A Note to Those Who Will Name Evil

[Karmadillo]

Gobama?

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2011/01/note-to-those-who-will-name-evil.html

January 17, 2011
A Note to Those Who Will Name Evil
Arthur Silber

The ferocious insistence of America on its national catechism -- that the United States is "unique in all of history, that our form of government is the greatest and best possible to mankind, toward which all others should and must strive, and that our national character is predisposed toward compassion and peace" -- today provides us with yet another holiday drained of every vestige of concern for the sanctity of life and turned into the occasion for onanistic preening and self-congratulation. And, of course, sales.

I wonder if a man who said the following would be so "honored" (and I sincerely apologize to Dr. King for the minor alterations indicated in brackets, but I dare to think that he would be sympathetic to the spirit in which these changes have been made):

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of {Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Pakistan, and Yemen, and Somalia, and ...}. 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 {these places}. 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.

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 {these places.} If we do not stop our war against the{se} people{s}...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 ...that we have been detrimental to the life of the{se} 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 ... we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

That is a short passage from "A Time to Break Silence," Dr. King's address given on April 4, 1967, at the Riverside Church in New York City. If you wish to offer genuine tribute to Dr. King, you might set some time aside to read the speech in its entirety.

more...

[Karmadillo]

1. Link to King's "A Time to Break Silence" speech.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm

<edit>

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!

more...