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

[Travis Cross]

I sent out the initial email in this thread before very many folks had 
joined this list.  The topic is related to some campaign themes, though 
not directly related to the campaign itself.  The initial email can be 
found in the archives here:

http://lists.findingliberty.org/archive/shepard-for-congress-discuss/2008-January/000001.html

Travis Cross wrote:
> This is from a different era, and yet Martin Luther King's themes 
> regarding the war in Vietnam ring eerily familiar today.
>
> Excerpt: Strange Liberators
>
> 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.
>
> [snip]

The audio to the speech can be found here:

http://files.findingliberty.org/mlk/19670404-mlk-a-time-to-break-silence.mp3

While listening to the speech, this part really stood out to me.  After
making his case against the war in Vietnam, MLK concluded with,

"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 the struggle, but I wish
to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam
is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and
if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing
clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. 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."

To which he received a loud and continuous ovation.

He also quotes Buddhist leaders in Vietnam who said,

"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."

Here MLK points out that to the extent that Communism has gained a
following, it is largely a reflection of the fact that the liberal
capitalist democracies of the West have abandoned the revolutionary
spirit of their founders, and embraced oppressive (traditional, if you
will) statism instead, leaving the Communists to position themselves as
the revolutionaries:

"These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting
against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs
of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The
shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before.
'The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.' We in the West
must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of
comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to
adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the
revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch
anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has
the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against
our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions
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."

Cheers,

-- Travis