Happy Birthday Martin Luther King Jr!!!
So "
Beyond Vietnam" is probably my favorite speech of all time, and here is why---he is directly linking all injustices together, and reaffirming the call to action against any injustice, almost calling for open revolution at the end, if nothing else will work.
A stark difference from Obama, who
claims MLK as a hero, and certainly as he says without whom he wouldn't be president, while ignoring MLK's larger record (at least publicly) instead only using "fierce urgency of now" as a usual refrain in his speeches. Today, in "honor" of MLK Obama will surprisingly,
NOT tell the public what he is doing.....
Monday is a day of commemoration for President Obama.
The
president and first lady Michelle Obama will participate in a community
service event to honor civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. on the
federal holiday that bears King's name.
Officials have not said what the event will be.
At 3pm The White House on Twitter sent
this tweet telling us what Obama was doing---
serving meals at DC Central Kitchen
more
White House staff and Cabinet members also tweeted service projects
Arne Duncan
Joe Biden
Penny Pritzker Commerce Secretary
I would prefer that our government follow King's words instead of superficial "days of service" painting in poor neighborhoods or serving at food kitchens, although it's a nice gesture.
""True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not
haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice that produces
beggars needs restructuring.""
The White House is calling 2014 "Year of Citizen Action"
link
Last year in honor of the 50th anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech, the Dream Defenders were not invited,
told there wasn't enough time (this is my favorite speech of 2013, along with Malala's
speech to Obama)
Cornell West says the same, saying he wanted to talk about drone strikes
A look behind the speech and reactions
link
"it was the most controversial speech he ever gave."
"168 major newspapers the next day denounced him." Not only that, but
then-President Lyndon Johnson disinvited King to the White House."
Here are some of my key phrases from the speech
"A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
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.
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.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation.
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.
So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems.
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.
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."
They must see Americans as strange liberators.
Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions.
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."
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.
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.
FULL SPEECH HERE
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, and 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'm 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."
And 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.
And 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 movements 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.
And 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.
And 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 ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last
three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have
told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried
to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change
comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so --
what about Vietnam? They ask 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 -- 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 19541; 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'm 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?
And 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, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for
his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound
by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go
beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak,
for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and 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 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 -- in the crushing of the nation's only
non-Communist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We
have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their
women and children and killed their men.
Now there is little left to build on, save
bitterness. Soon,
the only solid -- 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 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 -- 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 of the -- for the poor of America
who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and
corruption in Vietnam.
I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it
stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as 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 heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of
humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into
becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so
carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in
the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The
image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and
democracy, but the image of violence and militarism (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.
Part of our ongoing -- 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 -- 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.
****here King starts talking about open revolution almost, if all else fails****
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. 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. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their
ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false
ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our
nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must
decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all
protest.
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...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 --
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.
And 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.
HERE!!!!
It is with such activity in mind that the words
of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said,
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution
inevitable."
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our
nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by
refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the
immense profits of overseas 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...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.
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.
America, the richest and most powerful nation
in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is
nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our
priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit
of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo
with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of
positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is
not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs
or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their
misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation
in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise
restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not
engage in a negative anticommunism, 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 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."2 We in the West must support these
revolutions.
KING almost recommends Marxism here!!! also a GREAT quote about America's revolutionary roots, beginning the tide of freedom movements, treating all others as enemies.
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, and the crooked shall be
made straight, and the rough places plain."3
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
-- 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 am 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 --
ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint
John:
"Let us love one
another, for love is God. 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."4 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. And 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."5
