Arguments Against The Vietnam War
In 1967 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was ostracized by many of his followers in the black community for the offense of abandoning the Civil Rights Movement. Even some of his most loyal followers believed that by him speaking out against the war in Vietnam he was ignoring his work fighting against racial discrimination in the south. The question then becomes to what extent this accusation was true, and whether or not King should have ignored the Vietnam war in favor of continuing his work in the Civil Rights Movement. By looking at the arguments King makes in his earlier works and comparing it with his speech about the Vietnam war, we can see that King has preached the same ideas of nonviolence and peace from the beginning, showing that King’s
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Many felt that by fighting, the U.S. was defending democracy in the only legitimate way. Martin Luther King Jr., however, was not as keen on the idea of using violent means as a way to an end. The Vietnam War was a long and bloody battle that did not bring about satisfying results. According to the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files, there were 58,220 total American casualties in the Vietnam War, the exact kind of devastation King wrote about in the essay “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.” When King decided to speak out against the violence of the Vietnam War in the speech “Beyond Vietnam” he was met with much dissension. People argued that King ignoring his duties to the Civil Rights Movement, but I would argue that if he had ignored the war, then everything he had preached about nonviolence would have been hypocritical. The Vietnam war was another manifestation of the violence Dr. King had spoken out against his entire career, and to ignore it would be to discredit the violence happening at home. King implies this idea in his speech when he proposes that he “could never again raise his 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—[the American] government.” This is not to say that King’s involvement in the Vietnam War did not in retrospect dampen motivation in the Civil Rights Movement in the south, but that his involvement was something that was a natural progression from his speeches back in
Many felt that by fighting, the U.S. was defending democracy in the only legitimate way. Martin Luther King Jr., however, was not as keen on the idea of using violent means as a way to an end. The Vietnam War was a long and bloody battle that did not bring about satisfying results. According to the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files, there were 58,220 total American casualties in the Vietnam War, the exact kind of devastation King wrote about in the essay “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.” When King decided to speak out against the violence of the Vietnam War in the speech “Beyond Vietnam” he was met with much dissension. People argued that King ignoring his duties to the Civil Rights Movement, but I would argue that if he had ignored the war, then everything he had preached about nonviolence would have been hypocritical. The Vietnam war was another manifestation of the violence Dr. King had spoken out against his entire career, and to ignore it would be to discredit the violence happening at home. King implies this idea in his speech when he proposes that he “could never again raise his 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—[the American] government.” This is not to say that King’s involvement in the Vietnam War did not in retrospect dampen motivation in the Civil Rights Movement in the south, but that his involvement was something that was a natural progression from his speeches back in