This is the full speech, almost an hour long. Dr. King delivered it at Riverside Church in New York, explaining why he opposed the war in Vietnam, exactly a year to the day before he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4th, 1968. You can also listen to excerpts of this speech, plus excerpts of his last speech, “I Have Been to the Mountain Top,” here at Demoracy Now! — also included are rush transcripts for the segments they broadcast today. “I Have Been to the Mountain Top” was King’s last major address, given the night before he was killed. He was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers as he built momentum for a Poor People’s March on Washington. Seems that momentum is now picking up again, finally.
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One of the main reasons Vietnam was so different from Iraq/Afghanistan is the draft. I remember well the fear and concern everyone who had a teenage son would have to navigate. Back then, we were all more vulnerable and close to the possibility of the war being very, very personal. This got people motivated to STOP it.
Also, I/A war had the huge galvanizing event of 9-11 for the politicians to spin and trigger people’s emotional responses to build support for the war……even though we know (and knew then) that there was no connection between 9-11 and Iraq. But the web-weaving and spinning was phenomenally effective…especially since it was built on so much fear.
Interesting to contemplate; the two uses of fear…fear of one’s own loved one is used to try and stop a war, and in the other fear is used to promote/build one.
What is amazing is how fast the American public figured out that Vietnam was wrong. The United States was not openly involved until summer 1964 and did not put troops on the ground till early 1965. Yet within that very year it was a national outrage; MLK takes it up as an obvious tie-in to civil rights; and Nixon campaigns in 1968 on his secret method of ending the war, fully aware of public sentiment. Of course under the tutelage of Kissinter, Nixon expanded the war to Laos and Cambodia (that was his secret method). Yet through this phase the war protests are continuing to escalate and the US is out by 1974 — ten whole years, but the history of the war was the history of antiwar protest. The public was and is agonizingly silent all through Afghanistan and Iraq. The main people speaking up were Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore and a bunch of alternative journalists.