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Hey all,<br>
<br>
AWARE will have our peace booth at the Market inside Lincoln Square
tomorrow, Jan. 17th, from 8am - 1pm. Please stop by and talk with
us. (We still have peace calendars - make us an offer if you'd
like one.)<br>
<br>
Martin Luther King's birthday was this week, January 15th. From a
civil rights leader, he grew to be a powerful opponent of the war in
Vietnam - opposition that was controversial at the time - and more
broadly to oppose the triple evils of racism, militarism, and
extreme materialism, which he saw as linked.<br>
<br>
Below is King's speech, "Beyond Vietnam - A Time To Break Silence",
which he gave in New York City on April 4th, 1967, a year to the day
before he was assassinated. This is a good time to read and
consider this and others of his writings - many remain thoroughly
radical today.<br>
<br>
(Patsy Howell says it: if King were only a dreamer, they wouldn't
have shot him.)<br>
<br>
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<small>[from <a
href="http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm">http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm</a>,
with some corrections and emphasis added -SL]</small>
<h1>Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence<br>
by Rev. Martin Luther King</h1>
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."
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
</p>
<hr>
<p>
</p>
<h2>Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence<br>
By Rev. Martin Luther King<br>
4 April 1967</h2>
<i>Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4,
1967, at a meeting
of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City</i>
<p>
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my
conscience
leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because
I am in
deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which
has brought
us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent
statement 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." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
</p>
<p>
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
perplexed 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.
</p>
<p>
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
movement well 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.
</p>
<p>
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
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.
</p>
<p>
In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 reason 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Importance of Vietnam</h2>
<p>
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.
<b>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 the 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.</b>
</p>
<p>
<b>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 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 never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be
silent in the
face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.</b>
</p>
<p>
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. <b>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 hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence,
I cannot be
silent.</b>
</p>
<p>
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 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:
</p>
<blockquote><i> O, yes,<br>
I say it plain,<br>
America never was America to me,<br>
And yet I swear this oath--<br>
America will be!<br>
</i></blockquote>
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. <b>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.</b>
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.
<p>
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 <b>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?</b> 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?
</p>
<p>
Finally, as I try to delineate 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.
</p>
<p>
<b>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
victims of our
nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human
hands can make
these humans any less our brothers.</b>
</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Strange Liberators</h2>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
<b>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.</b>
</p>
<p>
<b>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,</b>
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.
<b>For the peasants this new government meant real land reform,
one of the most
important needs in their lives.</b>
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<b>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.</b> 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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?
</p>
<p>
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?
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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?
</p>
<p>
<b>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.</b>
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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
into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of
thousands.
</p>
<p>
<b>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.</b> 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. <b>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.</b>
</p>
<p>
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, <b>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.</b>
</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>This Madness Must Cease</h2>
<p>
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. <b>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 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 an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great
initiative in
this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.</b>
</p>
<p>
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam.
Recently one of
them wrote these words:
</p>
<p>
</p>
<blockquote>
<b>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.
</b>
</blockquote>
<p>
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. 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 horribly clumsy and deadly game we have
decided to
play.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
</p>
<ul>
<li> End all bombing in North and South Vietnam. </li>
<li> Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action
will create the atmosphere for negotiation. </li>
<li> Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in
Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand
and our interference in Laos. </li>
<li> 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. </li>
<li> Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from
Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.
</li>
</ul>
<p>
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 most provide the medical aid that is
badly needed,
making it available in this country if necessary.
</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Protesting The War</h2>
<p>
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 if our nation persists in its
perverse ways in
Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by
seeking out every
creative means of protest possible.
</p>
<p>
<b>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.</b> I am pleased to say that this is
the path now being
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.
</p>
<p>
</p>
<hr>
<p>
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. <b>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
laity-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.
Such thoughts take
us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the
living God.</b>
</p>
<p>
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed
to him that
<b>our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution</b>.
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. <b>This need
to maintain social
stability for our investments accounts for the
counter-revolutionary 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. 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."</b>
</p>
<p>
<b>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 investment.</b>
</p>
<p>
<b>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.</b>
We must rapidly
begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a
"person-oriented" society.
<b>When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights
are considered
more important than people, the giant triplets of racism,
materialism, and
militarism are incapable of being conquered.</b>
</p>
<p>
<b>A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the
fairness and
justice of many of our past and present policies.</b> 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. <b>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.</b>
</p>
<p>
<b>A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the
glaring
contrast of poverty and wealth.</b> 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.
</p>
<p>
<b>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 veins of people 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.</b>
</p>
<p>
<b>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.</b> There is nothing to
keep us from
molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have
fashioned it
into a brotherhood.
</p>
<p>
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 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.
</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The People Are Important</h2>
<p>
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. <b>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.</b> 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. 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 moutain
and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight
and the
rough places plain."
</p>
<p>
<b>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.</b>
</p>
<p>
<b>This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly
concern beyond
one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an
all-embracing
and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and
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 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-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist
belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the
first epistle of Saint John:</b>
</p>
<blockquote><i> Let us love one another; for love is God and
everyone 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.
</i></blockquote>
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. 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."
<p>
We are now faced with the fact 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 deperately for time to pause in her passage,
but time is
deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and
jumbled residue
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.
"The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still
have a choice
today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
</p>
<p>
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. <b>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.</b>
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently
stated:
</p>
<blockquote><i> Once to every man and nation<br>
Comes the moment to decide,<br>
In the strife of truth and falsehood,<br>
For the good or evil side;<br>
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,<br>
Off'ring each the bloom or blight,<br>
And the choice goes by forever<br>
Twixt that darkness and that light.<br>
</i>
<p><i> Though the cause of evil prosper,<br>
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;<br>
Though her portion be the scaffold,<br>
And upon the throne be wrong:<br>
Yet that scaffold sways the future,<br>
And behind the dim unknown,<br>
Standeth God within the shadow<br>
Keeping watch above His own.<br>
</i></p>
</blockquote>
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.
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<br>
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