'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Martin Luther King, Jr., on war

It's a public holiday here today in the United States: the official "birthday" of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the great civil rights leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and was assassinated in 1968.

If Dr. King had not been killed, he would have turned 85 on January 15.

Throughout the mid-1980s, I remember my two elder kids, who attended a public elementary school in Washington, DC, would every year, just before the holiday, start bringing home worksheets with an image of Dr King to color. And endlessly, they would study Dr. King's most famous oration: the "I have a dream" speech that he delivered from the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

If you've never read the whole text, it's definitely worth doing so. Near the end, he mounts to a rhetorical crescendo with this theme:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

... I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream...

I'm not quite sure what President Bush is planning to do today to mark Dr. King's birthday. What I'd like him to do is take out a tape-player and listen very carefully indeed to another of Dr. King's great orations: the sermon titled variously "Beyond Vietnam-- A Time to Break the Silence" , or more simply, "Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam". This one was delivered in April 1967, at a meeting at Riverside Church in New York City.

Through that link there, you can apparently even download an MP3 audio version of the sermon. It is certainly worth listening to. Dr. King was great and powerful preacher. But if you can't read or listen to the whole of the sermon, at least spend a little time pondering two portions of it.

The first is his response to those working alongside him in the civil rights movement who argued that coming out openly against the war in Vietnam could well divert the national focus from the civil rights struggle and harm that struggle in other ways as well. His response was this:

Tonight... 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 1964. 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.

Hallelujah! Amen!

At the end of the sermon, Dr. King offered a prescient forecast of the future and a simple but powerful prescription for what the US could and should do to radically de-escalate the conflict in Vietnam:

If we [that is, the US government]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.

It took a further eight years before the last US soldiers pulled hurriedly out of Vietnam. Along the way there, there were the additional, terrible brutalities of the "Vietnamization" program, and the massive, totally atrocious US bombings of Cambodia (which devastated much of Cambodian society and prepared the ground for the mega-atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge.)

When the US did pull its forces totally out of Vietnam, it did not do so in the generous, humble spirit of "atoning for" past sins and errors that Dr. King had urged, but in the angry, small-minded spirit of a grade-school bully walking defeated out of a schoolyard. There were none of the "reparations" that Dr. King had called for. Instead, for nearly 20 years after 1975, successive US governments sought to "punish" Vietnam even further for the fact that its people had humiliated the US military by maintaining a vindictive economic santions regime on the whole population of the country.

Of course, I have been reading/hearing Dr. King's words on the topic of Vietnam with the situation in Iraq front and central in my own mind. Most of the five policy-prescription points that he offered have direct relevance for Iraq today.

I hope that after January 30, there will be a (sufficiently) fairly elected, and therefore duly constituted, Iraqi leadership with which the US can negotiate the speedy and complete exit of US forces from the country.