Originally published April 4, 2004
OVER THE PAST YEAR, 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 Iraq, 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 the war, John? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? What do you know of the intricacies of foreign policy. Aren't you venturing outside your expertise, 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 misunderstanding, I deem it of single importance to try to state clearly why I believe that the path from Tudor Road, the street I grew up on in Brockport, New York, where I began my adulthood, leads clearly to this place.
I write this letter to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This letter is not addressed to Al Qaeda or to A.N.S.W.E.R. It is not addressed to Iraq or to Israel. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Iraq. Neither is it an attempt to make Muqtada al-Sadr or Osama Bin Laden paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons 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.
Right now, however, I do not wish to speak with either of them, 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.
I have several reasons for bringing Iraq into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Iraq and the struggle that others have been waging in America. At the end of the Cold War there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for our poor through the "Peace Dividend" which included all the great resources of a great nation suddenly made available in addition to the vast revenue that was being directed to the military. Then came the build-up in the Middle East for Desert Shield. This project endured and spread to the Balkan's and elsewhere. It eventually grew into the war on terrorism and I watched the dividend become broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political play thing of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that the United States would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its own so long as fear 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 people 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 children and their siblings and their spouses to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the young people who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Los Angeles. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching our youth on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to care for their medical needs or provide them a secondary education. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason grows out of my experience on the streets of the United States over the last twenty years - especially the last three. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young people trying to effect change, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and Guns 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 non-violent action. But, they asked, what about Iraq? 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 without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of the United States today can ignore the present war. If the United States' soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Iraq." It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.
And as I ponder the madness of Iraq, my mind goes constantly to the people of that area. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Baghdad, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for a continuous decade. 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 their broken cries.
They must see the United States as strange liberators. For years we sponsored sanctions and initiated destruction that virtually eliminated all infrastructure in their country and took the lives of several hundred thousand of their citizens. 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 "green zone." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Iraq 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 must they think of us in the United States when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Saddam Hussein while he did our bidding and then wrecked terror down on them when he would not? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "terrorism" as if our hands were completely clean? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of our operatives, and charge them with violence while we pour new weapons of death into their land?
What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of the Middle East and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which they will have no part? 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.
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and non-violence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know of 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.
At this point, I should make it clear that while I have tried here to give a voice to the voiceless of the Middle East and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Iraq 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 our troops 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 Iraqis, 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.
Somehow this madness must cease. I speak as a brother to the suffering poor of Iraq and the poor of the United States who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Iraq. 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 must be ours.
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 Iraq, that we have been detrimental to the life of her people. In order to atone for our errors in Iraq, we should take the initiative in bringing the war to a halt.
Meanwhile, we here on the streets of the United States have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. 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 Iraq and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by at least one soldier, and I recommend it to all who find the United States course in Iraq a dishonorable and unjust one. 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 Iraq. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Iraq 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 protest committees for the next generation. We will be marching and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.
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 fifty years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" worldwide. The need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Haiti. It tells why American forces have been active against rebels in Columbia. With such activity in mind, the words of John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. 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, 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. When machines and computers, profit 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. 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 easily 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, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples 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 re-ordering 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 until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against terrorism. War is not the answer. Terrorism will never be defeated by the use 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 the days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a terrorist or an appeaser who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problems of these turbulent days. We must engage in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against terrorism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of terrorism grows and develops.
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 terrorism, and our proneness to ad just to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. 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.
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in the Middle East 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 re-dedicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling 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.
A TIME TO BREAK SILENCE, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam
Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967
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