First, King and Harding spell out the violations of agreements, anti-democratic election and democracy, murderousness of US policy in Vietnam. Near genocide. Not a whiff of this specific account gets into your talk. Read over that section, quote it in the handout and comment on it. Also the section on Policy Objectives – what you say here is as bad as quoting Trump. There was no division of North and South predicted in the Geneva accord; Ho Chi Minh would have been elected by 80% so Ike threw out democracy. The US puppet regime under Diem has no moral or international legal standing; it is as phony as Israeli claims to “the occupied territories” and its genocidal expansion there…
Second of all, the speech says that whites and blacks are hurt by V-N. This is because as you say bout Iraq, the war is an aggression. But then you worry about “support” for the President (an imperialist thug, even Obama though less so). And peak of the US government as “we” – not most of us, not me, not you if you are aware of the words you are using here.
If “the people” supported the Iraq War, it would still be an act of aggression, and evil (and accompanied by torture and murder). King’s depictions of brotherhood (including in evil that is killing Vietnamese is important and his passion about how ordinary people, Vietnamese as well as Americans are hurt by the war is overpowering. The text misses it.
Third, King says he was never a mere civil rights preacher. He was after liberation of all the pooras in the poor people’s march – of which fighting racism was essential. But that also includes oppressors whose souls are distorted by what they do.
You are discussing the speech of a man who was murdered for it a year to the day later (LBJ was at least partially culpable in withdrawing federal protection from King). Why do you have a topic/stress on “policy objectives” for American Presidents, where you buy into a false ideology about Vietnam – instead of taking King, whose murder by the elite (covered up by the press and government hostility you mention) the talk does not explore. Seems like the emphasis should be the other way around – King first, his nonviolent democracy from below a hope, murdered by the rapacious American elite abroad and at home before the bullet was fired…
Fourth, if you don’t have time yet to read perhaps the most important and striking book for the course (much as I like King’s speech) say that…Do not quote a reactionary review which “defends the post World War II” order and claims that everything proceeeded agains the US like the civil rights movement as “eroding” (yes, the murder of King, Malcolm, Bobby, James Chaney, Viola Liuzzo – that was just “erosion”. Vietnam just erosion. The puppet states of the Middle East – just erosion. Apartheid and locking up Mandela – just “erosion,”…Either you see and are against US imperialism and take in Vitalis massive evidence, or you repeat the murderous and apologetic platitudes of the Council on Foreign Relations. Drop this – or say you didn’t read the book but this is an indication of its reactionary greeting by the Hillary-McCainists….
