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| US Lethal Drone Wars |
King’s 1967 concerns about the US in Vietnam were disregarded and belligerence
recklessly ingrained continues to escalate and expand against peoples of Africa, Asia, and Eastern
Europe
This January day on which American activist Martin Luther King, Jr., is supposedly commemorated is nothing more than another demonstration of capitalism, commerce’s never taking a holiday. It moves into a final full-blast of winter wastefulness, corralling careless consumers into its clutches.. It moves into a final full-blast of winter wastefulness, corralling careless consumers into its clutches. All the while peoples in foreign lands, one of which King spoke passionately and eloquently—suffer unspeakable wounds caused by endless US bombs, threat and intimidation, sanctions and occupation.
Martin Luther King’s words as well as those of other activists and thinkers are salient today but I am under no illusions that my fellow-Americans give a tinker’s damn about substance, about the active nature of and commitment to love, care and nonviolence – in relations of any kind, let alone US foreign relations.
Nevertheless, I remember, as I have not the luxury of forgetfulness; and these thoughts are worth remembering. There comes a “time,” King said, “when silence is betrayal; and that time has come for us… ”
King was speaking of the US war on Vietnam; but in today’s
context, THINK: US wars on peoples of Afghanistan,
Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, South and North Korea, Japan, Egypt, Libya,
Somalia, Congo, Nigeria, Sudan, Ukraine, Philippines, Central America, and
others.
From Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam—A Time
to Break Silence”
Excerpt, editing, comment by Carolyn Bennett
Speaking beyond silence, betrayal
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to
which they call us is a most difficult one. …
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| US theaters of endless wars |
[People] 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 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.
However, we must move on.
[Though] some of us have already begun to break the silence
of the night [and have] found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of
agony, we must speak. With all the humility that is appropriate to our limited
vision, we must nevertheless speak. We must speak.
Think: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria,
Yemen, Bahrain, South and North Korea, Japan, Egypt, Libya, Somalia, Congo, Nigeria,
Sudan, Ukraine, Philippines, Central America
Speaking to Americans
[Though the whole situation is ambiguous and presumed “enemies”
must be part of a collective solution to the tragedy], this speech is not
addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front, to China or to Russia –
“I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather
to my fellow Americans.…
“…I have walked among [America’s] desperate, rejected,
and angry young men [and] I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles will
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 ask—and rightly so— what about Vietnam?
…‘Is not our own nation using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wants’?
“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—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.
e are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for
the victims of our nation and for those it calls ‘enemy’; no document from human
hands can make these humans any less our [equals, our fellow human beings].
“W
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“…I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the
ideologies…, not of the junta …; but simply of the people who have been living
under the curse of war for … 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.”
Think: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria,
Yemen, Bahrain, South and North Korea, Japan, Egypt, Libya, Somalia, Congo, Nigeria,
Sudan, Ukraine, Philippines, Central America
Speaking for the sufferers
The homeless suffering
want, failed infrastructure, clean water, disease, insecurity
As our troop deployments increase and leaflets rain down together
with promises of peace and democracy and land reform, the people languish under
our [US] bombs and they come to consider us—not [those we call enemy]—as the
real enemy.
Knowing they must move or be destroyed by our bombs, [the suffering
people] move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their
fathers and into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met.
Most sufferers are women and children and the aged, witnessing
endless desecration. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million
acres of their crops. … 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. They wander into hospitals where scores of casualties caused by
US firepower far exceeds ‘enemy’-caused injuries. Millions have died, mostly
children.
Think: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria,
Yemen, Bahrain, South and North Korea, Japan, Egypt, Libya, Somalia, Congo, Nigeria,
Sudan, Ukraine, Philippines, Central America
Unspeakable suffering, unhealed
wounds
We have destroyed their most cherished institutions, the
family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops.
We have cooperated in crushing the nation’s only noncommunist
revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported
the enemies of the peasants … We have corrupted their women and children and
killed their men. Now, there is little to build on, except bitterness; and soon
the only solid physical foundations remaining will be [US] military bases and …
the concentration camps we call ‘fortified hamlets.’ Can we blame the peasants’
wondering if we (the United States) plan to build our new Vietnam on these foundations?
They are our [fellow human beings] and we must speak for them
and raise the questions they cannot raise.
Think: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria,
Yemen, Bahrain, South and North Korea, Japan, Egypt, Libya, Somalia, Congo, Nigeria,
Sudan, Ukraine, Philippines, Central America
Restorative value: seeing through their
eyes
What must they think of the United States of America when
they realize that we have permitted repression and cruelty [against them]…? What
do they think of our condoning the violence that led to their own taking up of
arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of ‘aggression’ [from
‘them’] as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust
us when now we charge them with violence after a murderous reign… 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 [those] we supported pressed
them to their violence. Surely, we must see that our own computerized plans of
destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.… They question our political
goals and deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they [are]
excluded.
Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation again
planning to build on political myth and then shore it up upon the power of new
violence?
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| Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. |
Love, nonviolence: neither romantic
essence nor state of being; but active and continuous
T
|
he “true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence,”
King said, “[is] when it helps us to see the ‘enemy’s’ point of view, to hear [those]
questions, to know [others’] assessment of ourselves.
“From [those other views] we may see the basic weaknesses of
our own [position]. And if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from
the wisdom of [those] whom we call the opposition.”
Sources and notes
“Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence” by Martin Luther
King Jr., delivered April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Concerned Laity, Riverside
Church, New York City [alt title “Time to Break Silence (Declaration Against
the Vietnam War)”], American Rhetoric, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
[AUTHENTICITY CERTIFIED Text version transcribed directly
from audio]
A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora
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