Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - April 4, 1967 - Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence Full and unabridged. https://youtube/watch?v=3Qf6x9_MLD0 Beyond Vietnam: What Martin Luther King still has to teach us by: Paul Rosenberg Sun Apr 04, 2010 Today is the 43rd Anniversary of Martin Luther Kings speech, Beyond Vietnam, A Time To Break Silence. Earlier this week, I wrote a diary calling attention to a Tavis Smiley PBS special devoted to discussing this speech. He had an excellent cast of commentators who had some very good and important things to say. But he didnt focus as much on digging into the specifics of what King said as he focused on the broader implications, as well as the constraints King was struggling against. This isnt a criticism. Smiley has a lot more experience in doing television than I do, and it struck me as a very savvy and sensible use of tv time. Its just that it left me wanting to highlight something else I find most significant, which centers on the arc of arguments King made about why he had no choice but to speak out against the war. This diary is as selective in its way as Smiley was in his, and I invite all readers to join in with whatever seems most important to them in the comments. The first thing I want to underscore is the way that King meets head-on the main criticism he knows that awaits him: What is he doing speaking out of turn, a civil rights leader speaking about peace? It seems like an utterly ludicrous objection to our ears today. But one of the reasons it seems so ludicrous today is precisely because of Martin Luther King, both his personal example, and the highly specific way that he answered that question. Of course, in the broadest and most profound sense, the entirety of the speech is his answer to that question, but the following passage is the tip of the iceberg, as it were. Whats more, it ends by subtley standing the entire premise on its head, and-more in sorrow than in anger--calling into question the competence of those who would ask such a foolish question in the first place: 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 dont mix, they say. Arent 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. Paul Rosenberg :: Beyond Vietnam: What Martin Luther King still has to teach us Rather than the press the point, and make a big deal about how foolish the question is, he simply lets the disturbing challenge hang there in the rhetorical background, as he quickly presses forward to begin explaining himself, which he does in part by reminding people that he is, after all, a preacher, and by implication it is quite natural for him to speak about just about anything under the Sun, so long as he makes a moral, spiritual and/or religious commentary upon it. That implication remains unspoken, but unmistakable as he proceeds: 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. Not only is this a very direct and unassailable argument grounded in brute fact, it sets the direction for a progression of further arguments: 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.... 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 then, in turn, it also becomes a matter of taking seriously the arguments towards violence of those he would lead in a non-violent direction. Here he shows a degree of respect for the intellect of those he would influence that is virtually unheard of in the imperial halls of power: My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasnt 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. This is the logic that comes from taking other people seriously as equals. King was deeply influenced by Martin Bubers writings on the I-Thou relationship, and it shows through quite clearly here. But now his line of arguments comes to a pivot point, where he reflects on the founding conception of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and its reflection of the prophetic vision of Langston Hughes: For those who ask the question, Arent 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. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier: O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath -- America will be! Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If Americas 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. Then hes on to the moral responsibility he carries as a Nobel Peace Prize winner (Paging Barack Obama. White telephone, please.): 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 19541; 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... and that pesky Jesus felluh: 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 Im 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? The arc of the arguments King offers for why he is compelled to speak out against the war prepare the way for an historical analysis of how we came to be involved that is far more sophisticated, and far more accurate than anything that was being offered in the mainstream political discourse of the time. But most importantly for my purposes here, that analysis-filled with significant moral and political observations as well-came to a place where it connected most clearly with sweep of his earlier arc of arguments: Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call VC or communists? .... Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemys point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition. This passage resonates all the more for me today because of something I did not know at the time-that what King is saying here actually reflects a significant insight of George Kennan. As Ive written about several times here at Open Left, in a remarkable paper, Kennans Long Telegram and NSC-68: A Comparative Analysis, East European Quarterly, Vol. 31, no. 4, January 1998, Efstathios T. Fakiolas analyzed two key documents from the formative days of the Cold War. As I wrote in one of those diaries, Wheres Obama? Questioning v Reinforcing [Foreign Policy] CW #3: Fakiolas used the framework of foreign policy realism for his analysis, but he determined that the two documents employed significantly different models within that tradition. Although they seemed to many people to be kindred documents, Fakiolas uncovers striking differences. Im going to do a separate diary delving deeper into his argument, but the bottom line for us now is this: Kennans Long Telegram and Nitzes NSC-68 appear similar, they depend on different models of international relations within the same realist tradition. Kennan relied on the tectonic plates model, in which there many other non-state actors, the world is not zero-sum, and there is often opportunity for mutual cooperation. Nitze relied on the billiard ball model, which sees the international system as composed solely of egoistic sovereign states interested in maximizing their relative power capabilities at the expense of others, and sees world politics is a zero-sum game in which national security conceived of in military and territorial terms is the one and only states national objective. As a result, Kennan favored a strategy of containment that emphasized strengthening the West socially, economically and culturally, addressing its flaws which the Soviets exposed. In contrast, Nitze ignored issues of the Wests internal flaws, and focused almost exclusively on military force to combat the Soviet Union. Thus, Kings perspective as man of God dovetailed with that of a leading realist foreign policy expert and actor-that we could triumph in the long run by taking seriously the exposure of flaws in our own conduct and the thinking behind it, and regarding that exposure as a gift leading us in the direction of perfection. This is not the perspective of a dreamer, who can be easily dismissed, as Obama sought to dismiss him, because he somehow doesnt know about evil. This is the perspective of possibly the greatest American of all time. And the shame is ours if we fail to heed what he still has to teach us.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 00:36:39 +0000