Today we celebrate Martin Luther King Day in the United States. During his life, Dr. King spoke not just of oppression at home, but also railed against what he saw as American injustices abroad, most notably in Vietnam.
In a speech delivered in New York City on March 4, 1967, entitled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” Dr. King gave a history of the Vietnamese revolution and its relationship to China. 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