SIMULACI ´ ON NUM´ ERICA DE RECUPERACI ´ ON DE FASE Y

In January 1967, as King waited to catch a flight to Jamaica, where he planned to

complete the manuscript of what would become his book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, he thumbed through Ramparts magazine. His eyes fell on photographs of Vietnamese children who had been badly burned by napalm. The images of these children and their wailing mothers crystallized Dr. King’s growing sense of outrage about the war in Vietnam. In that instant, he resolved to fully oppose the U.S. war effort.120

King’s first opportunity to speak out was at the Nation Institute in Los Angeles in February. King’s address was entitled “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam.” The victims of the war could be found far away from Vietnam. The casualties in the U.S. included the Great Society’s anti-poverty programs;121 _{the government’s loss of humility and resort to hubris in its}

120 _{Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 543.}

121 _{Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam,” in “In a Single Garment of} Destiny”: A Global Vision of Justice (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 153.

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actions;122 _{and the principle of dissent, a hallmark of American democracy.}123 _{The casualties} around the world included the Charter of the United Nations, violated by the U.S.’s aggressive war;124 _{the principle of national self-determination, once heralded by an American president;}125 and, in a divided world still governed by the danger of nuclear war, “the prospects of mankind’s survival.”126 _{King reiterated his call for “a supreme effort to generate the readiness, indeed the} eagerness, to enter into the new world which is now possible,”127 _{and for “a company of creative} dissenters” to “organize as effectively as the war hawks.”128

At King’s request, the antiwar group Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam hosted his most important and moving antiwar speech at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967. Entitled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” the speech was far more than a jeremiad. He wanted to “make a passionate plea to my beloved nation,”129 _{to speak} directly to “the far deeper malady within the American spirit” that if ignored would “take us beyond Vietnam” to concerns about U.S. intervention in other nations,130 _{and “to move past}

122 _{Ibid., 155.} 123 _{Ibid., 156.} 124 _{Ibid., 151.} 125 _{Ibid., 151-52.} 126 _{Ibid., 157.} 127 _{Ibid., 159.} 128 _{Ibid., 161.}

129 _{King, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” in “In a Single Garment of Destiny,”} 165.

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indecision to action” in finding “new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world.”131

His overall analysis of what he called the U.S.’s neocolonial actions in Vietnam and other nations made a deep impact, as public reaction in following days made clear. He gave seven reasons why he had brought Vietnam into his moral vision. Some sprang from his Christian convictions: the commitment reflected in SCLC’s motto “to save the soul of America”;132 _his commitment “to the ministry of Jesus Christ”;133 _{and his calling that he “shared with all men …} the calling to be a son of the living God.”134 _{His other compelling reasons were to “see the war} as an enemy of the poor”;135 the war’s “cruel manipulation of the poor”;136 the conflict of speaking against violence in the nation’s ghettoes while remaining silent in opposing the violence in Vietnam;137 _{and his award of the Nobel Prize, which laid “an additional burden of} responsibility” on him to “work harder than he had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man” and its “calling beyond national allegiances.”138

131 _{Ibid., 180.} 132 _{Ibid., 167.} 133 _{Ibid., 168.} 134 _{Ibid., 168.} 135 _{Ibid., 166.} 136 _{Ibid., 167.} 137 _{Ibid., 168.} 138 _Ibid.

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King recalled the previous three summers of riots in the nation’s ghettoes and excoriated the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”139 _{That violence,} he claimed, caused the Vietnamese people to “languish under our bombs and consider us – not their fellow Vietnamese – the real enemy.” U.S. violence herded the people “off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met.” It “poisoned their water”; killed a million acres of their crops, bulldozed their areas in preparation to “destroy their precious trees”; caused the people to “wander into towns” and saw “thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals … degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food … and selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their

mothers.”140 _{King coupled his litany of U.S. violence in Vietnam with “a pattern of suppression”} in other countries in the world house. That pattern of suppression “justified the presence of U.S. military ‘advisors’ in Venezuela … maintained social stability for U.S. investment accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala” and explained “why

American helicopters are being used against guerillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.”

These inflictions of violence on the rest of the world, according to King, threatened terrible consequences for the U.S. “America’s soul” would be “totally poisoned” by Vietnam;141 it would “approach spiritual death” by devoting “more money on military defense spending than on programs of social uplift”;142 and the U.S. state, which King had once seen as an

139 _{Ibid., 167.}

140 _{Ibid., 170-71.} 141 _{Ibid., 168.} 142 _{Ibid., 178.}

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indispensable ally in the struggle for civil rights for African Americans, would “possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”143