Vietnam War Research Paper

To the Americans, it was the Vietnam War. To the Vietnamese, it was the American War. Either way, on a smaller scale, it was a war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, but on a much larger scale, it was a proxy for the Cold War. North Vietnam, adrenalized with nationalistic zeal, propagated communism whereas South Vietnam, being held by French colonists, championed westernization. America, never the isolationist, entered the fray for two reasons and two reasons only: one, they owed their French allies from the American Revolution, and two, they sought to retard, if not eradicate, the Domino theory of communism. Be that as it may, regardless of whatever the reasons, the Vietnam War triggered a massive schism within America. Public opinion

Always has it been, and always shall it be, and it is for this exact reason that King sees wars “as an enemy of the poor” and he “attacks it as such.” From what King has told, a few years prior to Vietnam, the promise of a poverty program gave hope to myriads of Americans for the first time in a long time. However, everything changed when the Fire Nation, America, attacked Vietnam. King “watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war." King compares the poverty program to a toy because he feels that his government treats it as such; the poverty program is not being taken seriously enough. Rhetorically speaking, this is simile. For him, the American government has grown weary of its former toy, the poverty program, and has thus relinquished it for a game of people chess, the Vietnam War. Pursuing this further, he later goes on to lament upon how America would never invest the necessary funds... so long as... Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube." Given his rather frightening lexicon, one may safely assume that King believes war to be parasitic, perhaps even cannibalistic. Before him stands not a war, but a juggernaut that leaves the poor poorer. Through his adjective phraseology and rhetorical similes, King endeavors to instill in his audience the same

That said, despite his personal philosophies, war was here, war was there, war was everywhere. Externally so, America fought the World Wars, the Cold Wars, and the Vietnam War. Internally so, American liberalism fought American conservatism. King "walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men" and he has "told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems." Metaphorically speaking, King attempts to pacify his fellow African-Americans by arguing that violence is not a vaccine for their problems; it is medication, and inadequate medication at that. Vaccines prevent disease from ever even happening in the first place whereas medication only treats thereafter. While offering them his “deepest compassion”, King maintains his conviction that “social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.” However, as counterarguments, his own people respond with rhetorical questions of their own. “But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam?” Why is their own government permitted the luxury of justifying violent means through violent ends while they, the black victims of America, cannot? For them, if an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, then let it be blind. From there on out, King discovered that he could no longer raise his voice against