Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
By Rev. Martin Luther King
4 April 1967
Speech delivered by
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of
Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City
[Please put links to this speech on
your respective web sites and if possible, place the text itself
there. This is the least well known of Dr. King's speeches among
the masses, and it needs to be read by all]
http://www.ssc.msu.edu/~sw/mlk/brkslnc.htm
 I come
to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my
conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this
meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work
of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and
Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your
executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I
found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A
time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us
in relation to Vietnam.
The
truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which
they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the
demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of
opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war.
Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against
all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and
in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem
as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful
conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by
uncertainty; but we must move on.
Some of
us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have
found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony,
but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is
appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we
must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our
nation's history that a significant number of its religious
leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth
patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the
mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new
spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement
well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its
guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the
darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the
past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own
silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I
have called for radical departures from the destruction of
Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my
path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed
large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why
are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights
don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your
people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often
understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless
greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers
have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed,
their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which
they live.
In the
light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal
importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I
believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the
church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate --
leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come
to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved
nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National
Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.
Nor is
it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation
and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of
Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the
National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook
the role they can play in a successful resolution of the
problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be
suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and
history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are
never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight,
however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather
to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest
responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy
price on both continents.
The Importance of
Vietnam
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 I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years
ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if
there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and
white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments,
hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I
watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some
idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I
knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or
energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures
like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like
some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly
compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack
it as such.
Perhaps
the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became
clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the
hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their
brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in
extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the
population. We were taking the black young men who had been
crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles
away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not
found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been
repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and
white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a
nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same
schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts
of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on
the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of
such cruel manipulation of the poor.
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 asked -- and
rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation
wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to
bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and
I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the
violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first
spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world
today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the
sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands
trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
For
those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?"
and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I
have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto:
"To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could
not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but
instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free
or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were
loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we
were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem,
who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
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 America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of
the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as
it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is
that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are
led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health
of our land.
As if
the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of
America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was
placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize
for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder
than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This
is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even
if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning
of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the
relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so
obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am
speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that
the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and
capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for
white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten
that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his
enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to
the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of
this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share
with them my life?
Finally,
as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads
from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was
most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction
that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living
God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this
vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that
the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and
helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
This I
believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem
ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader
and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's
self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the
weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those
it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these
humans any less our brothers.
Strange Liberators
And as I
ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways
to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly
to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers
of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the
people who have been living under the curse of war for almost
three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is
clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there
until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken
cries.
They
must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people
proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined
French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist
revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though
they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their
own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead,
we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former
colony.
Our
government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready"
for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western
arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so
long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary
government seeking self-determination, and a government that had
been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no
great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some
Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land
reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine
years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right
of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the
French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.
Before
the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French
war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu,
they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We
encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to
continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we
would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at
recolonization.
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 -- primarily women and children and the aged.
They
watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of
their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their
areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into
the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American
firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may
have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander
into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless,
without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals.
They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for
food. They see the children selling their sisters to our
soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do
the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and
as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning
land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on
them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new
tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the
roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it
among these voiceless ones?
We have
destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and
the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We
have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only
non-Communist revolutionary political force -- the unified
Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants
of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed
their men. What liberators?
Now
there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the
only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our
military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we
call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan
to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we
blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise
the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.
Perhaps
the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for
those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the
National Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we
call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America
when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty
of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance
group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the
violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they
believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from
the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war?
How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence
after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence
while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely
we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone
their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported
pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own
computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest
acts.
How do
they judge us when our officials know that their membership is
less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving
them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know
that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam
and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which
this highly organized political parallel government will have no
part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the
Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta.
And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government
we plan to help form without them -- the only party in real
touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and
they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will
be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our
nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore
it up with the power of new violence?
Here is
the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it
helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his
questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his
view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own
condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and
profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the
opposition.
So, too,
with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land,
and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but
understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this
lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their
distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who
led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the
French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth
and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness
of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle
against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were
persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the
thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at
Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent
elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power
over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed
again.
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 of the increasing
international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the
north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing
are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his
sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most
powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops
thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight
thousand miles away from its shores.
At this
point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these
last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and
to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am
as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For
it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam
is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war
where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding
cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a
short period there that none of the things we claim to be
fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know
that their government has sent them into a struggle among
Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we
are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create
hell for the poor.
This Madness Must
Cease
Somehow
this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of
God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for
those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being
destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the
poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes
at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a
citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the
path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my
own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The
initiative to stop it must be ours.
This is
the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently
one of them wrote these words:
"Each
day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the
Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct.
The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their
enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so
carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not
realize that in the process they are incurring deep
psychological and political defeat. The image of America will
never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy,
but the image of violence and militarism."
If we
continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of
the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It
will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it
as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking
that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may
bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war
against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left
with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly
clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.
The
world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able
to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong
from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have
been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The
situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from
our present ways.
In order
to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the
initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like
to suggest five concrete things that our government should do
immediately to begin the long and difficult process of
extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:
-
End all
bombing in North and South Vietnam.
-
Declare a
unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create
the atmosphere for negotiation.
-
Take
immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast
Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our
interference in Laos.
-
Realistically
accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has
substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a
role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam
government.
-
Set a date
that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in
accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.
Part of
our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to
grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a
new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must
make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We
most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it
available in this country if necessary.
Protesting The War
Meanwhile
we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while
we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful
commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation
persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to
match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of
protest possible.
As we
counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify
for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with
the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say
that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy
students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I
recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a
dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all
ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions
and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times
for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when
our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive
its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on
the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all
protest.
There is
something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending
us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade
against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle,
but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.
The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady
within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering
reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and
laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will
be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned
about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about
Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a
dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there
is a significant and profound change in American life and
policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our
calling as sons of the living God.
In 1957
a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to
him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution.
During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of
suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S.
military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social
stability for our investments accounts for the
counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It
tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas
in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have
already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such
activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come
back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make
peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution
inevitable."
Increasingly,
by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken
-- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by
refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come
from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am
convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world
revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of
values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented"
society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and
computers, profit motives and property rights are considered
more important than people, the giant triplets of racism,
materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true
revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness
and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one
hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's
roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must
come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so
that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as
they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is
more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and
superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces
beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will
soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and
wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas
and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums
of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the
profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the
countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our
alliance with the landed gentry of 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 veins of people normally humane, of
sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically
handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled
with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year
after year to spend more money on military defense than on
programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America,
the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead
the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a
tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities,
so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the
pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a
recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have
fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This
kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense
against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never
be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let
us not join those who shout war and through their misguided
passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation
in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise
restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a
Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China
in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria
are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent
days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but
rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our
greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action
in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to
remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice
which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows
and develops.
The People Are
Important
These
are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting
against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of
the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality
are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land
are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light." We in the West must support these
revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort,
complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to
adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much
of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become
the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that
only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism
is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and
follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope
today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit
and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal
hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful
commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust
mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be
exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the
crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."
A
genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that
our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional.
Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind
as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual
societies.
This
call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern
beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call
for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This
oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily
dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly
force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival
of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some
sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which
all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying
principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door
which leads to ultimate reality. This
Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate
reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint
John:
Let us
love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is
born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God;
for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and
his love is perfected in us.
Let us
hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can
no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the
altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent
by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the
wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this
self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is
the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and
good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the
first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going
to have the last word."
We are
now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are
confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding
conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too
late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often
leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost
opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at
the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause
in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on.
Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous
civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There
is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our
vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having
writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent
coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
We must
move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak
for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world
-- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall
surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of
time reserved for those who possess power without compassion,
might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let
us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter
-- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the
callling 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.
As that
noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently
stated:
Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Off'ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil
prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above his own.
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THE KUALA LUMPUR
INITIATIVE TO CRIMINALISE WAR
17th December 2005
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