One year prior to his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his powerful antiwar speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” decrying the United States’ genocidal war on the people of Vietnam.  King eloquently linked the state-sanctioned oppression of blacks with the suffering that the Vietnamese were enduring in the face of a genocidal onslaught at the hands of the US national-security state. The mainstream media denounced King for speaking out against the war when they should have praised him for speaking truth to power.

MLK declared, “As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my 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 — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”

Thankfully, the Vietnamese people heroically resisted the genocidal onslaught and defeated the US national-security state and its puppet South Vietnamese regime.  We should appreciate King’s courage to speak out against the crimes committed by the US national-security state when it would have been easier for him to have stayed silent.