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Robert F. Kennedy
University of Cape Town Cape Town, South Africa
N.U.S.A.S. “Day of Affirmation” Speech June 6th, 1966
I came here because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by
the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last
independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but
relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a
hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic
application of modern technology; a land which once imported slaves, and now
must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course,
to the United States of America.
But I am glad to come here to South Africa. I am already enjoying my visit.
I am making an effort to meet and exchange views with people from all walks of
life, and all segments of South African opinion, including those who represent the
views of the government. Today I am glad to meet with the National Union of
South African Students. For a decade, NUSAS has stood and worked for the
principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights-principles which embody
the collective hopes of men of good will all around the world.
Your work, at home and in international student affairs, has brought great
credit to yourselves and to your country. I know the National Student Association
in the United States feels a particularly close relationship to NUSAS. And I wish to
thank especially Mr. Ian Robertson, who first extended this invitation on behalf of
NUSAS, for his kindness to me. It’s too bad he can’t be with us today.
This is a Day of Affirmation, a celebration of liberty. We stand here in the
name of freedom.At the heart of that Western freedom and democracy is the belief
that the individual man, the child of God, is the touchstone of value, and all society,
groups, the state, exist for his benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for
individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any
Western society.
The first element of this individual liberty is the freedom of speech: the right
to express and communicate ideas, to set oneself apart from the dumb beasts of
field and forest; to recall governments to their duties and obligations; above all, the
right to affirm one’s membership and allegiance to the body politic-to society-to the
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men with whom we share our land, our heritage, and our children’s future.
Hand in hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard, to share
in the decisions of government which shape men’s lives. Everything that makes
man’s life worthwhile-family, work, education, a place to rear one’s children and a
place to rest one’s head -all this depends on decisions of government; all can be
swept away by a government which does not heed the demands of its people.
Therefore, the essential humanity of men can be protected and preserved only
where government must answer-not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a
particular religion, or a particular race, but to all its people.
And even government by the consent of the governed, as in our own
Constitution, must be limited in its power to act against its people; so that there may
be no interference with the right to worship, or with the security of the home; no
arbitrary imposition of pains or penalties by officials high or low; no restrictions on
the freedom of men to seek education or work or opportunity of any kind, so that
each man may become all he is capable of becoming.
These are the sacred rights of Western society. These were the essential
differences between us and Nazi Germany, as they were between Athens and
Persia.
They are the essence of our differences with communism today. I am
unalterably opposed to communism because it exalts the state over the individual
and the family, and because of the lack of freedom of speech, of protest, of religion,
and of the press, which is the characteristic of totalitarian states. The way of
opposition to communism is not to imitate its dictatorship, but to enlarge individual
freedom, in our own countries and all over the globe. There are those in every land
who would label as Communist every threat to their privilege. But as I have seen
on my travels in all sections of the world, reform is not communism. And the denial
of freedom, in whatever name, only strengthens the very communism it claims to
oppose.
Many nations have set forth their own definitions and declarations of these
principles. And there have often been wide and tragic gaps between promise and
performance, ideal and reality. Yet the great ideals have constantly recalled us to
our duties. And-with painful slowness-we have extended and enlarged the meaning
and the practice of freedom for all our people.
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For two centuries, my own country has struggled to overcome the
self-imposed handicap of prejudice and discrimination based on nationality, social
class, or race-discrimination profoundly repugnant to the theory and command of
our Constitution. Even as my father grew up in Boston, signs told him that No Irish
Need Apply. Two generations later President Kennedy became the first Catholic
to head the nation; but how many men of ability had, before 1961, been denied the
opportunity to contribute to the nation’s progress because they were Catholic, or of
Irish extraction? How many sons of Italian or Jewish or Polish parents slumbered in
slums-untaught, unlearned, their potential lost forever to the nation and human race?
Even today, what price will we pay before we have assured full opportunity to
millions of Negro Americans?
In the last five years we have done more to assure equality to our Negro
citizens, and to help the deprived both white and black, than in the hundred years
before. But much more remains to be done.
For there are millions of Negroes untrained for the simplest of jobs, and
thousands every day denied their full equal rights under the law; and the violence of
the disinherited, the insulted and injured, looms over the streets of Harlem and
Watts and South Side Chicago.
But a Negro American trains as an astronaut, one of mankind’s first
explorers into outer space; another is the chief barrister of the United States
government, and dozens sit on the benches of court; and another, Dr. Martin Luther
King, is the second man of African descent to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his
nonviolent efforts for social justice between races.
We have passed laws prohibiting discrimination in education, in
employment, in housing, but these laws alone cannot overcome the heritage of
centuries-of broken families and stunted children, and poverty and degradation and
pain.
So the road toward equality of freedom is not easy, and great cost and
danger march alongside us. We are committed to peaceful and nonviolent change,
and that is important for all to understand though all change is unsettling. Still, even
in the turbulence of protest and struggle is greater hope for the future, as men learn
to claim and achieve for themselves the rights formerly petitioned from others.
And most important of all, all the panoply of government power has been
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committed to the goal of equality before the law, as we are now committing
ourselves to the achievement of equal opportunity in fact.
We must recognize the full human equality of all of our people before God,
before the law, and in the councils of government. We must do this, not because it
is economically advantageous, although it is; not because of the laws of God
command it, although they do; not because people in other lands wish it so. We
must do it for the single and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do.
We recognize that there are problems and obstacles before the fulfillment of
these ideals in the United States, as we recognize that other nations, in Latin
America and Asia and Africa, have their own political, economic, and social
problems, their unique barriers to the elimination of injustices.
In some, there is concern that change will submerge the rights of a minority,
particularly where the minority is of a different race from the majority. We in the
United States believe in the protection of minorities; we recognize the contributions
they can make and the leadership they can provide; and we do not believe that any
people -whether minority, majority, or individual human beings-are “expendable” in
the cause of theory or policy. We recognize also that justice between men and
nations is imperfect, and that humanity sometimes progresses slowly.
All do not develop in the same manner, or at the same pace. Nations, like
men, often march to the beat of different drummers, and the precise solutions of the
United States can neither be dictated nor transplanted to others. What is important
is that all nations must march toward increasing freedom; toward justice for all;
toward a society strong and flexible enough to meet the demands of all its own
people, and a world of immense and dizzying change.
In a few hours, the plane that brought me to this country crossed over
oceans and countries which have been a crucible of human history. In minutes we
traced the migration of men over thousands of years; seconds, the briefest glimpse,
and we passed battlefields on which millions of men once struggled and died. We
could see no national boundaries, no vast gulfs or high walls dividing people from
people; only nature and the works of man-homes and factories and
farms-everywhere reflecting man’s common effort to enrich his life. Everywhere
new technology and communications bring men and nations closer together, the
concerns of one inevitably becoming the concerns of all. And our new closeness is
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stripping away the false masks, the illusion of difference which is at the root of
injustice and hate and war. Only earthbound man still clings to the dark and
poisoning superstition that his world is bounded by the nearest hill, his universe
ended at river shore, his common humanity enclosed in the tight circle of those who
share his town and views and the color of his skin. It is your job, the task of the
young people of this world, to strip the last remnants of that ancient, cruel belief
from the civilization of man.
Each nation has different obstacles and different goals, shaped by the
vagaries of history and of experience. Yet as I talk to young people around the
world I am impressed not by the diversity but by the closeness of their goals, their
desires and their concerns and their hope for the future. There is discrimination in
New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the
mountains of Peru. People starve in the streets of India, a former Prime Minister is
summarily executed in the Congo, intellectuals go to jail in Russia, and thousands
are slaughtered in Indonesia; wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere in the
world. These are differing evils; but they are the common works of man. They
reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the
defectiveness of our sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows; they mark the
limit of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human beings
throughout the world. And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience
and indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of
our fellow human beings at home and around the world.
It is these qualities which make of youth today the only true international
community. More than this I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we
would all want to build. It would be a world of independent nations, moving
toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic
human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it
accept its responsibility to insure social justice. It would be a world of constantly
accelerating economic progress-not material welfare as an end in itself, but as a
means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to
pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would be proud to have
built.
Just to the north of here are lands of challenge and opportunity-rich in
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natural resources, land and minerals and people. Yet they are also lands confronted
by the greatest odds-overwhelming ignorance, internal tensions and strife, and great
obstacles of climate and geography. Many of these nations, as colonies, were
oppressed and exploited. Yet they have not estranged themselves from the broad
traditions of the West; they are hoping and gambling their progress and stability on
the chance that we will meet our responsibilities to help them overcome their
poverty.
In the world we would like to build, South Africa could play an outstanding
role in that effort. This is without question a preeminent repository of the wealth
and knowledge and skill of the continent. Here are the greater part of Africa’s
research scientists and steel production, most of its reservoirs of coal and electric
power. Many South Africans have made major contributions to African technical
development and world science; the names of some are known wherever men seek
to eliminate the ravages of tropical diseases and pestilence. In your faculties and
councils, here in this very audience, are hundreds and thousands of men who could
transform the lives of millions for all time to come.
But the help and the leadership of South Africa or the United States cannot
be accepted if we-within our own countries or in our relations with others-deny
individual integrity, human dignity, and the common humanity of man. If we would
lead outside our borders, if we would help those who need our assistance, if we
would meet our responsibilities to mankind, we must first, all of us, demolish the
borders which history has erected between men within our own nations-barriers of
race and religion, social class and ignorance.
Our answer is the world’s hope; it is to rely on youth. The cruelties and
obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and
outworn slogans. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a present which is
already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger which
comes with even the most peaceful progress.
This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of
mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage
over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. It is a
revolutionary world we live in, and thus, as I have said in Latin America and Asia, in
Europe and in the United States, it is young people who must take the lead. Thus
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you, and your young compatriots everywhere, have had thrust upon you a greater
burden of responsibility than any generation that has ever lived.
“There is,” said an Italian philosopher, “nothing more difficult to take in
hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the
lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” Yet this is the measure of the task
of your generation, and the road is strewn with many dangers.
First, is the danger of futility: the belief there is nothing one man or one
woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills-against misery and
ignorance, injustice and violence. Yet many of the world’s greatest movements, of
thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk
began the Protestant Reformation, a young general extended an empire from
Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory
of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and the
thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created
equal.
“Give me a place to stand,” said Archimedes, “and I will move the world.”
These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to
bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and
in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Thousands
of Peace Corps volunteers are making a difference in isolated villages and city slums
in dozens of countries. Thousands of unknown men and women in Europe resisted
the occupation of the Nazis and many died, but all added to the ultimate strength
and freedom of their countries. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and
belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts
to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny
ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy
and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls
of oppression and resistance.
“If Athens shall appear great to you,” said Pericles, “consider then that her
glories were purchased by valiant men, and by men who learned their duty.” That is
the source of all greatness in all societies, and it is the key to progress in our time.
The second danger is that of expediency; of those who say that hopes and
beliefs must bend before immediate necessities. Of course, if we would act
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effectively we must deal with the world as it is. We must get things done. But if
there was one thing President Kennedy stood for that touched the most profound
feelings of young people around the world, it was the belief that idealism, high
aspirations, and deep convictions are not incompatible with the most practical and
efficient of programs-that there is no basic inconsistency between ideals and realistic
possibilities, no separation between the deepest desires of heart and of mind and
the rational application of human effort to human problems. It is not realistic or
hardheaded to solve problems and take action unguided by ultimate moral aims and
values, although we all know some who claim that it is so. In my judgment, it is
thoughtless folly. For it ignores the realities of human faith and of passion and of
belief-forces ultimately more powerful than all of the calculations of our economists
or of our generals. Of course to adhere to standards, to idealism, to vision in the
face of immediate dangers takes great courage and takes self-confidence. But we
also know that only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly.
It is this new idealism which is also, I believe, the common heritage of a
generation which has learned that while efficiency can lead to the camps at
Auschwitz, or the streets of Budapest, only the ideals of humanity and love can
climb the hills of the Acropolis.
A third danger is timidity. Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of
their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral
courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is
the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields
most painfully to change. Aristotle tells us that “At the Olympic games it is not the
finest and the strongest men who are crowned, but they who enter the lists…
So too in the life of the honorable and the good it is they who act rightly
who win the prize.” I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter
the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the world.
For the fortunate among us, the fourth danger is comfort, the temptation to
follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so
grandly spread before those who have the privilege of education. But that is not the
road history has marked out for us. There is a Chinese curse which says “May he
live in interesting times.” Like it or not we live in interesting times. They are times of
danger and uncertainty; but they are also more open to the creative energy of men
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than any other time in history. And everyone here will ultimately be judged-will
ultimately judge himself-on the effort he has contributed to building a new world
society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort.
So we part, I to my country and you to remain. We are-if a man of forty
can claim that privilege-fellow members of the world’s largest younger generation.
Each of us have our own work to do. I know at times you must feel very alone
with your problems and difficulties. But I want to say how impressed I am with
what you stand for and the effort you are making; and I say this not just for myself,
but for men and women everywhere. And I hope you will often take heart from the
knowledge that you are joined with fellow young people in every land, they
struggling with their problems and you with yours, but all joined in a common
purpose; that, like the young people of my own country and of every country I have
visited, you are all in many ways more closely united to the brothers of your time
than to the older generations of any of these nations; and that you are determined to
build a better future. President Kennedy was speaking to the young people of
America, but beyond them to young people everywhere, when he said that “the
energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country
and all who serve it-and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.”
And he added, “With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history
the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His
blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our
own.”
testing the plug-in
if at first you don’t succeed try try again.
I’m being distracted by the “Currently Reading” list shown to the right of the comment box. I read the Wikinomics book; wasn’t impressed though I did learn some things.
Let me try again. Dennis
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The mission of Change Agency is to explore new concepts in reinventing education for the 21st century. Change Agency reflects my personal thoughts, research and ideas and does not necessarily reflect the policies, views or opinions of my employer.
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