"We're the Ones We've Been Waiting For"
Making Our Voices Heard

A very rattling piece by Ray McGovern. Should be required reading.

Two years after the march from Selma to Montgomery Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. took the pulpit at Riverside Church in New York City and gave a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Today we can substitute “Iraq” for “Vietnam.” Dr. King spoke clearly:

“Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.”

Ignore. That’s what the vast majority of Germans did in the 1930s as Hitler curtailed civil liberties and launched aggressive wars. I was born in August 1939, a week before Hitler sent German tanks into Poland to start World War II. I have studied that crucial time in some detail. And during the five years I served in Germany I had occasion to ask all manner of people how it could possibly be that, highly educated and cultured as they were, the Germans for the most part could simply ignore. Why was it that the institutional churches, Catholic and Evangelical Lutheran, could not find their voice? Why was it that so few spoke out?

A few did...and they provide good example for us today. Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke out, plotted against Hitler, and was executed. Also executed was a more obscure but equally courageous professor from the University of Berlin, Albrecht Haushofer.

Like Bonhoeffer, Haushofer was arrested for speaking out. The SS prison guards were required to extract a confession from prisoners before they were hanged or shot, but Haushofer refused. When they removed his body, though, a paper fell out of his pocket. It was his admission of guilt written in the form of a sonnet:

Schuld
...schuldig bin ich Anders als Ihr denkt.
Ich musste früher meine Pflicht erkennen;
Ich musste schärfer Unheil Unheil nennen;
Mein Urteil habe ich zu lang gelenkt...
Ich habe gewarnt,
Aber nicht genug, und klar;
Und heute weiß ich, was ich schuldig war.

Guilt
I am guilty,
But not in the way you think.
I should have earlier recognized my duty;
I should have more sharply called evil evil;
I reined in my judgment too long.
I did warn,
But not enough, and clear;
And today I know what I was guilty of.

At Riverside Church 22 years later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began by quoting a statement by Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” Dr. King added, “That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”

And that time has come for us in relation to Iraq. But where are the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Iraq? Where are the successors to Dr. King, to Bonhoeffer, to Professor Haushofer? “There is only us,” says Annie Dillard, and she is right of course. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Read the complete text of McGovern's speech here here.

This article by Cindy Sheehan is even stronger. Also required reading.