King took stand against war (a letter to the ed)

From Battle Creek Enquirer: King took stand against war
Quote:

"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. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam.

". . . It (the poorer class) was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions. . . . We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia.

". . . The Vietnamese must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation. . . . For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam."

The above are excerpts from Martin Luther King's 1967 speech on the Vietnam war. Since there had been no declaration of war by Congress and the "enemy" nation was small, backward and far, far away, many Americans in 1967 could not find the battle zone on a world map. Nor did many Americans understand the nature of the conflict.

The Vietnam war claimed 58,000 American lives and estimates of Vietnamese casualties vary - some estimate as high as 1 million dead. The U.S. was carpet bombing the country, dropping napalm and spraying the very toxic chemical Agent Orange as a defoliant. The U.S. military ordered the burning of villages.

Of late, many conservatives and war-mongers want to turn Vietnam into a "good" and necessary war. But as King points out, we were on the wrong side of the Vietnam war - on the side of French colonialists and self-serving dictators. Moreover, many prominent conservatives chose not to fight in the Vietnam war - George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, Newt Gingrich and Clarence Thomas, to name just a few.

As the Martin Luther King holiday approaches, we should remember his brave stand against the unjust, immoral war in Vietnam and also his advocating for economic justice.

R. Heubel
Battle Creek