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Why Don’T We Have A Peace Memorial? The Vietnam War And The Distorted Memory Of Dissent, Christian G. Appy

Center for the Study of Ethics in Society Papers

First paragraph:

Exactly a year before he was murdered, Martin Luther King Jr., gave one of the greatest speeches of his life, a piercing critique of the war in Vietnam. Two thousand people jammed into New York’s Riverside Church on April 4,1967, to hear King shred the historical, political, and moral claims U.S. leaders had invoked since the end of World War II to justify their counter-revolutionary foreign policy. The United States had not supported Vietnamese independence and democracy, King argued, but had repeatedly opposed it; the United States had not defended the people of South Vietnam from external Communist …