and having writ moves on."
We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or
violent coannihilation. 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 calling of the sons of God, and our
brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the
odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is
too hard? Will our message be that the forces of
American life militate against their arrival as full
men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be
another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity
with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause,
whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we
might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this
crucial moment of human history.
As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell,
eloquently stated:
Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering 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 portions 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.
And if we will only make the right choice, we will be
able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a
creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right
choice, we will be able to transform the jangling
discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of
brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we
will be able to speed up the day, all over America and
all over the world, when justice will roll down like
waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
[sustained applause]
Jr: Stop the War Now! Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was
our country's foremost spokesperson for peace and
justice. He understood how an immoral war abroad meant
racism and injustice at home. For this he was vilified
and eventually assassinated on April 4, 1968. From April
4 to7 of this year, in commemoration of the death of Dr.
King and in celebration of his legacy, United for Peace
and Justice calls for nationally coordinated local
antiwar actions to be organized throughout the country.
We issue this call in cooperation with the Campus Anti-
War Network, Citizen Works, and Direct Action to Stop
the War, which are all organizing nationwide protests
during the same period. Please organize appropriate
actions in your community. We must stop the war NOW.
More http://www.unitedforpeace.org/ ]
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLKapr67.html
"Beyond Vietnam"
by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam,
at Riverside Church, New York City
4 April 1967
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to
say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how
very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern
about the issues that will be discussed tonight by
turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say
that I consider it a great honor to share this program
with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, some
of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our
nation. And of course it's always good to come back to
Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had
the privilege of preaching here almost every year in
that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding
experience to come to this great church and this great
pulpit.
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight
because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join
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 statements 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 perplexing 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, 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 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, 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 must play in the 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 National
Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.
Since I am a preacher by calling, 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 this 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 a 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 hardly live on the same
block in Chicago. 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
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 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 the 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 until 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 1954.* And I cannot
forget that the Nobel Peace Prize 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 explain 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. 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 the victims of our
nation, for those it calls "enemy," for no document from
human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within
myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion,
my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula.
I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the
ideologies of the Liberation Front, 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
1954 -- in 1945 rather -- 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 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. 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 Agreement. 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 rooted out all
opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and
refused even to discuss reunification with the North.
The peasants watched as all of this was presided over by
United States influence and then by increasing numbers
of United States 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 dictators 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
the 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 on 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 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? 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 noncommunist 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.
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 a 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 the United States of 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
not have a 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 upon the power of a 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 could 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 Agreement concerning foreign troops. They
remind us that they did not begin to send troops in
large numbers and even supplies into the South 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.
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 hundred, or rather,
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 in 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 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 a 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 dealt 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 one
who loves America, to the leaders of our 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, and I
quote:
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.
Unquote.
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. 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
horrible, 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:
* Number one: End all bombing in North and South
Vietnam.
* Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the
hope that such action will create the atmosphere for
negotiation.
* Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other
battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our
military buildup in Thailand and our interference in
Laos.
* Four: 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 any future Vietnam
government.
* Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign
troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954
Geneva Agreement. [sustained applause]
Part of our ongoing [applause continues], 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 must provide the medical aid that is
badly needed, making it available in this country if
necessary. Meanwhile [applause], 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 and our lives if our nation persists in its
perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match
actions with words by seeking out every creative method
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. [sustained applause] I am pleased to say that
this is a path now 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. [applause] Moreover, I
would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up
their ministerial exemptions and seek status as
conscientious objectors. [applause] 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.
Now 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 [applause], 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. [sustained applause] So 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 has now
justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in
Venezuela. This 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 Cambodia 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."
[applause] 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 investments. 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 [applause],
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, extreme 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
comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars
needs restructuring. [applause]
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 South 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 hand 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. [sustained applause]
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. [applause] 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 engage in
a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive
thrust for democracy [applause], 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 wounds 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 antirevolutionaries. This has driven
many to feel that only Marxism has a 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. With this
powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status
quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when
"every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and
hill shall be made low [Audience:] (Yes); 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 worldwide 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 mankind. This oft
misunderstood, this oft 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'm not speaking of that force which is just emotional
bosh. 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-Muslim-
Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality
is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint
John: "Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God.
(Yes) And every one 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." Unquote.
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, 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 flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately
for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to
every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and
jumbled residues 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. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger
writes, and having writ moves on."
We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or
violent coannihilation. 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 calling of the sons of God, and our
brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the
odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is
too hard? Will our message be that the forces of
American life militate against their arrival as full
men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be
another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity
with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause,
whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we
might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this
crucial moment of human history.
As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell,
eloquently stated:
Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering 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 portions 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.
And if we will only make the right choice, we will be
able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a
creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right
choice, we will be able to transform the jangling
discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of
brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we
will be able to speed up the day, all over America and
all over the world, when justice will roll down like
waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
[sustained applause]