A Time to Break
Silence... Speech delivered by Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., on 4 April 1967, at a meeting
of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in
New York City - The speech that may have cost Martin
Luther King Jr his life exactly one year later on 4
April 1968.
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.
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 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 thosse
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.
Narrated
by Sean Penn and based on the work of media critic and
best-selling author Norman Solomon, who traveled with
Penn to Baghdad just before the war to call attention to
the dangers of a U.S. invasion, WAR MADE EASY reaches
into the Orwellian memory hole to expose 50 years of
government spin and media collusion that has dragged our
country into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq.
With remarkable archival footage of official distortion
and exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, the
documentary exposes how presidential administrations of
both parties have relied on a combination of deception
and media complicity to sell one war after another to the
American people.