http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/04/8096/
Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam
Delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
April 4, 1967
At Manhattan's Riverside Church
Published on Friday, April 4, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
(excerpt)
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 why I believe that
the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the church in Montgomery,
Alabama, where I began my pastorage, leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform 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
can play in a 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 NLF, but
rather to my fellow Americans who, with me, bear the greatest
responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on
both continents.
Since I am a preacher by trade, 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, 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. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched the program
broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political play thing
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 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 the 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 young black men who had been crippled by our society and
sending them 8000 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 never live on the same block in
Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation
of the poor.
My third reason 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 non-violent action. But, they asked, 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 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
unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed from the shackles
they still wear.
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.
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 Prize for Peace
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 or all men, for communist
and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and 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 hem? What then can I say to the Viet Cong 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 hem my life?
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam, 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. 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 their broken cries.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese
proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and
Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China.
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 re-conquest 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 re-colonize Vietnam.
Before the end of the war we were meeting 80 per cent 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 to do so.
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.
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of
their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers destroy their precious
trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least 20 casualties
from American firepower for each Viet Cong-inflicted injury. So far
we may have killed a million of them, mostly children.
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?
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 NLF, 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? 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 new weapons of
death into their land?
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is
less than 25 per cent 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.
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and non-violence,
when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his
questions, to know of 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. 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 at Geneva to give up, as a
temporary measure, the land they controlled between the 13th and 17th
parallels. 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 the increasing international
rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. Perhaps only
his sense of humor and 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 8000 miles from its shores.
At this point, I should make it clear that while I have tried here to
give a voice to the voiceless of 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 our troops 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. I speak as a child of God and
brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam and 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 an
American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in
this war is ours. The initiative to stop must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam.
Recently, one of them wrote these words: "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."
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. It' will
become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an
American colony, and men will not refrain from thinking that our
maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her
nuclear installations.
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 her people.
In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take
the initiative in bringing the war to a halt. 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 nightmare:
1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will
create the atmosphere for negotiation.
3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast
Asia by curtailing our military build-up in Thailand and our
interference in Laos.
4. 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 in any future Vietnam government.
5. Set a date on which we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam
in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.
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 NLF. Then we must make what reparations we
can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that
is badly needed, in this country if necessary.
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 be prepared to match actions with words by
seeking out every creative means 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 the path now being chosen by more than 70 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.
Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best
suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
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 we will find ourselves organizing clergy, and
laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. We will be
marching and attending rallies without end unless there is a
significant and profound change in American life and policy.
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 now has justified the presence of U.S. military
"advisors" in Venezuela. The 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 Colombia and why American napalm and
green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.
With such activity in mind, the words of 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, by
refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from
the immense profits of overseas investment.
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. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are
considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism,
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. True
compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not
haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which
produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values
will soon look easily 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
Latin 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 hands 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 re-ordering 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 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 the days which demand wise restraint and calm
reasonableness. We must not call everyone a communist or an appeaser
who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who
recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the
problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative
anti-communism, 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
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 ad just 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 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.
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 re-dedicate 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.
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