The American intervention came at a time when the Vietnamese were expecting freedom and peaceful life and it came in a manner that was even devastating compared to the French occupation. The essence in the speech centered on the war in Vietnam. “Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people,” they ask? Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence was delivered by Martin Luther King Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of concerned clergy and laity at Riverside Church in New York City, New York. He repeatedly stresses upon breaking the silence because in this situation being silent was a sin. Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? After more than a decade in the public eye fighting racism and inequality in America, King plunged himself into another searing, divisive issue in America with his speech, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, given at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967. From The Vietnam War, PBS. So, what America is doing to other nations like Vietnam also matters. HistoryNet Staff. 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. contact: support@notesmatic.com, admin@notesmatic.com, https://nolongerinvisiblemen.wordpress.com/2014/11/11/sparknotes-for-martin-luther-king-jr-s-a-time-to-break-silence/, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm, Navigating the Job Market During and After COVID-19, 4 Vital Considerations for Businesses Implementing the Internet of Things, How to Build a Sales & Marketing Funnel to Increase Sales Conversions, How To Make Online Marketing Your Business’s New Best Friend. Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes 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. 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. 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. He evaluates the psychological as well as social, political and economic implications of America’s participation in Vietnam war. He graduated with a Hons. Body Paragraph 1 While his words clearly deliver his disappointment over the path American government had chosen, it also expresses a clear intention to not be with the wrong and instead listen to one’s inner voice. War was an inhuman and barbaric exercise and America’s participation was not in human interest. He picks from history as well as politics and also supports his choices with philosophical wisdom. Martin Luther King, Jr., giving his speech Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence at Riverside Church in NYC, April 4, 1967. 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. At the time, civil rights leaders publicly condemned him for it. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech covers a great deal of information, and we encourage teachers to break the document into at least two parts to make the material more manageable for students. His indictment of the U.S. government and the war became known as “The Riverside Church Speech” and it was criticized by media from The New York Times to the Washington Post, and by groups such as the NAACP, which objected to the Civil Rights Movement weighing in on the war and joining anti-war protests. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. In this paper I will seek to determine the scholarly disregard of the rhetorical strategies that King adopted in his speech … In his argument, King mounts a multi-pronged attack on America’s participation in the Vietnam war and also gains people’s sympathy for the Vietnamese. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. We must stop now. 2 In an article titled, “Beyond Vietnam-A time to Break Silence.”, he tries to provide compelling evidence and sound reasoning to decry America’s involvement in Vietnam war. Rhetorical Analysis of MLK's Speech "Beyond Vietnam" Widely known for his work in the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr eventually also gained momentum in the anti-war movement against the war in Vietnam. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside church. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. He notes how essential it is to break silence before all hope is lost. 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? Could we blame them for such thoughts? Members get extended access to PBS video on demand and more. Martin Luther King, Jr., giving his speech Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence at Riverside Church in NYC, April 4, 1967. 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? I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”, “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. Reflecting on what speech vietnam beyond jr luther martin king analysis s going on here. The persuasive techniques utilized by King Jr are aimed at making people think over the outcomes of Vietnam war and if it was not against America’s integrity. 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. America will be! 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. The idea with the clergy took the theme of silence is betrayal. Fifty years ago in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech that startled even many of his supporters in the Civil Rights Movement. I heard him speak so many times. It … While those words from 1963 are necessary, his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” from 1967, is actually the more insightful one. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. 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. However, his words while they aim to bring the pain of the Vietnamese alive before the audience also include a request that a progressive nation should stand with humanity and not lose control of its feelings. Moreover, it is the poor and the helpless mainly who are falling prey to this war game. Apart from highlighting the wicked nature of the war, King Jr ‘s speech also sets the urgency for protest. The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history. This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. In this way, he personifies war as a demon that consumes people’s lives and a nation’s valuable resources which would otherwise be happy if it was not being ruined by bombs and bullets. 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. In part, we do not commemorate the aspects of Dr. King’s legacy that are wrapped up in “Beyond Vietnam” because a chorus of voices at the time condemned the speech as too radical, as communist, and as contrary to the interests of a Civil Rights Movement that was finally gaining traction on issues of social justice at home, and that stood only to lose by associating its cause with the most … Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts. Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. “Beyond Vietnam”, Silence is Betrayal: Martin Luther King’s Historic 1967 Speech Introduction by Michel Chossudovsky. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. In Doctor Martin Luther King’s Speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” King reaches out to his “fellow Americans” (2) to speak for those who are hurting so that they will come to the agreement that violence is not the solution. Now 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 Vietnam. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs. We have cooperated in the crushing — in the crushing of the nation’s only non-Communist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. Hear the entire recording of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence speech, including introductory applause and a greeting King makes to his fellow clergy speakers. King successfully brings out the irony behind the war through the use of figurative speech and plenty of imagery to paint a picture of destruction and doom in Vietnam. His use of imagery and diction is aimed at making people break their silence and express their anger clearly. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, delivers a speech entitled “Beyond Vietnam” in … Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I’m speaking against the war. 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. BACKGROUND This speech was given By Rev. Through his use of imagery, diction, and parallel structure, Martin Luther King Jr associates the war in Vietnam with injustice in his famous speech, "Beyond Vietnam - … The legacy of his speech is reflected in  The Vietnam War, an 18-hour series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (streaming to PBS members again starting August 4, 2020). He says, “ And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”. 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. Tax ID: 26-2810489. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. He also affirms that people have better options and that the idea of war, despite that it sounds patriotic is basically inhuman. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. ... A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word (unquote). War makes the innocent lose hope and  leaves behind horrific memories for generations on both sides. 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. I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call “VC” or “communists”? America never was America to me, Apart from being an advocate of Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of nonviolence, Martin Luther King Jr was a great leader and rhetor of all times. 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. Martin Luther King Jr. April 4,1967 A meetingat Riverside Church in New York In this speech King compares the struggles of the African Americans to the suffrage of the people in Vietnam TONE SINCERE- “ we must speak with all the humility They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. 1. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Over the past two years, 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 Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”. 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 communism grows and develops. 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. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. The neo-gothic Riverside Church in New York City has a long history of progressive leaders and activism, dating back to its opening in October, 1930. The church maintains an active social justice mission today. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence Rev. However, the persuasiveness of his speeches does not come solely from his ability to connect with his audience’s emotions but from an extraordinary ability to reason and validate his point. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, and some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier: O, yes, In this way, he appeals to the emotions of the audience and challenges the logic behind an unnecessary war. 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. For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. King’s main motive was to persuade people to see how war was destroying lives, society and economy and being silent meant being in approval of the war. On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King delivered his first major public statement against the Vietnam War, entitled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence." BEYOND VIETNAM April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, NYC. He notes, “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”. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. King used his famous oration skills to point out the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign affairs in view of the sorry domestic state of equality in America. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands. How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of “aggression from the North” as if there were nothing more essential to the war? King claimed that America made “ peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments ” (King, “ … On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. The irony is explicit in King’s words that the war is just an attempt to cover and hide the more pressing issues before America. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of new violence? The “Beyond Vietnam” speech was, indeed, a “Call to Conscience”! 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