We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. Read on for background on the historic speech, highlights and the speech in in its entirety. The war with Vietnam was just as unjust as unnecessary. After more than a decade in the public eye fighting racism and inequality in America, King plunged himself into another searing, divisive issue in America with his speech, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, given at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, and some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos. Martin Luther King Speaks Out In the speech “ Beyond Vietnam- A Time to Break Silence”, Dr. King speaks out on the issues brought upon by the Vietnam War and how it has a negative impact on African Americans. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. To construct a clear and strong picture and show how condemnable the war exercises in Vietnam were, King compared it with an arena of gladiators which even if it amuses and engages, is something absolutely animal and barbaric. “Beyond Vietnam”, Silence is Betrayal: Martin Luther King’s Historic 1967 Speech Introduction by Michel Chossudovsky. 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. Tax ID: 26-2810489. . His speech grows deeply sarcastic at times. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. 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. According to the PBS documentary MLK: A Call to Conscience (2010), the speech was denounced by 168 newspapers across the country. The impacts of dialogues on the audience will also be evaluated. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. Become a member of THIRTEEN ($5 monthly or $60 annually) and get access to THIRTEEN Passport as our thanks for your support. He quotes Langston Hughes, in his speech to establish a connection between the struggle for civil liberty in United States and the oppression in Vietnam. Read a rhetorical analysis of Martin Luther King Jr’s Beyond Vietnam: Time to break silence. He tries to make people see the other side of the picture where both black and white men were being pushed into hell without considering and questioning the outcome. Apart from being an advocate of Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of nonviolence, Martin Luther King Jr was a great leader and rhetor of all times. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. A true revolution of values will lay hand 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 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. In part, we do not commemorate the aspects of Dr. King’s legacy that are wrapped up in “Beyond Vietnam” because a chorus of voices at the time condemned the speech as too radical, as communist, and as contrary to the interests of a Civil Rights Movement that was finally gaining traction on issues of social justice at home, and that stood only to lose by associating its cause with the most … However, his words while they aim to bring the pain of the Vietnamese alive before the audience also include a request that a progressive nation should stand with humanity and not lose control of its feelings. Or will there be another message — of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? 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. BEYOND VIETNAM April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, NYC. 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? We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country, if necessary. One of Martin Luther King Jr.’s lesser known yet equally impactful speeches, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” condemns the violence and atrocities committed by the U.S against the Vietnamese in their foolish bid to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. He means to make people ask questions of themselves and ponder over the meaninglessness and uselessness of war and what would remain behind once the war was over. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. 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. 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. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. 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. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence Rev. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. 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. “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.”, Interior of Riverside Church on W. 120th Street in Manhattan. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. Soon, the only solid — 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. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own. 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 horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. However, all wanted clarity on the subject. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands. The problems being faced by either America or Vietnam were never going to be solved through rifles but through peaceful and nonviolent action. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this 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. It was his first major public antiwar speech and a powerful warning that a rise in racial hatred, militarism and … 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. I say it plain, Through his use of imagery, diction, and parallel structure, Martin Luther King Jr associates the war in Vietnam with injustice in his famous speech, "Beyond Vietnam - … 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. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. As he notes towards the end of his speech, “If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood “. It encompasses all humanity and not just America. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. King used his famous oration skills to point out the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign affairs in view of the sorry domestic state of equality in America. “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. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. He includes various perspectives and addresses several counterarguments with the intention to prove the futility of war as a tool to address social, economic and political problems. Harding recalled in an interview with Tavis Smiley, The Third Rail with OZY Wants You in the Audience. 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. Procrastination is still the thief of time. 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 must stop now. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. He graduated with a Hons. In April of 1967, the Rev. The recent statements 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.” And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. 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’m speaking against the war. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. 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 1954; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize 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. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. 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. 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. 1. 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? The neo-gothic Riverside Church in New York City has a long history of progressive leaders and activism, dating back to its opening in October, 1930. That speech, entitled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break The Silence, was an unequivocal denunciation of America’s involvement in that Southeast Asian conflict. 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. America is overlooking its own poor and pouring resources into a war which does not offer any political, economic or social advantage. And finally, as I try to explain 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. We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. If it is, let us trace its movements 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”. Fifty years ago in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech that startled even many of his supporters in the Civil Rights Movement. 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. 2. In this paper I will seek to determine the scholarly disregard of the rhetorical strategies that King adopted in his speech … History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. In the strife of truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Instead, King chooses to use facts to show what an illness war is. Dr. King’s purpose is to make the church leaders he is speaking to aware that the time has come for them to speak out loudly in … He says, “ 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. 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