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Rev. King on Vietnam war

Posté par admin
vendredi 17 février 2006 [n° 1066]

Unjust Evil and Futile War [MLK1]

I will be discussing today one of the most controversial issues confronting our nation. I’m using as a subject from which to preach, why I am opposed to the war in Vietnam.

Now let me make it clear in the beginning, that I see this war as an unjust, evil and futile war. I preach to you today on the war in Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts the truth is hard to come by, because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins.

But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. Ye shall know the truth, said Jesus, and the truth shall set you free.

I’ve chosen to preach about the war in vietnam today because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence is betrayal.

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music : Peter Gabriel

source : Honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
Listen to His Wisdom
Then Act Accordingly

Podcasts [XML] :

MLK 1- Unjust Evil and Futile War
MLK 2- War on the Poor
MLK 3- Apathy
MLK 4- Hypocrisy
MLK 5- God is Love
MLK 6- Now is the Time

_______________________

“Beyond Vietnam”

Perhaps a 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 hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

(…)

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell 1, 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.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr :
“Beyond Vietnam”
Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen Concerned
about Vietnam, at Riverside Church

4 April 1967 New York City


  1. The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell by James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) Project Gutenberg [back]
Histoire, Poetry

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