[shepard-for-congress-discuss] MLK on the Vietnam War

[Travis Cross]

This is from a different era, and yet Martin Luther King's themes 
regarding the war in Vietnam ring eerily familiar today.

"By 1967, King had become the country's most prominent opponent of the 
Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which 
he deemed militaristic. In his 'Beyond Vietnam' speech delivered at New 
York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he 
was murdered -- King called the United States 'the greatest purveyor of 
violence in the world today.'"

"Time magazine called the speech 'demagogic slander that sounded like a 
script for Radio Hanoi,' and the Washington Post declared that King had 
'diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.'" [1]

An excerpt from King's speech:

Strange Liberators

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways 
to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the 
people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, 
not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been 
living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I 
think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no 
meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and 
hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people 
proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and 
Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They 
were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American 
Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused 
to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its 
reconquest of her former colony.

Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for 
independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance 
that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that 
tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking 
self-determination, and a government that had been established not by 
China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly 
indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this 
new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs 
in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right 
of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in 
their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.

Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French 
war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they 
began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged 
them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war 
even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the 
full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land 
reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there 
came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the 
temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we 
supported one of the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, 
Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed 
out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused 
even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as 
all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing 
numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's 
methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, 
but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real 
change -- especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments 
in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and 
without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and 
received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. Now 
they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow 
Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we 
herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where 
minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be 
destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children and 
the aged.

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their 
crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas 
preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, 
with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one 
"Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them 
-- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the 
children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets 
like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they 
beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our 
soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and 
as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land 
reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just 
as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the 
concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent 
Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and 
the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have 
cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist 
revolutionary political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have 
supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their 
women and children and killed their men. What liberators?

Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only 
solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases 
and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified 
hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new 
Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? 
We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These 
too are our brothers.

Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for 
those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National 
Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or 
Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that 
we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring 
them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think 
of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? 
How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression 
from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How 
can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the 
murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour 
every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand 
their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must 
see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we 
must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf 
their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is 
less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them 
the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are 
aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear 
ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized 
political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can 
speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled 
by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of 
new government we plan to help form without them -- the only party in 
real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they 
deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. 
Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to 
build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new 
violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it 
helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to 
know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see 
the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may 
learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called 
the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, 
and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but 
understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of 
confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American 
intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence 
against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in 
the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and 
the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second 
struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were 
persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and 
seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they 
watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have 
surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they 
realized they had been betrayed again.

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be 
remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered 
the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have 
been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning 
foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in 
any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into 
the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the 
earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed 
that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has 
watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now 
he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American 
plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling 
and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. 
Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears 
the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops 
thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles 
away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these 
last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to 
understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply 
concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me 
that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the 
brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other 
and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for 
they must know after a short period there that none of the things we 
claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know 
that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, 
and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the 
wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.

Sources:

[1] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm
[2] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/video1/mlkagainstvietnam.mp3
[3] http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/018772.html

Cheers,

-- Travis