Rhetorical Analysis: "A Time to Break Silence"

By Jonathan Lam on 08/25/17

Tagged: rhetorical-analysis essay

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Last practice essay before the SAT tomorrow! I'm not excited. Excerpt from "Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence" Adapted from Martin Luther King Jr..

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Saving America Before Saving Vietnam

In his essay, "A Time to Break Silence -- Beyond Vietnam," Martin Luther King Jr. argues to his civil rights supporters that the fight in Vietnam is unjust and ironic, considering the unresolved conflicts of race and poverty back at home. He does this by establishing his authority in the issue of the Vietnam War, including a personal anecdote to stress the poor domestic situation, and by satirizing the war by comparing it to the situation back home.

MLK Jr. is known for being an advocate for peace and civil rights, and therefore he ensures that his audience understands why the anti-war sentiment is relevant to him. While he acknowledges that some Americans misunderstand his position as pertinent only to domestic civil rights and "thereby mean to exclude [him] from the movement for peace," to which he clarifies that all issues relevant to all of the "the descendants of slaves" in America, as well as the use of nonviolence to solve conflicts in society. This is an important step in establishing ethos in his argument: had he not made this clear connection between the Vietnam War and the rights of African American soldiers in Vietnam, his argument would be less impactful on his audience because his past experience with peaceful rights protests would not benefit him. Thus, even though the Vietnam War does not explicitly deal with black emancipation and other equal rights, that our "own nation [was] using massive doses of violence to solve its problems" and hurting the poorer, African American citizens that were drafter in the war means that MLK has a valuable voice on the war, given his experience with the peaceful civil rights movement.

In order to emphasize the domestic problem of violence to his audience, MLK uses an understandable personal anecdote in the third paragraph. The implication that "Molotov cocktails and rifles" are used in America to resolve conflicts, even as war rages in Vietnam, brings the shock value of the domestic situation to the reader. While the focus of the problem at hand, given the contemporary issues of LBJ's "War on Poverty" initiative and the Vietnam War, might easily be mistaken for the violent and expensive war, the use of the simple anecdote of King's ghetto travels within the US effectively shifts his listeners' focus to the more important issues for America: fighting poverty and continuing the push for Civil Rights for African Americans. By presenting his experience in a personal and non-political anecdote, MLK clearly turns the attention away from Vietnam and delineates the important issues at hand within the U.S.

King uses the rhetorical device of irony against the Vietnam War by logically explicating the conflict of interests between fighting the Vietnam War and fighting poverty and inequality at home. He expresses that there is a clear disconnect between the use of needless violence in Vietnam, which "draw[a] men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube," and the policies for fighting poverty in the domestic ghettos he has tried to improve. The irony has a very logical appeal, in which "men and skills and money" are explicit, distinct reasons why the U.S. should not fight the war. To further the irony, MLK mentions that the war was sending "the black young men who had been crippled by our society ... to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in [America]" -- here he draws parallels between hellish, war-ridden Vietnam and the slums of the U.S. The rationale here is that the U.S. was fighting to improve conditions elsewhere even though the same had not been accomplished within itself, arguing against the Vietnam War by presenting its hypocrisy to the audience. By using irony and hypocrisy, MLK is able to reason that the situation in Vietnam is illogical and flawed.

Although Martin Luther King Jr. is experienced in dealing with matters of domestic Civil Rights, he rationalizes that the war is unfounded and nonsensical because of its misdistribution of resources to fight abroad when domestic changes are more necessary to help the U.S.