Martin Luther King, Jr. and Vietnam

On the occasion of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the United States, I thought I would take this opportunity to remember what King thought about Vietnam and the Vietnam War. As a proponent of non-violent action, he was generally against war. He gave a speech in April 1967 where he publicly came out against the war, and was excoriated for it. But his reasons, reading it now, seem especially prescient. He had seven main reasons, from taking attention and resources from the poor in America to a need for solidarity with oppressed people around the world.

One portion that spoke to me, because it really points out how the US mis-read the situation in Vietnam from the start, was this:

[The Vietnamese] must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954—in 1945 rather—after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. 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. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China—for whom the Vietnamese have no great love—but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

As usual, King was ahead of this time. A majority of Americans supported the war when he gave the speech. And King himself was assassinated a year after the speech, and well before Americans turned on the war “Not until August 1968, according to Gallup surveys at the time, did a majority -- barely, at 53% -- call it an error.” It took another 7 years before the US fully pulled out of Vietnam.

I like that in the speech King talks about the impact of the war on the US, but spends a greater amount of time talking about the poor Vietnamese and how they have suffered, and how the Southern government wasn’t the party of the peasantry and therefore cannot build their support. Yet, he starts saying that the speech is not “an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue.” And he makes a statement which speaks to me now, in a period where the US has seemed to decide to pull back from promoting democracy and justice around the world, but is pushing in the opposite direction.

We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy [applause], realizing that our greatest defense against communism 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 communism grows and develops.

That is what is missing in US foreign policy today, especially in the time of Trump. The US president has sided more often with dictators and autocrats than with elected officials in our closest allies. Rather than trying to be an example of how great democracy is leaders in countries like China point to the US (and the UK with the fiasco that is Brexit) as a reason to avoid the chaos of democracy. Rather than trying to make conditions inhospitable for terrorism by improving the lives of people that live under threat, the US bombs them with un-manned drones.

But if anything, the tragedy of Vietnam shows that the US and the world have been in bad situations and yet were able to move forward. There has been a great deal of progress since 1967, with the number of people in dire poverty falling drastically, life expectancy growing and major diseases like measles and polio almost wiped out. Democracy reigns and human rights are protected in many more countries than ever. The key is to keep continuing on this path.

Let’s all try to look at Martin Luther King, Jr. as an example of what we should strive for. As George Orwell said: “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.” Happy belated MLK day!

PS A good reading of the speech by Viet Thanh Nguyen is here.