Martin Luther King - "Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence"
Martin Luther King pronunciou este discurso, pleno de actualidade, no dia 4 de Abril de 1967. Foi assassinado exactamente um ano depois em Memphis, Tennessee.
Apresenta-se a seguir os excertos do discurso que aparecem no final do filme War Made Easy:
A ordem é a do discurso original. Os números indicam a ordem pela qual aparecem no filme. Estes excertos podem (com vantagem) ser ouvidos:
«(…) 1. "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us (...)
2. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. (…)
3. (…) 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. (...)
4. What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? (…)
5. Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. (...)
6. (...) we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. (…)
10. Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. (...)
11. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours. (…)
7. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. (...)
8. "This way of settling differences is not just." (…)
9. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. (…)»
Estes excertos foram escolhidos para poderem ser utilizados no filme (foram excluídas todas as referências ao Vietnam) e podem ser, até com maior propriedade, aplicados à realidade actual.
O discurso completo pode ser lido aqui:
- American Rhetoric: Martin Luther King, Jr: A Time to Break Silence (aqui pode ser ouvido o discurso)
By 1967, King had become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," and the Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."
Mais sobre Martin Luther King:
- Martin Luther King - Biography (Nobel)
- The Martin Luther King Papers Project at Stanford University
- A Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr at B. Davis Schwartz Memorial Library
adaptado de um e-mail enviado pelo Jorge
Notícias AQUI
