A Time to Break Silence

Dear Mr. President,

On the eve of the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s electrifying “I Have a Dream” speech, there are many articles and analyses of its—and his—impact, but there’s another speech, “A Time to Break Silence” which is equally important and as relevant today as it was when he gave it on April 4, 1967. It was a powerful anti-Vietnam War speech, not appreciated by the Johnson Administration or any administration since. Anti-war sentiment is never popular with the power elite, for war is a path to power. I haven’t seen a single mention of the Break Silence speech and that’s a shame for there are important, indeed critical lessons we need to learn from it. Dr. King, a fellow Nobel Peace Prize recipient, saw the connection between war and poverty, between war and injustice, war and the crushing of hope and aspiration at home and abroad. Although the speech is about Vietnam, it is also about Afghanistan today, the parallels strikingly similar. Near the end he says: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” We are approaching—maybe already in—that state of spiritual death as a nation and blindly headed deeper into it, for the drums of war beat once more for “intervention,” this time in Syria. It reminds me of the runup to the invasion of Iraq—the evidence of WMDs/the evidence of chemical weapons, the list of atrocities by Saddam Hussein/the list of atrocities by the Assad regime, the moral duty to rid the world of a tyrant, etc. No talk of cutting off arms to both sides in this horrendous slaughter or finding another path to peace. You make secret deals to arm the rebels—many, jihadists, terrorists and those we deem our enemies elsewhere—who are also guilty of atrocities. Outside Europe and Washington, there is little enthusiasm for military intervention but never mind, as reported in today’s NYT (“Arab League Rejects Attack Against Syria” p. A1), “…administration officials said they did not regard the lack of an imprimatur from the Security Council or the Arab League as insurmountable hurdles given the carnage last week.” And what of the carnage we cause if we bomb them? It’s a time to break silence, Mr. President, a time to speak out against the obscenity of war, a time to put aside the false myth that violence is a path to peace. You have yet another opportunity to be worthy of that Nobel Peace Prize. I urge you to show you deserved it.