Jottings from the Granite Studio

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 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.”

Not suprisingly given the times, Dr. King’s comments sparked considerable controversy. Time Magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The extent to which the revolution in Vietnam could be considered “indigenous” was (and still is) hotly debated, and the tropes and cliches heard in this debate were strikingly similar to arguments from a decade earlier regarding China’s own revolution. The same logic that asked “Who lost China?” (as if it were ever ours to lose) lived on through the planning of our wars in Southeast Asia and in many ways still resonates in current US policy in Iraq today. It is American exceptionalism at work.

King mentioned China again when he argued that Communism would not fall through war, but through the upholding of democratic values around the world:

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 prescience of this speech seems undeserving of the vitriol which it received. We never did resort to atomic weapons during the Cold War, but hate and hysteria are still the calling cards of those who favor war over peace as a solution to the world’s problems. The names of our enemies may have changed, but like a cruel mad lib, the rhetoric remains the same, and Dr. King ends his address on a note that is sadly as relevant today as it was forty years ago:

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.”

Amen.