Narrated by Sean Penn and based on the work of media critic and
best-selling author Norman Solomon, who traveled with Penn to Baghdad just
before the war to call attention to the dangers of a U.S. invasion, WAR MADE
EASY reaches into the Orwellian memory hole to expose 50 years of government
spin and media collusion that has dragged our country into one war after another
from Vietnam to Iraq. With remarkable archival footage of official distortion
and exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, the documentary exposes how
presidential administrations of both parties have relied on a combination of
deception and media complicity to sell one war after another to the American
people.
Giving special attention to parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, WAR MADE EASY
sets government spin and media collusion from the present alongside virtually
identical patterns from the past, guided by Solomon s meticulous research and
tough-minded analysis. Rare footage of political leaders and journalists from
the past includes Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, Defense Secretary
Robert McNamara and news correspondents Walter Cronkite and Morley Safer.
According to Solomon, whose work has been praised by The Los Angeles Times as
brutally persuasive, the positive attention the film has received may indicate a
new willingness to counter years of pro-war media spin and government deception.
These deep patterns of ongoing perception management must be demystified and
decoded if we're going to move beyond the horrors of perpetual war, he said. The
way War Made Easy is being embraced could be an important step in that
direction.
An Official Selection of 2007 s International Documentary Film Festival in
Amsterdam and the 2007 Montreal and Vancouver International Film Festivals, WAR
MADE EASY, directed by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp, is an invaluable
introduction to war propaganda and public relations that transcends partisan
politics, and raises serious questions about the role of journalism and
political communication in our society.
A Time to Break Silence...
Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on 4 April 1967, at a
meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City -
The speech that may have cost Martin Luther King Jr his life exactly one
year later on 4 April 1968.
I
come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience
leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in
deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has
brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent
statement 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." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they
call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner
truth, men 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 the 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; but we must move
on.
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have
found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must
speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our
limited vision, but we must speak.
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. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let
us trace its movement well 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.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own
silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called
for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have
questioned me about the wisdom of my path.
At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and
loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the
voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you
hurting the cause of your people, they ask?
And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their
concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that
the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed,
their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal
importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe
that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery,
Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary
tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved
nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation
Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.
Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and
the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it
an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons
of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution
of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious
of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent
testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful
give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather
to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in
ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.
The Importance of Vietnam
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I
have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral
vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection
between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging
in America.
A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as
if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white --
through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings.
Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the 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. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of
the poor and to attack it as such.
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. 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 never live on the same block in Detroit. I
could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows
out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years
-- especially the last three summers.
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men
I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would 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 asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? 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 hundreds of thousands
trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
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.
In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were
convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black
people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free
or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed
completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with
Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
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. If
America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read
Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of
men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that
America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for
the health of our land.
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
1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace 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. 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 am speaking against the war.
Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all
men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black
and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that
my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that
he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to
Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or
must I not share with them my life?
Finally, as I try to delineate 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. Beyond the calling of race or
nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I
believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and
helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem
ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper
than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and
positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for
victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from
human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
Strange Liberators
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways
to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the
people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not
of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under
the curse of war for almost three continuous 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.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people
proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and
Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were
led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of
Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them.
Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former
colony.
Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for
independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that
has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic
decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination,
and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the
Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that
included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real
land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right
of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their
abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.
Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French
war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began
to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with
our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they
had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this
tragic attempt at recolonization.
After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land
reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there
came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily
divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the
most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem.
The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all
opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to
discuss reunification with the north.
The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and
then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the
insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they
may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to
offer no real change -- especially in terms of their need for land and
peace.
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. All the while the people read our leaflets and received
regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. 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 hospitals, with at least
twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted
injury.
So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. 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.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as
we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What
do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans
tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of
Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be
building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and
the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have
cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary
political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the
enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and
children and killed their men. What liberators?
Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only
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? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and
raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.
Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for
those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National
Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists?
What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted
the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as
a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the
violence which led to their own taking up of arms? 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?
How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the
murderous reign of Diem 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
the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that
our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.
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?
What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their
control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow
national elections in which this highly organized political parallel
government will have no part?
They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is
censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to
wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them -- the
only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political
goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will
be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation
planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the
power of new violence?
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. 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.
So, too, with Hanoi. 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.
To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words,
and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the
men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French,
the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed
by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies.
It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at
tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they
controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary
measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent
elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united
Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.
When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be
remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the
presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the
initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops,
and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of
supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.
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.
Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its
forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors
of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and
shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion
strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he
hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it
drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand
miles away from its shores.
At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these
last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to
understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply
concerned about our troops there as anything else.
For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not
simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face
each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of
death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things
we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know
that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and
the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy
and the secure while we create hell for the poor.
This Madness Must Cease
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of
God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose
land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is
being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double
price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak
as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we
have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The
great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be
ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently
one of them wrote these words:
"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the
Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The
Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It
is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the
possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process
they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of
America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and
democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the
world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear
that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men
will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a
war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. 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 horribly clumsy and deadly game
we have decided to play.
The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to
achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning
of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of
the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to
turn sharply from our present ways.
In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the
initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest
five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the
long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish
conflict:
- End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
- Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will
create the atmosphere for negotiation.
- Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast
Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference
in Laos.
- Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has
substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any
meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
- Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in
accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.
Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to
grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime
which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we
can for the damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is
badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary.
Protesting The War
Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while
we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We
must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse
ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking
out every creative means of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for
them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of
conscientious objection.
I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than
seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it
to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust
one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their
ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors.
These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the
moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive
its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest
that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending
us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the
war in Vietnam.
I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say
something even more disturbing. 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. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam,
but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him
that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past
ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has
justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela.
This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for
the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala.
It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in
Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been
active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the
words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he
said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent
revolution inevitable."
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has
taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by
refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the
immense profits of overseas investment.
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, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being
conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness
and justice of many of our past and present policies.
On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's
roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see
that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will
not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's
highway.
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not
haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces
beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring
contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look
across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge
sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits
out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say:
"This is not just."
It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and
say: "This is not just."
The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others
and nothing to learn from them is not just. 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. A nation that continues
year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of
social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead
the way in this revolution of values. 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. There is
nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands
until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against
communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the
use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war
and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish
its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise
restraint and calm reasonableness.
We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the
seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and
hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days.
We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive
thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism
is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive
action seek to remove thosse conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice
which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and
develops.
The People Are Important
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting
against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a
frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The
shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before.
"The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light."
We in the West must support these revolutions. 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
anti-revolutionaries.
This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary
spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make
democracy real and follow through on the revolutions 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 moutain and hill shall be
made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places
plain."
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our
loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must
now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve
the best in their individual societies.
This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern
beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an
all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and
misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the
world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity
for the survival of man.
When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak
response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have
seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that
unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This
Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is
beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:
Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born
of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no
longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of
retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising
tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and
individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. 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. Therefore the first
hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last
word."
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted
with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and
history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still
the thief of time.
Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost
opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood;
it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but
time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and
jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words:
"Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our
vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves
on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent
co-annihilation.
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak
for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world -- a world
that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down
the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess
power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without
sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter
-- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the callling of the
sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say
the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will
our message be that the forces of American life militate against their
arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be
another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of
commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though
we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human
history.
As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, 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.
- the DVD at Amazon.com