Munich American Peace Committee

Munich American Peace Committee (MAPC)

Radio Lora, 11. Jan. 2006

Alternative Radio

MARTIN LUTHER KING.JR:

Beyond Vietnam
Vietnam – mehr als ein Krieg
4. April 1967, Riverside Church , New York City

Martin Luther King hielt diese Rede ein Jahr vor seiner Ermordung anläßlich seiner Ernennung zum Stellvertretenden Vorsitzenden von „Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam“ (Kirche und Laien gegen den Vietnamkrieg). Auch 36 Jahre später haben seine Worte nichts von ihrer Aktualität verloren.

Ich bin in dieses Gotteshaus gekommen, weil mir mein Gewissen keine andere Wahl ließ. Ihr Aufruf, dass die Zeit gekommen sei, in der Schweigen Verrat bedeutet, spricht mir aus dem Herzen. Die Wahrheit dieser Worte ist eine Sache, ihre Umsetzung eine andere. Gerade in Kriegszeiten fällt es schwer, unserer Regierung zu widersprechen. Der komplizierte Konflikt verunsichert uns, aber wir müssen unsere Stimmen erheben. Erstmals haben auch viele Geistliche den Pfad des sanften Patriotismus verlassen und sich auf den rauhen Weg des Widerspruchs begeben. Vielleicht erwächst daraus einer neuer Geist und eine neue Vision. Seit zwei Jahren schweige ich nicht mehr, sondern fordere das Ende der Zerstörung Vietnams. Oft werde ich gefragt, warum ich über Krieg spreche und über Widerstand, denn Frieden und Bürgerrechte hätten doch nichts mit einander zu tun. Um dieses Mißverständnis aufzuklären, bin ich heute von Montgomery, Alabama in dieses Gotteshaus gekommen. Ich bin gekommen, um an das Land zu appellieren, das ich liebe. Nicht an Hanoi, nicht an die National Liberation Front, nicht an China, nicht an Russland. Ich verkenne weder die schwierige Situation in Vietnam, noch die Notwendigkeit einer gemeinsamen Lösung. Ich halte weder Nordvietnam noch die NLF für Unschuldsengel, aber ich sehe, welch wichtige Rolle sie bei einer erfolgreichen Lösung spielen können. Die Geschichte lehrt uns, dass Konflikte nur durch vertrauensvolles Geben und Nehmen gelöst werden können.
Für mich als Prediger ist es selbstverständlich, auch Vietnam in meine Visionen einzuschließen, bestehen doch ganz eindeutige Zusammenhänge zwischen dem Krieg in Vietnam und dem Kampf für Bürgerrechte hier. Vor einigen Jahren brachte das Regierungsprogramm zur Armutsbekämpfung einen Hoffnungsschimmer für schwarze und weiße Arme. Es gab Experimente, Hoffnungen, Neuanfänge... doch dann begann der Krieg in Vietnam und alles brach zusammen. So wurde dieser Krieg zum Feind der Armen.

Der Krieg hat nicht nur die Hoffnungen der Armen hier im Land zerstört, es waren vor allem ihre Söhne, Brüder und Ehemänner, die man in den Kampf schickte und die dort starben. Wir schickten junge Schwarze 8,000 Meilen weit weg, um sie in Südostasien für Freiheiten kämpfen zu lassen, die man ihnen in Südwest Georgia und East Harlem verwehrt. Im Fernsehen sehen wir Weiße und Schwarze Seite an Seite töten und sterben für eine Nation, die es ihnen nicht erlaubt, in der Schule nebeneinander zu sitzen. In brutaler Solidarität brennen sie gemeinsam die Hütten der armen Dorfbewohner nieder, während sie in Detroit niemals im gleichen Block wohnen dürften. Ich kann nicht länger schweigen angesichts dieser grausamen Manipulation der Armen.

Ein weiterer Grund, nicht mehr zu schweigen, sind die Ghettos im Norden. Ich hatte den jungen Verzweifelten, Ausgestoßenen und Wütenden immer gesagt, dass nur gewaltfreie Aktionen soziale Verbesserungen brächten. Und nun fragen sie mich: “und was ist mit Vietnam?“ Ich kann in den Ghettos nur dann Gewaltlosigkeit predigen, wenn ich sie auch von dem schlimmsten Gewalttäter – meiner eigenen Regierung – mit lauter Stimme fordere. Seit 1964 lastet auf mir die Verantwortung des Friedensnobelpreises, noch härter für die Gemeinschaft der Menschen zu arbeiten. Für mich gehören der Dienst an Jesus Christus und der Dienst für den Frieden zusammen: wenn ich über den Wahnsinn des Vietnamkrieges nachdenke, gehen meine Gedanken zu den Menschen dort, die seit fast drei Jahrzehnten den Fluch des Krieges erleben. Für sie sind wir Amerikaner höchst sonderbare Befreier. 1945 erklärte sich das vietnamesische Volk unter Ho Chi Minh für unabhängig. Ihre Befreiungsurkunde berief sich auf die amerikanische Unabhängigkeitserklärung, aber wir haben sie nicht anerkannt und statt dessen Frankreich bei der Rückeroberung seiner Kolonie unterstützt.
Unsere Regierung fand, Vietnam sei noch nicht „reif“ für die Unabhängigkeit. So wurden wir erneut Opfer des fatalen Giftes westlicher Arroganz. Wir verhinderten eine Revolutionsregierung, die für ihr Land Selbstbestimmung und lebenswichtige Landreformen anstrebte. Für die Rekolonialisierung Vietnams übernahmen wir 80% der französischen Militärausgaben. Nach der Niederlage von Dien Bien Phu hofften viele, dass es auf Grund der Genfer Konvention doch noch zu Unabhängigkeit und Landreform käme. Doch es kamen die USA. Und sie unterstützen nicht Ho, der den Süden mit dem Norden vereinigen wollte, sondern wieder einen der grausamsten Diktatoren der Neuzeit: Premierminister Diem. Sie sahen zu, wie Diem die Opposition unterdrückte, die Bauern ausbeutete und jeden Dialog mit dem Norden verweigerte. Aufstände gegen ihn schlugen die USA mit Militärgewalt nieder. Nach seinem Sturz kommen noch mehr US –Truppen ins Land, um die korrupten, unfähigen und unpopulären Nachfolger zu unterstützen. Sie verteilen Flugblätter mit Versprechungen von Frieden, Freiheit und Landreform, aber sie werfen Bomben. Um unseren Bomben zu entkommen, lassen sich Frauen, Kinder und Alte von uns vom Land ihrer Väter in Konzentrationslager treiben. Sie beobachten uns, wenn wir ihr Wasser vergiften, ihre Ernten vernichten, ihre kostbaren Bäume abholzen. 20 vietnamesischen Todesopfern amerikanischer Feuerangriffe steht 1 von den Vietkong verletzter Amerikaner gegenüber. In den Städten sehen sie die obdachlosen, nackten Kinder, die in Rudeln, wie Tiere um Essen betteln und ihre Schwestern an US-Soldaten verkaufen. Was mögen diese Bauern denken, wenn wir die reichen Landbesitzer unterstützen und unseren Worten über Landreform keine Taten folgen lassen? Was mögen sie denken, wenn wir an ihnen unsere neuesten Waffen testen, genauso wie die Deutschen, die neue Arzneimittel und neue Foltermethoden in den europäischen Konzentrationslagern testeten. Wo ist das unabhängige Vietnam, das wir angeblich errichten wollten?
Wir haben ihre beiden kostbarsten Güter zerstört: die Familie und das Dorf. Wir haben ihr Land und ihre Ernten vernichtet. Wir haben dazu beigetragen, die einzig nicht kommunistische Kraft im Lande zu vernichten: die Buddhistische Kirche. Wir haben die Feinde der Bauern von Saigon unterstützt, ihre Frauen und Kinder korrumpiert und ihre Männer getötet. Wir, die Befreier.
Ich habe versucht, den Sprachlosen in Vietnam eine Stimme zu geben, aber auch das Schicksal unserer Truppen dort geht mir sehr, sehr nahe. Sie müssen einen inner-vietnamesischen Kampf kämpfen und im Namen unserer Regierung die Rechte der Reichen verteidigen und den Armen das Leben zur Hölle machen.
Dieser Wahnsinn muß ein Ende haben. Es war auch unsere Initiative, diesen Krieg zu führen, es muß unsere Initiative sein, ihn zu beenden.
Die Botschaft der großen vietnamesischen Buddhistenführer lautet: „Jeder Tag, den dieser Krieg weiter andauert, verstärkt den Haß in den Herzen der Vietnamesen und in den Herzen aller mitfühlenden Menschen. Die Amerikaner machen aus Freunden Feinde. Nie mehr wird der Name Amerika für Revolution, Freiheit und Demokratie stehen, sondern für Gewalt und Militarismus“

Wenn wir diesen Krieg fortführen, wird es keinen Zweifel mehr darüber geben, dass wir keine ehrenhaften Absichten hegen, sondern aus Vietnam eine amerikanische Kolonie machen und China in einem Krieg verwickeln wollen, um seine Atomanlagen bombardieren zu können. Wenn wir den Krieg gegen das vietnamesische Volk nicht sofort beenden, wird die Welt glauben, dass wir ein törichtes, aber tödliches Spiel spielen. Die Welt jedoch erwartet von Amerika eine Reife, die es möglicherweise gar nicht hat.

III

Wir in den Kirchen und Synagogen müssen unsere Regierung dazu bewegen, sich endlich aus dieser unwürdigen Verstrickung zu befreien. Wir müssen unsere Stimmen erheben und unseren Worten kreative Protestaktionen folgen lassen.
Bereits 1957 meinte ein kluger amerikanischer Diplomat, dass die USA bei Revolutionen immer auf der falschen Seite stehen. In Venezuela haben wir 10 Jahre lang tatenlos einer zunehmenden Repressionspolitik zugesehen, bis die Anwesenheit amerikanischer „Militärberater“ erforderlich wurde. Zum Schutz unserer Investitionen ließen wir amerikanische Militäraktionen in Guatemala, Hubschraubereinsätze gegen die Guerrillas in Kolumbien und Napalmbomben in Peru zu.
J.F. Kennedy sagte: „Wer friedliche Revolutionen verhindert, verursacht gewaltsame.“ Wir verhindern friedliche Revolutionen, um die Profite der Auslandsinvestitionen zu schützen. Wenn wir auf der richtigen Seite der Weltrevolution stehen wollen, müssen wir unsere Wertmaßstäbe radikal ändern. Statt sachorientiert, müssen wir Mensch-orientiert werden. Solange Maschinen, Computer, Profitstreben und Besitzansprüche wichtiger sind als Menschen, so lange werden Rassismus, Materialismus und Militarismus nicht überwunden. Neue Werte bedeuten politisches Umdenken; bedeuten, nicht weiterhin riesige Summen in Asien, Afrika und Südamerika gewinnbringend zu investieren, ohne sich um das Wohl dieser Länder zu kümmern. Eine Nation, die Jahr für Jahr mehr Geld für Verteidigung als für Sozialprogramme ausgibt, nähert sich ihrem seelischen Tod.
Amerika, die reichste und mächtigste Nation der Welt könnte die Revolution der Werte anführen und unseren Brüdern die Hände reichen. Wahre Revolution der Werte bedeutet Loyalität mit allen Menschen. Sie ist die Kraft, die alle großen Religionen als oberstes Lebensprinzip vereint. Der Erste Brief des Johannes ist die Zusammenfassung dieser Hindu-Moslem-Christen-Juden-Buddhisten-Glaubenswahrheit: „Laßt uns einander lieben, denn Gott ist die Liebe und jeder, der liebt, ist aus Gott geboren. Wer nicht liebt, kennt Gott nicht, denn Gott ist die Liebe.“ Laßt uns hoffen, dass dies die neue Losung wird. Wir müssen uns aus dem Bann der Untätigkeit befreien. Wir müssen streiten für den Frieden in Vietnam und für Gerechtigkeit in der 3. Welt. Laßt uns jetzt gleich den mühsamen, aber wunderbaren Kampf für eine neue Welt beginnen. Oder wollen wir unseren Brüdern und Schwestern sagen, dass der Ausgang zu ungewiß und der Kampf zu hart sei, dass der amerikanische way of life uns leider daran hindert, sie als vollwertige Mitglieder in unsere Gesellschaft aufzunehmen? Oder wollen wir ihnen unsere Solidarität mit ihren Hoffnungen zeigen. Wir haben die Wahl – jetzt ist der Moment der Entscheidung.

Radio Lora 11. Jan. 2006

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Beyond Vietnam
Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967

Exactly one year before his murder, Martin Luther King was named Co-Chairman of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam
(now Clergy and Laity Concerned) and on that occasion delivered “Beyond Vietnam.” This was his first major speech on the war and
became the focus of the growing awareness of the link between militarism abroad and human rights at home. Dr. King’s words remain
all too relevant today as we still struggle with the military and economic involvement of the U.S. in the world and the growing
economic and political repression at home.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join 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.
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 perplexing 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.
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 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 movements 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.
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 sources 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, 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.
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. 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.
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 several 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 build-up 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 demoniacal 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 black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 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 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 non-violent action. But they asked—and rightly so—what about Vietnam?
They asked if our 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 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:

O, yes
I say it plain,
American 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 of 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 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 his 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 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 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.
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.
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 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 80% 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 re-colonization.
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 re-unification 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 20 casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. 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 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? 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 co-operated 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 American 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 25 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 13th and the 17th 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 we 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 his aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than 8,000 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 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 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 a hell for the poor.
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. 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.
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 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.” 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.
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.
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:

End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military build-up in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
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.
Set a date that 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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
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 children of the living God.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong wide of a world revolution. During the past 10 years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military “advisors” in Venezuela. This 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. 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.” 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.
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. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. 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. True revolution of value will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. 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. 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 re-structuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily 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 home 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.
American, 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. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands 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 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 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 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.
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 mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.” 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.
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: “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.” 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.” 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 lost opportunity. The “tide in the affairs of men” does not remain at the flood; it ebbs.
We may cry out desperately 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 written moves on . . .” We still have a choice today: non-violent co-existence or violent coannihilation.
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 children of God, and our brothers and sisters 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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