Here is an audio clip excerpt of Robert F. Kennedy's
Day of Affirmation Address.
The clip has Spanish subtitles. Scroll
down for the full English transcript.
It follows the full text transcript of
Robert F. Kennedy's Day of Affirmation Address, delivered at
the University of Cape Town at Cape Town, South Africa —
June 6, 1966.
Mr. Chancellor,
Mr. Vice Chancellor, Professor Robertson, Mr.
Diamond, Mr. Daniel, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I come here this
evening 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
was once the importer of 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, and my wife and I
and all of our party are glad to come here to
South Africa, and we are glad to come here to
Cape Town. I am already greatly enjoying my
visit here. I am making an effort to meet and
exchange views with people of 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 around the globe.
Your work, at home and in international student
affairs, has brought great credit to yourselves
and your country. I know the National Student
Association in the United States feels a
particularly close relationship with this
organization. And I wish to thank especially Mr.
Ian Robertson, who first extended this
invitation on behalf of NUSAS, I wish to thank
him for his kindness to me in inviting me. I am
very sorry that he can not be with us here this
evening. I was happy to have had the opportunity
to meet and speak with him earlier this evening,
and I presented him with a copy of Profiles in
Courage, which was a book written by President
John Kennedy and was signed to him by President
Kennedy's widow, Mrs. John Kennedy.
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, all groups, and states, exist
for that person's 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; the right 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 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 lives worthwhile - family,
work, education, a place to rear one's children
and a place to rest one's head - all this
depends on the decisions of government; all can
be swept away by a government which does not
heed the demands of its people, and I mean all
of its people. Therefore, the essential humanity
of man can be protected and preserved only where
the government must answer - not just to the
wealthy; not just to those of a particular
religion, not just to those of a particular
race; but to all of the 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, but also no interference with
the security of the home; no arbitrary
imposition of pains or penalties on an ordinary
citizen by officials high or low; no restriction
on the freedom of men to seek education or to
seek work or opportunity of any kind, so that
each man may become all that 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 essences of our differences with
communism today. I am unalterably opposed to
communism because it exalts the state over the
individual and over the family, and because its
system contains a lack of freedom of speech, of
protest, of religion, and of the press, which is
characteristic of a totalitarian regime. The way
of opposition to communism, however, is not to
imitate its dictatorship, but to enlarge
individual human freedom. There are those in
every land who would label as "communist" every
threat to their privilege. But may I say to you
, 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 own duties. And -
with painful slowness - we in the United States
have extended and enlarged the meaning and the
practice of freedom to all of our people.
For two centuries, my own country has struggled
to overcome the self-imposed handicap of
prejudice and discrimination based on
nationality, on social class or race -
discrimination profoundly repugnant to the
theory and to the command of our Constitution.
Even as my father grew up in Boston,
Massachusetts, signs told him that "No Irish
Need Apply". Two generations later, President
Kennedy became the first Irish Catholic, and 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 because
they were of Irish extraction? How many sons of
Italian or Jewish or Polish parents slumbered in
the slums - untaught, unlearned, their potential
lost forever to our nation and to the 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 that time. But much,
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 and equal rights under the
law; and the violence of the disinherited, the
insulted and the injured, looms over the streets
of Harlem and of Watts and Southside 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 our court; and another, Dr. Martin Luther
King, is the second man of African descent to
win the Nobel Peace Prize for his non-violent
efforts for social justice between all of the
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
all of us. We are committed to peaceful and
non-violent change and that is important for all
to understand - though 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 committed to the goal
of equality before the law - as we are now
committing ourselves to 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 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 in Asia and in
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 that minority is of a different race than
that of the majority. We in the United States
believe in the protection of minorities; we
recognize the contributions that they can make
and the leadership they can provide; and we do
not believe that any people - whether majority
or minority, 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 very slowly indeed.
All do not develop in the same manner and 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, and that is
not our intention. What is important however 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 of its people, whatever their
race, and the demands of a world of immense and
dizzying change that face us all.
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 migrations 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
brings men and nations closer together, the
concerns of one inevitably become the concerns
of all. And our new closeness is stripping away
the false masks, the illusion of differences
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
ends at river's shore, his common humanity is
enclosed in the tight circle of those who share
his town or his views and the color of his skin.
It is your job, the task of the young people in
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
to death 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 different 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 our youth
today the only true international community.
More than this I think that we could agree on
what kind of a world we 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 of 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 all be proud to have built.
Just to the North of here are lands of challenge
and of opportunity - rich in 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 were exploited. Yet they have
not estranged themselves from the broad
traditions of the West; they are hoping and they
are gambling their progress and their stability
on the chance that we will meet our
responsibilities to them, to help them overcome
their poverty.
In the world we would like to build, South
Africa could play an outstanding role, and a
role of leadership in that effort. This country
is without question a preeminent repository of
the wealth and the knowledge and the skill of
the continent. Here are the greater part of
Africa's research scientists and steel
production, most of it reservoirs of coal and of
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 disease and of pestilence.
In your faculties and councils, here in this
very audience, are hundreds and thousands of men
and women who could transform the lives of
millions for all time to come.
But the help and leadership of South Africa or
of the United States cannot be accepted if we -
within our own countries or in our relationships
with others - deny individual integrity, human
dignity, and the common humanity of man. If we
would lead outside our own 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 the 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 imagination, a predominance
of courage over timidity, of the appetite for
adventure over the life of ease - a man like the
Chancellor of this University. It is a
revolutionary world that we all live in; and
thus, as I have said in Latin America and Asia
and in Europe and in my own country, the United
States, it is the young people who must take the
lead. Thus 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, against ignorance, or injustice
and violence. Yet many of the world's great
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 32 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; but each of us can work to
change a small portion of the events, and in the
total of all these acts will be written the
history of this generation. Thousands of Peace
Corps volunteers are making a difference in the
isolated villages and the city slums of 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 such as
these that the belief that human history is thus
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 own 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
must act effectively we must deal with the world
as it is. We must get things done. But if there
was one thing that President Kennedy stood for
that touched the most profound feeling of young
people across the world, it was the belief that
idealism, high aspiration 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 hard-headed 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 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 for those
who seek to change the world which yields most
painfully to change. Aristotle tells us "At the
Olympic games it is not the finest or the
strongest men who are crowned, but those 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 conflict will find themselves with
companions in every corner of the world.
For the fortunate amongst us, the fourth danger
is comfort; the temptation to follow the easy
and familiar path of personal ambition and
financial success so grandly spread before those
who have the privilege of an 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 the most
creative of any time in the history of mankind.
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 the
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 with your
difficulties. But I want to say how impressed I
am with what you stand for and for the effort
you are making; and I say this not just for
myself, but men and women all over the world.
And I hope you will often take heart from the
knowledge that you are joined with your 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
that I have visited, you are all in many ways
more closely united to the brothers of your time
than to the older generation in any of these
nations; 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 "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 and 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."
Also called the
Persian Wars, the Greco-Persian Wars were
fought for almost half a century from 492 BC -
449 BC. Greece won against enormous odds. Here
is more:
