The sixteenth chapter of The Power of Nonviolence: Writings by Advocates of Peace contains Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech  Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam. The speech, which is also known as Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence ,was given in the Manhattan’s Riverside Church exactly one year before King was assassinated.   It is sad to realize that Dr. King’s 45 year old attempt to seek freedom from war applies equally to the Vietnam War as it does to the wars that the United States is now waging in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.

Through the lens of history, it is hard to understand how controversial the speech was in 1967.  It is common wisdom today that the Vietnam War was a mistake, despite the US government’s recently started 10-year plan to rehabilitate American’s view of that war.  In 1967, all the major media backed the Vietnam War.  Dr. King was regularly attacked in national newspapers such as the New York Times for speaking out against the Vietnam War.  Peace activists are still attacked in today’s media for opposing today’s wars for the same reasons that Dr. King cites.

Dr. King responds to his critics who say that he should only speak about the domestic issue of civil rights, and keep silent on the VietNam War.  The critics make the lesser evil argument that Dr. King is hurting the cause of civil rights by speaking out against the war.  Dr. Kings explains in the introduction of his speech that those critics misunderstand both who he is , and misunderstand”the world in which they live.”  Dr. King gives seven reasons why he must speak out: 

1. Economic. The Vietnam War drains federal funds that could used to alleviate poverty.  It becomes useless to speak out against poverty as a civil rights issue when the funds to resolve it are being diverted to war.  The same goes for the US today where we are told we cannot afford single-payer universal health care, to fight global warming  or save homes from foreclosure, yet 53% of the federal budget goes to war.
2. Segregation. The people most likely to be sent to war are those who have the fewest rights back home.  Dr. King spoke of Blacks and Whites “brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago.”  There is still segregation today, and those victims of segregation are still the most likely to serve.  The only difference is that in 1967 the wealthy could manipulate the draft exemptions in order to avoid serve, while today’s voluntary military has an economic draft where those same victims of segregation are given no other choice to survive but to enter the military.
3. Nonviolence. Dr. King was asked by angry young men how he could preach nonviolence to them when the government used violence to solve its problems.  In response, he swore to never “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.”   This is the part of the speech that always touched me the deepest because it seemed to involve the most personal soul searching.
4. Civil Rights.  Dr. King addresses the question of whether being a civil rights leader excludes him from speaking about peace.  he explains that when they organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) that their motto was: “To save the soul of America”.  Their concern was not limited to the needs of African-Americans or through the sole perspective  of civil rights.They understood that they must approach change as the betterment of all.  Dr King came to see that “if.America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam.’”
5. “Brotherhood of Man”  First, Dr. King discusses the secular commitment place on him by being awarded the Nobel peace prize to work not just to save the soul of america, but to work for the betterment of all humankind.
6. Ministry Moving to his responsibility as a Christian pastor, he is astounded that anyone can even question his duty to work for peace: 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? 
7. Christianity.  Lastly, as an individual who believes that all humanity are children of God, Dr. King feels a calling to speak out: We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers. 

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.

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?

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called “enemy,” I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else.

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 a hell for the poor.

Surely 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 destroy, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt 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 one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

Each day the war goes on the hatred increased in the hearts 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.