This war as an unjust, evil and futile war: MLK on Vietnam/Iraq

MLK
1 Unjust Evil and Futile War - mp3
I will be discussing today one of the most
controversial issues confronting our nation. I’m using as a subject
from which to preach, why I am opposed to the war in Vietnam.

Now let me make it clear in the beginning, that I see
this war as an unjust, evil and futile war. I preach to you today on
the war in Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other
choice. The time has come for America to hear the truth about this
tragic war. In international conflicts the truth is hard to come by,
because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations
and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts
that blind us to our sins.

But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He
who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the
bonus we receive for knowing the truth. Ye shall know the truth, said
Jesus, and the truth shall set you free.

MLK
2 War on the Poor- mp3

I come this morning to my protest to make a passionate
plea to my beloved nation. This sermon 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. This morning however I wish not to speak with Hanoi, the
National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans, who 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 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.

MLK
3- Apathy - mp3

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.

Now of course one of the difficulties in speaking out
today grows out of the fact that there are those who are seeking to
equate dissent with disloyalty. It is a dark day in our nation when
high level authorities will seek to use every method to silence
dissent. Something has happened and people are not going to be silent,
the truth must be told. Yes we must stand, and we must speak. There
comes a time when silence is betrayal.

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.

MLK
5- God is Love - mp3

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.

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."

Let us love one another; for God is Love 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 me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam
because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but
with anxiety and sorrow in my heart. Above all, with a passionate
desire to see our beloved country to stand as a moral example to the
world.

I speak out against this war because I am disappointed
with America. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and
deal forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic
exploitation and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end
road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far
country of racism and militarism. America has strayed away, this
unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has
left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality.

It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home America.

I call on Washington today, I call on every man and
woman of goodwill all over America today, I call on the young men of
America who must make a choice today, to take a stand on this issue-
tomorrow may be too late.

MLK
6- Now is the Time - mp3

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 military government 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 these people and hear their broken cries.

Now let me tell you the truth about it, they must see Americans as strange liberators.

Who are we supporting in Vietnam today, but a man by
the name of General Chi, who fought with the French, against his own
people. And who said on one occasion that the greatest hero of his life
was Hitler- this is who we are supporting in Vietnam today. Oh our
government and the press generally won’t tell us these things, but God
told me to tell you this morning- the truth must be told.

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 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.

We have destroyed their two most cherished
institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land
and their crops. This is the role our nation has taken.

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. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on
life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must
come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men
and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their
journey on life’s highway.
True compassion is more that flinging a coin to a beggar. A true
revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of
poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation.

Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy.
Now is the Time, to lift our nation from the quicksand of racial
injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make
justice a reality for all of God’s children. It would be fatal for the
nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.

Martin Luther King Jr.

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This is the kind of thing you cannot digest in one pass, but listen
again and again for it to sink it to your soul. What would Dr. King do
if he were alive today?

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