Today and tomorrow are excellent days to listen to Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (1967). Our audio link is from the original speech, made in Atlanta. Here is the text read in New York a few weeks later. And here are some fragments:
We must face the sad fact that our government sought, in a real sense, to sabotage the Geneva Accord.
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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 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.
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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, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.
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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 the veins of peoples 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.
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And don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, “You are too arrogant! And if you do not change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still and know that I am God.”
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And I don’t know about you, I ain’t gonna study war no more.
Tomorrow is King’s birthday, which coincides, fortunately, with his holiday this year. And yes, this speech is as descriptive of U.S. policy now as it was then. And the speech shows very clearly that Martin Luther King was not conciliatory or middle of the road, and he did think radically, that is, from the roots of things.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Kissinger said that America does not have friends, it only has interests. And in speaking that truth, Kissinger described the seeds of America’s self-destruction, for to act only in self-interest is immoral, and while immorality can be sustained for a while by force, it cannot be sustained for ever. But those giant triplets are alive and well and living in the USA. For now.
This is a side of Dr. King that I have never seen before. I really like this post. Very good blog also.
I still remember the tide turning against the War in Vietnam. When King began to speak-out hope was in short supply.
Use that new header, the script is just the ticket.
Thanks for the post. I have heard this speech before and it is amazing how it could be spoken again today and it would be just as relevant.
But I have to say I disagree with you. I think that King was not conciliatory on the Vietnam war but he was on other issues. He was radical about the war but he was very much not radical when it came negotiating the rights of black people…I don’t think he had the luxury to be radical…
great post and, yes, it is very applicative to U.S. policy today. thank you for this.
I found a video of these words and posted it up at my site, but I’m linking to you for the transcript.
Paz siempre.
And so, feliz fiesta, y’all! Kym, you’re right of course, and not having the luxury to be radical, that’s true. I am really just trying to correct for the vanilla-ization of King I see going on sometimes.
Definitely. Word.
I remember hearing this speech some years ago, and it really opened my eyes. Thanks for linking so I could think about these words again.
P.S. King was anti-war and anti-poverty, especially toward the end. Both of these things show in this speech, as does his emphasis on solidarity across national boundaries.
My point of view at this moment is, we (i.e. the U.S. establishment) have mainstreamed his memory as that of a man who refused violence and asked politely for desegregation, in patriotic American terms … and let firehoses be turned on him, and let himself be dragged off to jail. He was noble and non-scary, and we learned to share lunch counters and such, and discovered it wasn’t so bad.
What we don’t like about him, and what we are trying to bleach out of his memory, is that he in fact addressed serious structural issues, not just “prejudice.”