“After
Vietnam” 50 Years Later
by
Pastor Paul J. Bern
The
fiftieth anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s
much-beloved (right wing extremists excluded) speech, “After
Vietnam” occurred this past week. To commemorate this famous speech
I will be posting this slightly condensed version today, particularly
in view of the fact that it is at least as relevant today as it was
back then.
MLK's
“After Vietnam” Speech at Riverside Church, Harlem, N.Y. (1967)
I
need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and
how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the
issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large
numbers.... And of course, it’s always good to come back to
Riverside church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege
of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always
a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this
great pulpit. 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'm in deepest agreement with the aims and work of
the organization which has brought us together: Clergy
and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam.
The recent statements 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." And
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. And
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 movements 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 burning 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, 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 must play in the 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 National Liberation
Front, but rather to my fellow Americans. Since I am a preacher by
calling, 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 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 this 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. Perhaps a 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. And 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. And so we watch
them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we
realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. 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
nonviolent action. But they ask – and rightly so – what about
Vietnam? They ask 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 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
until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely 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. 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.... 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'm 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? 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?
And
finally, as I try to explain 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
son-ship 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 the 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 of the ideologies of the Liberation Front,
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.
For
nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right
of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in
their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the
war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even
before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to
despair of 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. Soon we would be paying almost the
full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization. After the French
were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would
come again through the Geneva Agreement. 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 rooted 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 United States' influence and then by
increasing numbers of United States 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 dictators
seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for
land and peace.....
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 in 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 of the – 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 one
who loves America, to the leaders of our 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, and I quote:
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 (unquote).
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. 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
horrible, 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. The situation is one in which we must
be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. 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:
[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 buildup 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 any future Vietnam government.
[5]
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 and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in
Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking
out every creative method 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.... 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.
Now
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. And so, such thoughts
take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the
living God.
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 has now justified the presence of U.S. military
advisers 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 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." 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 investments.
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, extreme 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. 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 comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs
restructuring. 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
South 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 hand 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.
These
are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against
old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds 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 a 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 worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond
one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an
all-embracing – embracing and unconditional love for all mankind.
This oft misunderstood, this oft 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-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about
ultimate – ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first
epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is
God. And every one 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. And history is cluttered with the
wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating
path of hate.
We
still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent
co-annihilation. 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 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.
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.
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. 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."
