"Are we like the God of the Old Testament that we can decide, in Washington, D.C., what cities, what towns, what hamlets in Vietnam are going to be destroyed? ... Do we have to accept that? ... I do not think we have to. I think we can do something about it." --Robert Kennedy (final Senate speech on Vietnam, 1968)
I lived through those events. And the resemblance to Bush's Iraq war is excruciatingly painful, and deeply disturbing.
We lost three major antiwar figures to assassination in that period, two of them in one year, 1968: RFK and MLK.
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John F. Kennedy, assassinated in 1963, had fought the CIA both on the invasion of Cuba and on the US presence in Vietnam. It has now been documented that JFK rescinded the presidential orders for US "military advisers" in Vietnam who were paving the way for the war. I believe now that these were the reasons he was killed.
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Martin Luther King, a powerful moral leader, assassinated in March 1968, had come out publicly against the Vietnam war the year before, in a speech entitled, "Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence." King had been advised by the DLC types of that era not to mix civil rights and peace. He rejected that advice in spring 1967, came out against the war in an amazing speech (see below--the parallels to Iraq are so haunting!), got roundly criticized for it, and, I believe, got assassinated because of it.
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Robert F. Kennedy, also assassinated in 1968, just three months after MLK, had initially supported the Vietnam War, but broke with LBJ and turned against it with a passion, as it got worse and worse, and, finally, mounted an antiwar presidential campaign that was sweeping the country--with an incredible cadre of support from young people who were hungry for peace. He was headed for the White House.
Bang, bang, shoot, shoot--as that other famous antiwar figure, John Lennon, once sang (assassinated in 1980).
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The mysteries around these assassinations have never been solved. And suspicions remain that forces connected to US war profiteers and warmongers were involved. The same suspicions attend the untimely death of Senator Paul Wellstone, in 2002, just as he was mounting a campaign against the Iraq war, weeks before his comeback re-election to the Senate. He, too, was presidential material, and would have made a superb candidate in '04.
Can it be a coincidence that only those who favor peace, and who have the leadership skills and power to change US policy, get killed in this way, at the height of their powers, just as they make a significant political move to achieve peace? It seems very pointed to me. And not a coincidence. And I favor re-opening all four investigations (including Wellstone, for which there was NO investigation that the public has access to).
Whatever the truth may be, there is a lesson to be learned, and that is, that WE CANNOT RELY ON LEADERS to achieve peace and justice. They will be killed. They will be Diebolded. Their campaigns will be sabotaged. The goals of peace and justice must be a collective responsibility. And I believe that, with the recognition by many of us that our election system has now been rigged (with the Bushite electronic voting machines and their SECRET programming), and our activism about it--and also with the courageous antiwar activities of Cindy Sheehan and many other good people--we are, at last, as a people, taking collective responsibility for DIRECTING our leaders and our government to stop the war and to seek world peace and justice for all.
I don't think we've ever done that before--truly taken collective responsibility for what our country has become--ripe fruit for fascists to pluck and plunder and turn to their purposes. We didn't really take responsibility for it in the 1960s and '70s. For one thing, we left this humongous military machine in place, and nuclear weapons. What is it for--except to steal our money and conduct unjust wars? (When was the last time this military machine actually DEFENDED us?) And we let a COVERT war take place, against Nicaragua--and against the direct order of Congress--without impeaching the president who was responsible for it (Reagan). Now we see what comes of such citizen neglect and laziness: the corruption of both parties, and the loss of our democracy.
But I feel very strongly that the active antiwar movement in this country now--which seemed to begin in 'fits and starts'--is actually way stronger than the one driven by the military Draft in the 1960s. I think it is much more fundamental, and is based in part on the lessons of Vietnam, which many of us oldsters remember quite well, but also on a global consciousness that did not exist in the United States back then. The fact that we KNOW that Venezuela's elections were honest and aboveboard, and ours were not--is a good example of what I mean. We may be late to the problem, but we are better informed and savvier than we ever were in the '60s--DESPITE the miserable, war mongering, corporate controlled Fourth Estate that we are inflicted with now.
Further, nearly 60% of the American people were against this war FROM THE BEGINNING. That was not the case in the 1960s. Now, all we have to do is EDUCATE them on WHY this war is proceeding against their will--the dastardly rigging of our election system--and the people of this country WILL restore democracy. It is in their hearts. And I think it will be a far better democracy than the one we had before.
"The lessons of rigged elections" will become the equivalent of "the lessons of Vietnam" in our history books.
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In the following, you can substitute Iraq for Vietnam for every broad point in the speech, and for most of the details as well. It is remarkable!:
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BEYOND VIETNAM: A TIME TO BREAK SILENCE, by Martin Luther King
7 April 1967, delivered before the Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam
"And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, 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 1954* -- in 1945 *rather* -- 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 their 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 Agreement. 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 rooted 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 United States' influence and then by increasing numbers of United States 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 dictators 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 the 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 on 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 out 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 noncommunist 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.
"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....
"This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:
'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 (unquote).'
"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. 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. 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."
4 April 1967
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
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