Greatest anti-tribalism speech ever written

By Dominic Odipo

Kenya: It was, perhaps, the greatest peace speech ever delivered anywhere by a major political figure over the last 50 years.

According to Prof Jeffrey Sachs who powerfully critiques it in his latest book, “To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace”, it was “the most important foreign policy speech of the modern presidency.” Sachs, the renowned economist, is also the director of the Earth Institute based at Columbia University in New York.

Nuclear holocaust

The speech was delivered by American President John F Kennedy (JFK) at the annual graduation or commencement ceremonies of the American University in Washington DC on June 10, 1963. Nine months earlier, the world had come to the brink of nuclear war which would have led to the annihilation of virtually the entire human race.

But through some cool and masterful diplomatic and military chess-gaming at the highest level, JFK and Nikita Khrushchev, then the leader of the former Soviet Union, had managed to avert nuclear disaster at the last minute. Exactly 165 days  after he delivered this speech, JFK was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. He never lived to see or gauge the real impact of his Peace Speech but the speech itself lives on and grows even bigger by the day.

Fifty years after our own Independence and just over 20 years after the fall of the former Soviet Union, it might be useful for us to remember some of the more memorable passages of that speech, the full text of which, most helpfully, Sachs has included in his book.

If you substitute the words “tribe” or “community” where JFK used “nation” you will appreciate just how relevant this speech is to our own circumstances today.

“What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana imposed on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time, but peace in all time.”

For all time

Here one catches a call from the heart, a call for genuine peace, not that of the grave or the slave — peace not just for his fellow Americans but for everyone on earth, peace not just for today or tomorrow, but for all time.

“I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces.

“It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.”

Here one catches a candid appreciation by the American President who then (as today) commanded the world’s largest and deadliest nuclear forces, that a nuclear war was not just senseless but that it would also probably destroy the whole world, including the unborn and those of us here in Kenya, who probably had no idea what the Americans and the Soviets were bickering about!

“World peace, like community peace,does not require that each man love his neighbor, it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors. So let us persevere. Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all people to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly towards it.”

In 1991, the Soviet Union, the adversary that was the primary target of this speech, imploded into Russia, the Ukraine and a number of smaller states. The tide of time and events had brought earth-shaking geopolitical changes. The American leadership persevered and, in time, the possibility of nuclear war had diminished considerably.

And finally: “So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.

“For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”

Indeed. How many of our political leaders can be able to capture such messages so powerfully, so precisely and so briefly?

Exactly five months and 12 days from the date of this speech, JFK was shot dead on a Dallas motorway. In the final analysis, we are all mortal.

The writer is a lecturer and consultant in Nairobi.

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