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THE MLK SPEECH WE NEED TODAY IS NOT THE ONE WE REMEMBER MOST  
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Viet Thanh Nguyễn
January 12, 2019
TIME [[link removed]]

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_ While Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963
March on Washington is widely remembered, his 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" is
the speech that we needed to hear then–and need to hear today. _

King delivering his speech “Beyond Vietnam” at New York City’s
Riverside Church in 1967, John C. Goodwin

 

Most Americans remember Martin Luther King Jr. for his dream of what
this country could be, a nation where his children would “not be
judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their
character.” While those words from 1963 are necessary, his speech
“Beyond Vietnam,” from 1967, is actually the more insightful one.

It is also a much more dangerous and disturbing speech, which is why
far fewer Americans have heard of it. And yet it is the speech that we
needed to hear then–and need to hear today.

In 1963, many in the U.S. had only just begun to be aware of events in
Vietnam. By 1967, the war was near its peak, with about 500,000
American soldiers in Vietnam. The U.S. would drop more explosives on
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia than it did on all of Europe during World
War II, and the news brought vivid images depicting the carnage
inflicted on Southeast Asian civilians, hundreds of thousands of whom
would die. It was in this context that King called the U.S. “the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Many of King’s civil rights allies discouraged him from going public
with his antiwar views, believing that he should prioritize the
somewhat less controversial domestic concerns of African Americans and
the poor. But for King, standing against racial and economic
inequality also demanded a recognition that those problems were
inseparable from the military-industrial complex and capitalism
itself. King saw “the war as an enemy of the poor,” as young black
men were sent to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they
had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

What King understood was that the war was destroying not only the
character of the U.S. but also the character of its soldiers.
Ironically, it also managed to create a kind of American racial
equality in Vietnam, as black and white soldiers stood “in brutal
solidarity” against the Vietnamese. But if they were fighting what
King saw as an unjust war, then they, too, were perpetrators of
injustice, even if they were victims of it at home. For American
civilians, the uncomfortable reality was that the immorality of an
unjust war corrupted the entire country. “If America’s soul
becomes totally poisoned,” King said, “part of the autopsy must
read Vietnam.”

In his speech, which he delivered exactly one year to the day before
he was assassinated, King foresaw how the war implied something larger
about the nation. It was, he said, “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 … unless there is a
significant and profound change in American life.”

King’s prophecy connects the war in Vietnam with our forever wars
today, spread across multiple countries and continents, waged without
end from global military bases numbering around 800. Some of the
strategy for our forever war comes directly from lessons that the
American military learned in Vietnam: drone strikes instead of mass
bombing; volunteer soldiers instead of draftees; censorship of
gruesome images from the battlefronts; and encouraging the reverence
of soldiers.

You can draw a line from the mantras of “thank you for your
service” and “support our troops” to American civilian regret
about not having supported American troops during the war in Vietnam.
This sentimental hero worship actually serves civilians as much as the
military. If our soldiers can be absolved of any unjust taint, then
the public who support them is absolved too. Standing in solidarity
with our multicultural, diverse military prevents us from seeing what
they might be doing to other people overseas and insulates us from the
most dangerous part about King’s speech: a sense of moral outrage
that was not limited by the borders of nation, class or race but
sought to transcend them.

What made King truly radical was his desire to act on this empathy for
people not like himself, neither black nor American. For him, there
was “no meaningful solution” to the war without taking into
account Vietnamese people, who were “the voiceless ones.”
Recognizing their suffering from far away, King connected it with the
intimate suffering of African Americans at home. The African-American
struggle to liberate black people found a corollary in the struggle of
Vietnamese people against foreign domination. It was therefore a
bitter irony that African Americans might be used to suppress the
freedom of others, to participate in, as King put it, “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 investments.”

Americans prefer to see our wars as exercises in protecting and
expanding freedom and democracy. To suggest that we might be fighting
for capitalism is too disturbing for many Americans. But King said
“that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we
… must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin
… the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented
society.” Those words, and their threat to the powerful, still apply
today. For the powerful, the only thing more frightening than one
revolution is when multiple revolutions find common cause.

The revolution that King called for is still unrealized, while the
“giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism” are
still working in brutal, efficient solidarity. He overlooked how
misogyny was also an evil, but perhaps, if he had lived, he would have
learned from his own philosophy about connecting what seems
unconnected, about recognizing those who are unrecognized. Too many of
today’s politicians, pundits and activists are satisfied with
relying on one-dimensional solutions, arguing that class-based
solutions alone can solve economic inequality, or that identity-based
approaches are enough to alleviate racial inequality.

King argued for an ever expanding moral solidarity that would include
those we think of as the enemy: “Here is the true meaning and value
of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s
point of view … 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.”

This was the dream of King’s that I prefer–the vision of a
difficult and ever expanding kinship, extending not only to those whom
we consider near and dear, but also to the far and the feared.

_Viet Thanh Nguyễn was born in Vietnam and raised in America. His
novel __The Sympathizer_
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Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as five other awards. His latest
book is __To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other_
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* MLK
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* Beyond Vietnam
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* Revolutionary Thought
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