Martin Luther King’s Commentary on the Injustices of the Vietnam War
The war that preserved Vietnamese independence was a “success” for the oppressed country, but the United States’ role in the violent conflict unveiled a hypocrisy in its superficially noble cause and its damage to the American psyche. To commentate on these injustices, Martin Luther King Jr. consistently utilizes allusions to the Bible, multifaceted appeals to his authority, rationale, and emotion to advocate against the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam.
To begin with, King justifies both his later allegories to the Bible and his credentials to garner belief for his claims. For example, the civil rights leader calls attention to his status as “a preacher by calling”, warranting his decision to “bring… Vietnam into the field of [his] moral vision”, and justifying his salvific intent to “save the soul of America. ”King’s verification of his inherently Christian roles in society deftly legitimizes him in the eyes of the religious 20th century America, figuratively placing him and his audience on the same side. Seeking to appeal to an authority that transcends the racial tensions between the black and the white man, King masterfully forges a connection with his white audience. In another instance, King and his organization asserts African “[Americans] would never save from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed from the shackles they still wear” in order to authorize the notions presented in his speech. Alluding to sin’s mastery of man through “the shackles [America] still wears and America’s inability to “save…itself” parallels common Christian thoughts and beliefs of the day. Referencing the devastating residual consequences of African slavery enables King to emphasize the inhumanity of sending black Americans to war. His comparison of the hypocrisy of the African civil rights with the destructive and wicked concept of slavery during America’s past aptly achieves this effect.
Additionally, King taps into the emotions of his readers through surgical, deliberate diction in order to reveal the scope of the apparent inhumanity of America’s previous stance in Southeast Asia. Notably, the preacher mourns that “Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube”, emphasizing that with America’s Vietnamese policies, his country “would never invest in its poor.” Readers parse out that the United States Federal Government’s own actions are economically crippling its own people, truly like “America’s soul [becoming] totally poisoned.” Our foreign policy in consistently and unconditionally protecting democracy is literally killing the US’s own people in a rather undemocratic fashion, stressing the fallacies in the government’s own hypocrisy.
In addition to King’s specific diction and his self-verification, he further employs Biblical allegories and uses rationale to sway his readers. Utilizing the previous religious link King forged, King asserts the war “was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die.” Underlining King and his audience’s commonality in loving their sons, brothers, and husbands achieves another connection to them, strengthening the impact of his essay. He later lays out the most blatant instance of the USFG’s hypocrisy to the black male, proclaiming it “[sent] them to guarantee liberties which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” The government attempts to uphold the lofty task of maintaining world democracy, when ironically they cannot even support basic human equality and “[being] unable to seat [blacks and whites] together in the same schools.” They unjustly force their people to “kill and die” for policies they cannot bestow themselves, depicting the utterly cruel injustice imposed on black American males.