Six more dead Marines. Six more dead from accidental drone attacks. A few here. A few there. Kids dying of starvation in Somalia. Distended stomachs in Haiti across from NGO compounds serving steak. Racist hate spews from the hypocrital mouths of those that would be President. Oblivious masses frozen in front of wide screens watching the "big game". Lavish spending on ads for the Super Bowl. Obscene spending by obscurely named Super-PACs funded by the bastards causing the dead Marines and the families killed "accidently" by unmanned weapons. If they're unmanned, who pulled the trigger?
Who is going to remember the Marines from Hawaii? Who will remember the dead families in Pakistan or Afghanistan? How many care about the sunken eyes of the dying children? How can we walk by the filth and despair of the refugee camps in Haiti.
Just trying to keep up with all the despair makes me weary and think it would be easier to not know. But if I didn't know, would I be human? If I stopped caring would it really make a difference? Too late. I do know. As one individual, the whirlwinds of despair, hatred, volence and bad news intimidates and frustrates me. My mind is always in turmoil. Should I go to the job or make my job one of attempting to change things?
The cold reality is trying to change things isn't primary despite my best intentions. I still need to work in order to eat and have shelter. I want to simplify in my mind but the will to do so is often too weak. And so, I fret and curse and worry. What will become of us?
I look at my granddaughter and wonder if she will still face a world or sexism, misogyny and hate for women. She's seven. Already the brainwashing of institutionalized education has started. Who will look after her that she might be free to be herself?
My oldest grandson faces an unsure future. In two years he will leave high school. What choices will he have. Will recruiters come for him? Will he fall prey to the seduction of war. The narcosis of war. Or will he become indebted to be able to get a college degree worthless in a job market seeking only to pay less than living wages?
My youngest grandson starts first grade. Will there be any freedom left for him when he reaches adulthood? Will his parents see the need to enter the struggle against the hatred and oppression to ensure there are still freedom and rights? Or be too worn out, too exhausted to care?
And, still, my mind returns to the continued wars ripping apart families. Breaking the hearts of parents. Scarring children. Making wives or husbands cry in despair. The images of mothers holding obtunded babies in the hellish camps of the impoverished are hard to forget. The memories of the 9th Ward of New Orleans or the relocation camps of Vietnam aren't going to go away.
It would be easy right here to say it's hopeless. It may be in the long run. I have environmentalist friends who tell me it's too late. We've passed the tipping point. But I notice they keep fighting for their cause. They don't give up in depressive despair.
Helplessness and hopelessness are a deadly duo that leads to suicide. It can be a physical suicide or an emotional one. One where all we do is exist until we die. But in the face of all the reasons not to care or resist, can we quit? Can I ? There are certainly days when it seems like I could. But those days pass. I can't quit because I don't want to just exist.
I like to be around the energy of the young and old who have passion. I like watching my grandkids smile and enjoy life. I want that for all children. I enjoy hearing the idealism of young students and rebellious anarchists. I respect the elders of my generation who continue to battle against the tidal wave of evil that seems overwhelming.
The empathy toward those who face only poverty and hopelessness is a hard thing to maintain. But, if not us, who will it be? Do we alllow the racists, the imperialist without regard for other humans, the narcissistic politicians who sell out to be elected or the masters of war to succeed in their destructive ways?
I can't stomach the idea of allowing the rapists of women, the polluters of Earth or the bigots of this world to think they've won. That they can go unchallenged. Maybe it's rage and hatred that fuels me to stupidly think we can really "overcome". I hope there's also love in my heart. I think there is but the outrage can obscure things. The past has numbed my emotional thought processes. Many of my veteran friends can understand what I mean. But I like to think that same past has made us care.
So, despite the doubts, the outrage and despair I still feel compelled to continue the sometimes hazardous course of resistance. I don't want to be a cog in the destructive machine producing the hatefulness that kills babies, slaughters the innocent and creates the hatred of divisiveness among humans. Rather than just exist I want the adventure of living to fight for peace and justice. How totally naive and unrealistic. I can't seem to grow up!
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Saturday, January 21
Insidious Play For Lives
As you watch the NFL playoffs this weekend, notice how many military recruitment ads there will be. As you watch the NBA on any weekend notice how many ads for the military. The military and their bosses pulling the puppet strings like to equate the military and professional sports. They like to use team work as being something you can find in the military. And of course, there are troops being in...ducted during half times, troops holding those field sized flags, color guards in dress uniforms. "God bless America" during the games. Yep, if you can't grow up to be Dirk or Lebron, you can grow up to be Pat Tillman.
What does it say about organizations dominated by people of color on the playing fields allowing recruitment to be done throughout the games? What target audience is there watching these ads? Does Steve Nash and Champ Bailey plan on letting their kids join the Marines real soon? But even more egregious are the Donald Sterns and Mark Cubans of the management and ownership groups. They know the effect of the ads on young people. But somebody has to fight the wars on the cheap while boys and girls playing kid's games make millions each year, right?
We shouldn't put a damper on sports, though. The insidious ads of recruitment are everywhere. They want you to "be all you can be", "Army tough" and "Semper Fi" but unlike those ads selling you all the wonder drugs that list all the side effects in small print and fast talk overs, the recruitment ads don't tell you, "WARNING: enlistment in the military can cause death, dismemberment, traumatic amputation, PTSD, TBI, MST and other serious side effects. Talk to a veteran before you enlist"
What does it say about organizations dominated by people of color on the playing fields allowing recruitment to be done throughout the games? What target audience is there watching these ads? Does Steve Nash and Champ Bailey plan on letting their kids join the Marines real soon? But even more egregious are the Donald Sterns and Mark Cubans of the management and ownership groups. They know the effect of the ads on young people. But somebody has to fight the wars on the cheap while boys and girls playing kid's games make millions each year, right?
We shouldn't put a damper on sports, though. The insidious ads of recruitment are everywhere. They want you to "be all you can be", "Army tough" and "Semper Fi" but unlike those ads selling you all the wonder drugs that list all the side effects in small print and fast talk overs, the recruitment ads don't tell you, "WARNING: enlistment in the military can cause death, dismemberment, traumatic amputation, PTSD, TBI, MST and other serious side effects. Talk to a veteran before you enlist"
Jim Crow 2.0
I hate hearing or seeing anything about the Republican primaries, "debates" or candidates for presidency. Impossible if I turn any radio or tv on or read a paper. So, the little attention I have paid tells me the GOP is in SC speaking the code of the racist white man as usual. Newt talks about "food stamp President", Romney sucks up to the ultra right and Santorum has made it clear how he feels about people of color. And all think a big old fence should surround American borders to the south....didn't hear anything about the north where rogue Canadians could be crossing over right now to steal citizenship and jobs from Americans. It's like the old blues song...."if you're black, get back, if you're brown stick around, if you're white, it's alright. Get back, get back get back".
Old Jim Crow is supposedly dead but old racist bigots are still around and running for office. From voter suppression laws requiring "just the right ID" to all that code speaking we might as well have the candidates at the debates wearing the hooded garb of the Klan while they stand on stage. And camera scans of the audience show deliriously happy good ole boys and girls whenever the next candidate drops some line about those welfare queens or food stamp mamas. Or illegals taking over the jobs. Seems the only way America can survive is if we keep it tidy white and moral. Well except for "open marriages" advocated by a former congressperson who went on a witch hunt when a certain President had an oral thing with an intern.
My skin crawls watching this crap. Please.....are people this stupid really running for the Presidency? But, I realize it isn't stupidity that creates this slimey circus. Not stupidity of the candidates. It's cynicism and the basic hate for true ideals of morality, justice and equality. The candidates are only giving the likely voters what they want. All you had to do is listen to the cheering when the code words are used. Or the cheering when it was suggested a while back anybody without insurance should be left to die if they get a serious illness they can't pay to have treated.
Is it any wonder we drop bombs on innocent people. We pander to hate and racisim toward our own people. Why would we act more appropriately toward foreign nations and people.
And the worst is yet to come. Wait until the super PACs and all the corporate "persons" start their attacks on Obama. Wait until the big money starts the hate campaign in earnest. There will be little truth spoken by either side and the clowns will be in charge. The circus has only begun.
This year the media will fill our minds with the great importance of the 2012 election. But what we really have is a con game. We'll be asked to keep our eyes on the circus while the masters of war and plunder are planning their next assault on the rights of men and women around the world. They'll be planning on how to further enslave the working class and steal the rest of their savings while we'll be watching the clowns prancing and preening from town to town acting like they're relevant to our lives.
Old Jim Crow is supposedly dead but old racist bigots are still around and running for office. From voter suppression laws requiring "just the right ID" to all that code speaking we might as well have the candidates at the debates wearing the hooded garb of the Klan while they stand on stage. And camera scans of the audience show deliriously happy good ole boys and girls whenever the next candidate drops some line about those welfare queens or food stamp mamas. Or illegals taking over the jobs. Seems the only way America can survive is if we keep it tidy white and moral. Well except for "open marriages" advocated by a former congressperson who went on a witch hunt when a certain President had an oral thing with an intern.
My skin crawls watching this crap. Please.....are people this stupid really running for the Presidency? But, I realize it isn't stupidity that creates this slimey circus. Not stupidity of the candidates. It's cynicism and the basic hate for true ideals of morality, justice and equality. The candidates are only giving the likely voters what they want. All you had to do is listen to the cheering when the code words are used. Or the cheering when it was suggested a while back anybody without insurance should be left to die if they get a serious illness they can't pay to have treated.
Is it any wonder we drop bombs on innocent people. We pander to hate and racisim toward our own people. Why would we act more appropriately toward foreign nations and people.
And the worst is yet to come. Wait until the super PACs and all the corporate "persons" start their attacks on Obama. Wait until the big money starts the hate campaign in earnest. There will be little truth spoken by either side and the clowns will be in charge. The circus has only begun.
This year the media will fill our minds with the great importance of the 2012 election. But what we really have is a con game. We'll be asked to keep our eyes on the circus while the masters of war and plunder are planning their next assault on the rights of men and women around the world. They'll be planning on how to further enslave the working class and steal the rest of their savings while we'll be watching the clowns prancing and preening from town to town acting like they're relevant to our lives.
Love America, Hate the Politicians
People say, "Why do you hate America?"
I say I don't hate America. I love America. I hate the actions of the government bought by the rich corporate PACs and the wealthy who don't give a damn about Americans or the rest of the world. They only care about themselves. Their motto is "I've got mine and screw the rest of you."
There is still this mindset of "America, love it or leave it." Yeah, well my mindset is this nation is better than that. This nation is part of the rest of the world and is obligated to make the world better for all people. Rather than bombs and troops we could drill wells and reduce the number of children dying by millions. And it would be billions and billions cheaper. So why not? Stupid question. There's no profit to be made in improving the lives of the impoverished and most miserable peoples of the world.
Look at Haiti, if you can without crying or puking. Where did all those billions of dollars go to help the people? NGOs claim they've improved things but the people say things have gotten worse. If you only have 6-10 toilets per 8-10,000 people and the toilets aren't cleaned out daily is that considered an improvement over no toilets?
There are a few thousand different NGOs taking the money to bring relief. In their free time many of the staff have nice beds in luxury hotels. They eat steak and shrimp across the street from a refugee camp so crowded cholrea will kill thousands before it is controlled.
The USAID, a US governmental agency gives relief but there are certain conditions. If they buy grain it has to be American grain. If they send equipment it has to be equipment from American corporations. 93% of the billion or so dollars sent for relief is recyclyed to America corporations, many of them within the beltway of DC. Even when the food or equipment is cheaper or closer for immediate needs from non-American sources. Is this how the US wins hearts and minds?
Americans are so ethnocentric and Eurocentric they either can't conceive of the squallor of Haiti or other nations ravaged by wars and famine or they don't want to know. They don't think there are consequences for American foreign policy over the years and when there are attacks on Americans become the whining, bitching, never forgetting victims. What the hell do they think when they allow our government to impose corrupt leaders on nations, bomb, strafe and destroy civilian population centers and rape the land for natural resources? Do they really think because we're America everybody should love us.
Americans are better than they've allowed the government to be. But their voices of reason are being sold out. And too many think they deserve freedom but anybody different doesn't. Tim Tebow is the darling of the American public. How would he fare were he Muslim? How would he fare if he were gay? Intolerance has not diminished because we have laws against hate crimes. It just manifests itself in different and more sinsister ways. If we say our hate and racism is part of our religous beliefs should we get an exemption from the laws?
Or how about the Catholic Church and others who have openly bashed gays for hundreds of years? Or women who choose to have an abortion are murderers but a President sanctioning torture and indiscriminate bombing isn't a war criminal?
I don't like this America! I don't like an America where hate and violence prevail. I don't like the America where greed prevails. I don't like an America where corporations are considered people and allowed to buy my government. You can tell me to love it or leave it but I'll tell you I'm not leaving and neither are some of my best friends.
I say I don't hate America. I love America. I hate the actions of the government bought by the rich corporate PACs and the wealthy who don't give a damn about Americans or the rest of the world. They only care about themselves. Their motto is "I've got mine and screw the rest of you."
There is still this mindset of "America, love it or leave it." Yeah, well my mindset is this nation is better than that. This nation is part of the rest of the world and is obligated to make the world better for all people. Rather than bombs and troops we could drill wells and reduce the number of children dying by millions. And it would be billions and billions cheaper. So why not? Stupid question. There's no profit to be made in improving the lives of the impoverished and most miserable peoples of the world.
Look at Haiti, if you can without crying or puking. Where did all those billions of dollars go to help the people? NGOs claim they've improved things but the people say things have gotten worse. If you only have 6-10 toilets per 8-10,000 people and the toilets aren't cleaned out daily is that considered an improvement over no toilets?
There are a few thousand different NGOs taking the money to bring relief. In their free time many of the staff have nice beds in luxury hotels. They eat steak and shrimp across the street from a refugee camp so crowded cholrea will kill thousands before it is controlled.
The USAID, a US governmental agency gives relief but there are certain conditions. If they buy grain it has to be American grain. If they send equipment it has to be equipment from American corporations. 93% of the billion or so dollars sent for relief is recyclyed to America corporations, many of them within the beltway of DC. Even when the food or equipment is cheaper or closer for immediate needs from non-American sources. Is this how the US wins hearts and minds?
Americans are so ethnocentric and Eurocentric they either can't conceive of the squallor of Haiti or other nations ravaged by wars and famine or they don't want to know. They don't think there are consequences for American foreign policy over the years and when there are attacks on Americans become the whining, bitching, never forgetting victims. What the hell do they think when they allow our government to impose corrupt leaders on nations, bomb, strafe and destroy civilian population centers and rape the land for natural resources? Do they really think because we're America everybody should love us.
Americans are better than they've allowed the government to be. But their voices of reason are being sold out. And too many think they deserve freedom but anybody different doesn't. Tim Tebow is the darling of the American public. How would he fare were he Muslim? How would he fare if he were gay? Intolerance has not diminished because we have laws against hate crimes. It just manifests itself in different and more sinsister ways. If we say our hate and racism is part of our religous beliefs should we get an exemption from the laws?
Or how about the Catholic Church and others who have openly bashed gays for hundreds of years? Or women who choose to have an abortion are murderers but a President sanctioning torture and indiscriminate bombing isn't a war criminal?
I don't like this America! I don't like an America where hate and violence prevail. I don't like the America where greed prevails. I don't like an America where corporations are considered people and allowed to buy my government. You can tell me to love it or leave it but I'll tell you I'm not leaving and neither are some of my best friends.
Saturday, January 14
Breaking the Betrayal of Silence
Denver will hold its annual "Marade" to commemorate MLK day. It's one of the largest gatherings in the nation. It starts at East High and goes down Colfax, one of the busiest avenues in the city. Eventually the parade/march will end up at Civic Center Park, the park where Occupy Denver was evicted by riot squads with pepper spray and tear gas. Ironic. The parade is run by self important politicians and their minions along with a good number of the religious community. No Occupy speaker will speak. No feminist will speak. No revolutionary will speak. No young anarchist will speak. No Black Panther will speak.
When the parade came to an end the last time I marched a few years back there were tables set up by "sponsors". Two in particular caught my eye: the Denver Public Safety Department and an insurance company notorious in New Orleans for unethical practices of not paying claims of the Katrina survivors. The Denver Public Safety Department is the DPD and DFD. The same Denver police responsible for pepper spraying and assaulting the peaceful Occupy Denver group. The same police notorious for brutality throughout the black and brown communities of Denver. Irony, once again.
I also came to realize the religious community of Denver fails in their understanding of Dr. King's message. Time and again the majority of the interfaith council here in Denver has had opportunity to speak out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To object to the loss of life. To voice outrage against the billions spent on death and violence at the expense of programs for the poor. Time and again they've failed to make a stand against the greed and fraud by the masters of war making billions off the blood of millions. And, yet, the same religious community takes advantage of Dr. King's day to make themselves important as speakers praising his life.
Christians around the nation are praying for a miracle today. They pray for a football player's victory because he professes his faith every day in every way. I don't hate this player. I actually enjoy his play. But for all his profession of faith, I've yet to hear him object to the wars. The same can be said for the greatest majority of NFL, NBA, MLB players. A large number of the players are black. They give praise to the life of Dr. King but don't mention some of the core values he challenged us all to have. They don't mention the wars.
The charade on Monday will be attended by Occupy members and others who are part of a local resistance against the madness of our times. They won't have much support. I question if the religious will ever find the courage to speak out publicly against the spiritual death Dr. King mentioned in his Riverside Church address in April 1967. I question if those who declare themselves followers of Christ so publicly so frequently will have the courage to speak out as Dr. King spoke out. To break the betrayal of silence Dr. King was compelled to break.
When the parade came to an end the last time I marched a few years back there were tables set up by "sponsors". Two in particular caught my eye: the Denver Public Safety Department and an insurance company notorious in New Orleans for unethical practices of not paying claims of the Katrina survivors. The Denver Public Safety Department is the DPD and DFD. The same Denver police responsible for pepper spraying and assaulting the peaceful Occupy Denver group. The same police notorious for brutality throughout the black and brown communities of Denver. Irony, once again.
I also came to realize the religious community of Denver fails in their understanding of Dr. King's message. Time and again the majority of the interfaith council here in Denver has had opportunity to speak out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To object to the loss of life. To voice outrage against the billions spent on death and violence at the expense of programs for the poor. Time and again they've failed to make a stand against the greed and fraud by the masters of war making billions off the blood of millions. And, yet, the same religious community takes advantage of Dr. King's day to make themselves important as speakers praising his life.
Christians around the nation are praying for a miracle today. They pray for a football player's victory because he professes his faith every day in every way. I don't hate this player. I actually enjoy his play. But for all his profession of faith, I've yet to hear him object to the wars. The same can be said for the greatest majority of NFL, NBA, MLB players. A large number of the players are black. They give praise to the life of Dr. King but don't mention some of the core values he challenged us all to have. They don't mention the wars.
The charade on Monday will be attended by Occupy members and others who are part of a local resistance against the madness of our times. They won't have much support. I question if the religious will ever find the courage to speak out publicly against the spiritual death Dr. King mentioned in his Riverside Church address in April 1967. I question if those who declare themselves followers of Christ so publicly so frequently will have the courage to speak out as Dr. King spoke out. To break the betrayal of silence Dr. King was compelled to break.
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence - speech by MLK (April '67)
Very few posts on this blog aren't my own words but at this time, the Saturday before the MLK commemoration, there are no better words relevant to the world we live in. We should revisit what Dr. King had to say often.
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam
Delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
April 1967
At Manhattan's Riverside Church
OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorage, leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.
Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor - both black and white - through the Poverty Program. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political play thing of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years - especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But, they asked, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a Civil Rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed from the shackles they still wear.
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam." It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the "brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant or all men, for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that He died for hem? What then can I say to the Viet Cong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with hem my life?
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and their broken cries.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its re-conquest of her former colony.
Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision, we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants, this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to re-colonize Vietnam.
Before the end of the war we were meeting 80 per cent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will to do so.
After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while, the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy, and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go.
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers destroy their precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least 20 casualties from American firepower for each Viet Cong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building?
Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts'? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.
Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the NLF, that strangely anonymous group we call VC or communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem, and charge them with violence while we pour new weapons of death into their land?
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than 25 per cent communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant.
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and non-violence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know of his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded at Geneva to give up, as a temporary measure, the land they controlled between the 13th and 17th parallels. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.
When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the President claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. Perhaps only his sense of humor and irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than 8000 miles from its shores.
At this point, I should make it clear that while I have tried here to give a voice to the voiceless of Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for our troops must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor.
Somehow this madness must cease. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam and the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently, one of them wrote these words: "Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It' will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony, and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations.
The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of her people.
In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing the war to a halt. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmare:
1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military build-up in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
4. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
5. Set a date on which we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.
Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the NLF. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, in this country if necessary.
Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than 70 students at my own Alma Mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy, and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. We will be marching and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. The need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. With such activity in mind, the words of John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look easily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: " This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are the days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take: offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to ad just to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us re-dedicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam
Delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
April 1967
At Manhattan's Riverside Church
OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorage, leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.
Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor - both black and white - through the Poverty Program. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political play thing of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years - especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But, they asked, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a Civil Rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed from the shackles they still wear.
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam." It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the "brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant or all men, for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that He died for hem? What then can I say to the Viet Cong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with hem my life?
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and their broken cries.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its re-conquest of her former colony.
Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision, we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants, this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to re-colonize Vietnam.
Before the end of the war we were meeting 80 per cent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will to do so.
After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while, the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy, and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go.
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers destroy their precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least 20 casualties from American firepower for each Viet Cong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building?
Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts'? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.
Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the NLF, that strangely anonymous group we call VC or communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem, and charge them with violence while we pour new weapons of death into their land?
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than 25 per cent communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant.
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and non-violence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know of his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded at Geneva to give up, as a temporary measure, the land they controlled between the 13th and 17th parallels. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.
When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the President claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. Perhaps only his sense of humor and irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than 8000 miles from its shores.
At this point, I should make it clear that while I have tried here to give a voice to the voiceless of Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for our troops must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor.
Somehow this madness must cease. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam and the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently, one of them wrote these words: "Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It' will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony, and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations.
The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of her people.
In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing the war to a halt. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmare:
1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military build-up in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
4. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
5. Set a date on which we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.
Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the NLF. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, in this country if necessary.
Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than 70 students at my own Alma Mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy, and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. We will be marching and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. The need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. With such activity in mind, the words of John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look easily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: " This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are the days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take: offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to ad just to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us re-dedicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
Friday, January 13
We Were Trained This Way
The viral video of Marine snipers urinating on dead Taliban combatants, if they are in fact combatants, is yet another example of the way the Corps and the military demonize and dehumanize the enemy. During the Vietnam insanity the DIs constantly referred to the enemy as "gooks" or other such disparaging slurs. They took away our personal identity as best they could. They created a mind set of the... only good enemy is a dead enemy. They used operant behavioral conditioning tactics that were very effective for duping and training young people. It would be easy to condemn just the Marine individuals in the video, but America, you need to understand this is an example of what you get when you send young and often immature men and women into your immoral wars. While the majority of you were at the mall or never gave a damn about the poverty draft or the all volunteer military about 1-3 percent of the population was involved in killing and being killed for no good reason. Yes, each individual is responsible for their actions. These Marines are responsible for the obscenity of this action. But the people of this nation are responsible for sending their sons and daughters to the obscenity of these continual wars. So, get over your moral outrage, America. Do something like have national debate about violence, excessive spending on weapons of mass destruction and the continued use of war to solve problems.
Pissing on The Truth
Watching Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta express their outrage toward four young Marines stupidly urinating on the bodies of the killed enemies is like pissing on the truth. All the progressives and liberals talk about the Geneva Convention but where the hell were they in Vietnam with Agent Orange and napalm and white phosphorus? Where have they been with DU, napalm (repackaged and renamed) and w...hite phosphorus in Iraq and Afghanistan? And with the bombing and shelling of civilian neighborhoods in Fallujah and other centers of population during both wars? Maybe they should actually read the articles of the Geneva Convention. I offer no excuses for stupid acts of grunts called upon by the rich masters of war to fight their insane wars. I saw stupid acts of extracting gold teeth from dead bodies, pushing hog-tied prisoners from the top of tanks and AmTracs, in the field water boarding and the hitting of a prisoner hog-tied with an E-Tool flush in the face during my 13 months in Vietnam. As an 18 year old I knew it was fucking wrong but I also knew survival dictated I shut my mouth. Or, in other words, I didn't have the courage of those who exposed My Lai. Few do. The military culture want us to believe in country, honor and duty but I'll be doing a presentation with the discussion of a young woman raped by a fellow soldier. She reported to her company's top NCO. He had her give him twenty pushups because she didn't properly use the chain of command to report the rape. Where were Hillary and Leon for her??? And at the anniversary of Gitmo's illegal and immoral prison talking about the rules of war, the dignity of war is the ultimate pissing on the bodies of the dead.
Doublespeak Redux
So, in our Orwellian world of doublespeak a young private can expose war crimes, immoral actions of a government and other illegal actions and he is to be tried as a criminal with the risk of a lengthy prison stay. But the perpetrators of two illegal wars such as Bush and Cheney go on their merry way smirking and laughing at the way they were able to play war with the lives of real men and women ...soldiers and innocent civilians and those dastardly "terrorists". And also able to restrict the rights of the people, many of whom cheered for the wars for 15 minutes and then went back to their reality of idiotic Fox programming claiming to be "real". And, still I hear people capitulate to this by saying they have nothing to hide and are ok with having their rights stolen from them. Still they allow the rich to con them and persuade them capitalism has worked even as they look at their 401k or 403b and notice they lost one-half to three fourths of their pension since 2008. Still they think it ok for the military to spend billions with a B every damn week for the purpose of violence and death in wars. As long as it isn't them or their kids, who cares? Still they only get outraged when they're told to by the corporate media. Such as when someone disses an evangelical quarterback who should really read the Bible concerning his prayer habits. Or if someone suggests a woman has the right to marry another woman or a man another man. Or a woman has the right to control her own body. Still the billionaires buy the elections of public officials and the people shrug their shoulders and say, "well it's been like that forever" And they ask what those damn "hippies" at all these Occupy Wallstreet sites are doing. Shouldn't they get jobs??? Still the ugly head of racism, ageism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and hate rages as strong as ever. Lip service is paid to the issues but then it's back to the same behaviors. Anybody that thinks the struggle was won hasn't been paying attention. The struggle is a perpetual one that always needs courageous people to step up. And still I love this nation and the many people who carry on the struggle.
Saturday, January 7
Will We All Die Alone?
Just finished Hans Falllada's EVERY MAN DIES ALONE. It's a book about resistance against the facist government of Hitler by a non-Jewish German couple whose son was killed in the war. The descriptions of fear and intimidation, the bullying and spying by police and other agencies of government seemed very familiar. Neighbors were afraid to trust neighbors. While the hierarchy all took the stance of uber-patriotism, the general public detested the government and but said nothing to keep themselves from becoming a target of investigation. Though written in the 40s, the book has great relevancy yet today.
I see co-workers afraid for their jobs unwilling to stand up for themselves. I see union workers targeted by management should they become too public with their unionism. And weak unions unable to do much more than collect dues and occasionally challenge management.
And of course, there are the police who neither "protect" or "serve" when it comes to dissent against government. The individual cops become a gang of blue going about their brutality toward peaceful people. Individual thought is not endorsed. Like the military. Sociopaths somehow get into the ranks and manage to get power. Like the military.
I vividly recall Marines so institutionalized by the Corps they chose to remain on base during times we were given liberty. They had money but didn't like to enter the civilian world. I remember a Staff Sgt. leading a platoon who had an IQ barely above a person with developmental disability. A concerned company clerk told some of us grunts about him. Of course, it didn't take a genius to figure that one out given his propensity to think he was John Wayne.
Is this the world we want? Automatons enforcing oppressive laws, fearful workers willing to accept abuse simply to remain working for unfair wages, government of the rich only?
Do we want a culture so vapid "reality television" is thought to be real? One where personal interactions are replaced by text messages and social media only? Where players earning millions with sports teams owned by billionaires are the "heroes"? A society so hypnotized by mass media and fluff entertainment it fails to see the true reality?
This may simply sound like a rant but it seems the more people are polarized and distanced from reality and each other the more likely the government and the puppeteers of wealth are to carry out their oppression. The more wedge issues created by bastards like Rove and the Koch brothers the less likely people are to rise up in angry resistance. John Paine and others were the pamphleteers of revolution in the late 1700s. Today there is a great variety of ways to do what they did. But for how long? Will Goldman-Sachs and friends soon be the owners of all the media?
I see co-workers afraid for their jobs unwilling to stand up for themselves. I see union workers targeted by management should they become too public with their unionism. And weak unions unable to do much more than collect dues and occasionally challenge management.
And of course, there are the police who neither "protect" or "serve" when it comes to dissent against government. The individual cops become a gang of blue going about their brutality toward peaceful people. Individual thought is not endorsed. Like the military. Sociopaths somehow get into the ranks and manage to get power. Like the military.
I vividly recall Marines so institutionalized by the Corps they chose to remain on base during times we were given liberty. They had money but didn't like to enter the civilian world. I remember a Staff Sgt. leading a platoon who had an IQ barely above a person with developmental disability. A concerned company clerk told some of us grunts about him. Of course, it didn't take a genius to figure that one out given his propensity to think he was John Wayne.
Is this the world we want? Automatons enforcing oppressive laws, fearful workers willing to accept abuse simply to remain working for unfair wages, government of the rich only?
Do we want a culture so vapid "reality television" is thought to be real? One where personal interactions are replaced by text messages and social media only? Where players earning millions with sports teams owned by billionaires are the "heroes"? A society so hypnotized by mass media and fluff entertainment it fails to see the true reality?
This may simply sound like a rant but it seems the more people are polarized and distanced from reality and each other the more likely the government and the puppeteers of wealth are to carry out their oppression. The more wedge issues created by bastards like Rove and the Koch brothers the less likely people are to rise up in angry resistance. John Paine and others were the pamphleteers of revolution in the late 1700s. Today there is a great variety of ways to do what they did. But for how long? Will Goldman-Sachs and friends soon be the owners of all the media?
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