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Armed Services Day 1965: Air Vice Marshal Ky by from Thomas
Martin Luther King, "And who are we supporting in Vietnam today? It's a
man by the name of general Ky who fought with the French against his own
people, and who said on one occasion that the greatest hero of his life
is Hitler. This is who we are supporting in Vietnam today. Oh, our
government and the press generally won't tell us these things, but God
told me to tell you this morning."
Twenty years later, on another morning in Hong Kong Stadium Center
Court, your author played a tennis doubles match against Air Vice
Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, the US support dictator of US created South
Vietnam who Martin Luther King reported in his sermon Why I Am Opposed
to the War in Vietnam as having said that the greatest hero of his life
was Hitler. Though I thought I recognized his face from somewhere while
we played (my partner had said "Just call him General"), it wasn't until
shaking his hand after the match that he was introduced to me, my hand
receiving an electric shock as it held that of a mass murderer.
King had preached in the beginning of that sermon, "Do you realize that
the Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a
combined French and Japanese occupation. And incidentally, this was
before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh.
And this is a little-known fact, and these people declared themselves
independent in 1945. They quoted our Declaration of Independence in
their document of freedom, and yet our government refused to recognize
them ... poisoned the international situation for all of these years.
France then set out to reconquer its former colony. And they fought
eight long, hard, brutal years trying to re-conquer Vietnam. You know
who helped France? It was the United States of America. It came to the
point that we were meeting more than eighty percent of the war costs.
And even when France started despairing of its reckless action, we did
not. And in 1954, a conference was called at Geneva, and an agreement
was reached, because France had been defeated at Dien Bien Phu. But even
after that, and after the Geneva Accord, we did not stop. We must face
the sad fact that our government sought, in a real sense, to sabotage
the Geneva Accord. Well, after the French were defeated, it looked as if
independence and land reform would come through the Geneva agreement.
But instead the United States came and started supporting a man named
Diem who turned out to be one of the most ruthless dictators in the
history of the world. He set out to silence all opposition. People were
brutally murdered because they raised their voices against the brutal
policies of Diem. And the peasants watched and cringed as Diem
ruthlessly rooted out all opposition. The peasants watched as all this
was presided over by United States influence and by increasing numbers
of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that
Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown, they may have been
happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no
real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace."
Then King spoke of Gen. Cao Ky who again made it into the news this week
passing at age 81. Peace advocate King was silenced at age 39.
