In commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr., I offer three quotes
(short excerpts) from his speach Beyond Vietnam, from 1967.
[...] 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 the hundreds of
thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
...
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. So such
thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of
the living God.
...
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 antirevolutionaries. This has
driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary
spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make
democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that 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 mountain and hill shall be made low; the crooked
shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."
—Martin Luther King, Beyond Vietnam, 1967.
The rest of this speach also includes an interesting history of the
Vietnamese conflict.
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