Het
volgende uitstekende artikel van Paul Street handelt over de lessen
van Martin Luther King (in de VS vaak aangeduid als MLK) waarover men in de VS en de rest van het westen
liever niet spreekt, dit daar in zijn visie o.a. alleen echte gelijkheid kan
ontstaan in een vorm van socialisme.........
Het is op 4 april a.s. 50 jaar geleden dat de staat dr. Martin Luther King liet vermoorden..... Vandaar veel aandacht dit jaar voor deze vrijheid en gelijkheidsstrijder. In de VS is 15 januari, de geboortedag van MLK, een vrije dag: 'Martin Luther King Day'. Een uiterst hypocriet gebeuren als je het Paul Street vraagt, daar men vooral niet spreekt over de ideeën die King had over de ideale maatschappij en de vorm van bestuur die alle burgers ten goede zou komen, niet alleen de witte midden en hoge inkomens. Een wereld waarin arbeiders niet langer uitgebuit worden door en voor de ondernemers en aandeelhouders (en welgestelden in het algemeen).
Zo is echt socialisme of communisme een oplossing voor veel van de huidige ellende in de wereld. Vergeet niet dat communisme tot nu toe nooit heeft bestaan in onze wereld. Wat betreft socialisme kan je het Chili van Allende, Cuba van Fidel Castro en Venezuela onder Chavez en Maduro aanwijzen als voorbeelden (ook al was en is dit nog niet zoals het zou moeten zijn, echter wel zo goed dat de arme bevolking een veel beter leven kreeg, inclusief gezondheidszorg, een fatsoenlijk dak boven het hoofd en alfabetisering. Vandaar ook dat de VS zo haar best doet daar een eind aan te maken, wat tot nu toe al een aantal keren is gelukt, neem de uiterst bloedige staatsgreep tegen de democratisch gekozen regering van president Salvador Allende op 11 september 1973 in Chili, waarbij Allende strijdend werd vermoord........ (betaald door- en onder regie en mede verantwoording van de CIA.....)
Momenteel is de VS naast het voeren van illegale oorlogen bezig met een economische oorlog tegen Venezuela, helaas is een heel groot deel van de Venezolaanse bevolking op de hoogte van de smerige streken die de VS het land levert (stop op leveringen van medicijnen en levensmiddelen) dat ze aan de kant van Maduro blijven staan. (dit nog naast de door de CIA georganiseerde gewelddadige protesten in Venezuela....)
De kijk van MLK op de wereld was volgens de schrijver van het volgende artikel, Paul Street, de reden waarom de overheid in de VS King alleen wil herdenken als strijder voor gelijke rechten t.b.v. gekleurde burgers....... Men leidt willens en wetens de aandacht af van de visie die King had op de VS en de wereld in het groot. Street spreekt dan ook (terecht) van een voortdurende morele en intellectuele moord op Martin Luther Kung.......... ('vreemd genoeg' is er ook in de EU amper of geen aandacht voor de linkse kant van King....)
Zijn visie op de wereld, gecombineerd met zijn charisma is dan ook de reden waarom Martin Luther King 'een bedreiging was' voor de overheid en 'wel vermoord moest worden.....'
Counterpunch
JANUARY 19, 2018
As
the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s violent death (on
April 4, 1968) grows closer, you can expect to hear more and more in
U.S. corporate media about the real and alleged details of his
immediate physical assassination (or perhaps execution). You
will not be told about King’s subsequent and ongoing moral,
intellectual, and ideological assassination.
I
am referring to the conventional, neo-McCarthyite, and whitewashed
narrative of King that is purveyed across the nation every year,
especially during and around the national holiday that bears his
name. This domesticated, bourgeois airbrushing portrays King as
a mild liberal reformist who wanted little more than a few basic
civil rights adjustments in a supposedly good and decent American
System – a loyal supplicant who was grateful to the nation’s
leaders for finally making noble alterations. This year was no
exception.
The
official commemorations never say anything about the Dr. King who
studied Marx sympathetically at a young age and who said in his last
years that “if we are to achieve real equality, the United States
will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.” They delete
the King who wrote that “the real issue to be faced” beyond
“superficial” matters was the need for a radical social
revolution.
It
deletes the King
who went on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in late
1967 to
reflect on how little the Black freedom struggle had attained beyond
some fractional changes in the South. He deplored “the arresting of
the limited forward progress” Blacks and their allies had attained
“by [a] white resistance [that] revealed the latent racism that was
[still] deeply rooted in U.S. society.”
“As
elation and expectations died,” King explained on the CBC, “Negroes
became more sharply aware that the goal of freedom was still distant
and our immediate plight was substantially still an agony of
deprivation. In the past decade, little has been done for Northern
ghettoes. Al the legislation was to remedy Southern conditions –
and even these were only partially improved.”
Worse
than merely limited, King felt, the gains won by Black Americans
during what he considered just the “first phase” of their freedom
struggle (1955-1965) were dangerous in that they “brought whites a
sense of completion” – a preposterous impression that the
so-called “Negro problem” had been solved and that there was
therefore no more basis or justification for further black activism.
“When Negroes assertively moved on to ascend to the second rung of
the ladder,” King noted, “a firm resistance from the white
community developed…In some quarters it was a courteous rejection,
in others it was a singing white backlash. In all quarters
unmistakably, it was outright resistance.”
Explaining
to his CBC listeners the remarkable wave of race riots that washed
across U.S. cities in the summers of 1966 and 1967, King made no
apologies for Black violence. He blamed “the white power
structure…still seeking to keep the walls of segregation and
inequality intact” for the disturbances. He found the leading cause
of the riots in the reactionary posture of “the white society,
unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change,”
which” produc[ed] chaos” by telling Blacks (whose expectations
for substantive change had been aroused) “that they must expect to
remain permanently unequal and permanently poor.”
King
also blamed the riots in part on Washington’s imperialist and
mass-murderous war on Vietnam. Along with the misery it inflicted on
Indochina, King said, the United States’ savage military aggression
against Southeast Asia stole resources from Lyndon Johnson’s
briefly declared and barely fought “War on Poverty.” It sent poor
Blacks to the front killing lines to a disproportionate degree. It
advanced the notion that violence was a reasonable response and even
a solution to social and political problems.
Black
Americans and others sensed what King called “the cruel irony of
watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die
together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in
the same school. We watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts
of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the
same block in Detroit,” King said on the CBC, adding that he “could
not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”
Racial
hypocrisy aside, King said that “a nation that continues year after
year to spend more money on military defense [here he might better
have said “military empire”] than on programs of social uplift is
approaching spiritual doom.”
Did
the rioters disrespect the law, as their liberal and conservative
critics alike charged? Yes, King said, but added that the rioters’
transgressions were “derivative crimes…born of the
greater crimes of the…policy-makers of the white society,”
who “created discrimination…created slums [and] perpetuate
unemployment, ignorance, and poverty… [T]he
white man,”
King elaborated, “does
not abide by law in
the ghetto. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive
the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building
codes and regulations; his
police make a mockery of law;
he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provision
of public services. The slums are a handiwork of a
vicious system of
the white society.”
Did
the rioters engage in violence? Yes, King said, but noted that their
aggression was “to a startling degree…focused against property
rather than against people.” He observed that “property
represents the white power structure,
which [the rioters] were [quite understandably] attacking and trying
to destroy.” Against those who held property “sacred,” King
argued that “Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how
much we surround with rights and respect, it has no personal being.”
What
to do? King advanced radical changes that went against the grain of
the nation’s corporate state, reflecting his agreement with New
Left militants that “only
by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the
roots are in the system rather in man or faulty operations.”
King advocated an emergency national program providing either
decent-paying jobs for all or a guaranteed national income “at
levels that sustain life in decent circumstances.” He also called
for the “demolition of slums and rebuilding by the population that
lives in them.”
His
proposals, he said, aimed for more than racial justice alone. Seeking
to abolish poverty for all, including poor whites, he felt that “the
Negro revolt” was properly challenging each of what he called “the
interrelated triple evils” of racism, economic injustice/poverty
(capitalism) and war (militarism and imperialism).
The Black struggle had thankfully “evolve[ed] into more than a
quest for [racial] desegregation and equality,” King said. It
had become “a challenge to a system that has created miracles of
production and technology” but had failed to “create justice.”
“If
humanism is locked outside the [capitalist] system,” King said
on CBC five months before his assassination (or execution), “Negroes
will have revealed its inner core of despotism and a far greater
struggle for liberation will unfold. The United States is
substantially challenged to demonstrate that it can abolish not only
the evils of racism but the scourge of poverty and the horrors of
war….”
No
careful listener to King’s CBC talks could have missed the
radicalism of his vision and tactics. “The dispossessed of this
nation – the poor, both White and Negro – live in a
cruelly unjust society,”
King said. “They must organize
a revolution against
that injustice,” he added.
Such
a revolution would require “more than a statement to the larger
society,” more than “street marches” King proclaimed. “There
must,” he added, “be a
force that interrupts [that society’s] functioning at some key
point.”
That force would use “mass civil disobedience” to “transmute
the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force”
by “dislocate[ing]
the functioning of a society.”
“The
storm is rising against
the privileged minority of
the earth,” King added for good measure. “The storm will not
abate until [there is a] just
distribution of the fruits of the earth…”
The “massive,
active, nonviolent resistance to the evils of the modern system”
that King advocated was “international in scope,” reflecting the
fact that “the poor countries are poor primarily because [rich
Western nations] have exploited them through political or economic
colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of
her modern economic imperialism.”
King
was a democratic socialist mass-disobedience-advocating and
anti-imperialist world revolution advocate. The guardians of
national memory don’t want you to know about that when they purvey
the official, doctrinally imposed memory of King as an at most
liberal and milquetoast reformer. (In a similar vein, our ideological
overlords don’t want us to know that Albert Einstein
[Time magazine’s
“Person of the 20th Century”] wrote a
brilliant essay making the case for socialism in
the first issue of venerable U.S.-Marxist magazine Monthly Review
– or that Helen Keller was a fan of the Russian Revolution.)
The
threat posed to the official bourgeois memory by King’s CBC
lectures – and by much more that King said and wrote in the last
three years of his life – is not just that they show an officially
iconic gradualist reformer to have been a democratic socialist
opponent of the profits system and its empire. It is also about how
clearly King analyzed the incomplete and unfinished nature of the
nation’s progress against racial and class injustice, around which
all forward developments pretty much ceased in the 1970s, thanks to a
white backlash that was already well underway in the early and
mid-1960s (before the rise of the Black Panthers, who liberal
historians like to blame for the nation’s rightward racial drift
under Nixon and Reagan) and to a top-down corporate war on
working-class Americans that started under Jimmy Carter and then went
ballistic under Ronald Reagan.
The
“spiritual doom” imposed by U.S. militarism has lived on, with
Washington having directly and indirectly killed untold millions of
Central Americans, South Americans, Africans, Muslims, Arabs, and
Asians in many different ways over the years since Vietnam.
Accounting for roughly 40 percent of the world’s military
expenditure, the U.S. maintains Cold War-level “defense” (empire)
budgets to sustain an historically unmatched global empire (with at
least 800 military bases spread across more than 80 foreign
countries and
“troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign
countries and territories”) even as a near-record 45 million
U.S.-Americans remain
stuck under
the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level. A
very disproportionate number of the nation’s poor are Black and
Latino/a.
It
is obvious that the racist and white-supremacist real estate baron
Donald J. Trump spoke disingenuously in tongue when he mouthed nice
words about Dr. King last Monday. But what about his
predecessor, Barack Obama, the nation’s first technically Black
president? It was cruelly ironic that Obama kept a bust of King in
the Oval Office to watch over his regular betrayal of the martyred
peace and justice leader’s ideals. Consistent with Dr. Adolph Reed
Jr.’s early (1996) dead-on
description of
the future President as “a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable
credentials and vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics,” Obama
consistently backed top corporate and financial interests (whose
representatives filled and dominated his administrations, campaigns,
and campaign coffers) over and against those who would undertake
serious programs to end poverty, redistribute wealth (the savage
re-concentration of which since Dr. King’s time has produced a New
Gilded Age in the U.S.), grant free and universal health care,
constrain capital, and save livable ecology as it approached a number
of critical tipping points on the accelerating path to irreversible
catastrophe. Thus is that one of Obama’s supporters (Ezra
Klein)
was moved in late 2012 to complain that a president “whose platform
consists of Romney’s health care bill, Newt Gingrich’s
environmental policies, John McCain’s deficit-financed payroll tax
cuts, George W. Bush’s bailouts of filing banks and corporations,
and a mixture of the Bush and Clinton tax rate” was still being
denounced as a “leftist.”
Obama
opposed calls for any special programs or serious federal attention
to the nation’s savage racial inequalities, so vast now that the
median of white households was 20 times that of black households and
18 times that of Hispanic households near the end of his presidency.
He did this while the fact of his ascendency to the White House
deeply reinforced white America’s sense that racism was over as a
barrier to black advancement and generated its own significant white
backlash that only worsened the situation of less privileged black
Americans.
Obama
made it crystal clear in ways that no white president could that what
Dr. King in 1963 called America’s unpaid “promissory note” and
“bad check” to Black America would remain un-cashed. This was all
too sadly consistent with Obama’s preposterous 2007 campaign claim
(at a commemoration of the King-led 1965 Selma Voting Rights March)
to believe that Blacks had already come “90
percent” of
the way to equality in the U.S.
Completing
the “triple evils” hat trick, Obama – the self-appointed
chief-executioner atop the Special Forces Global War on (of) Terror
Kill List – embraced and expanded upon the vast criminal and
worldwide spying and killing operation he inherited from Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and George W. Bush. He tamped down
Bush’s failed ground wars only to ramp up and inflate the role of
unaccountable special force and drone attacks in the spirit of his
dashing and reckless imperial role model John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Obama’s drone program, Noam Chomsky noted in early
2015,
was “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times.” It
“target[ed] people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us some
day, and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby,” Chomsky wrote.
In
waging his deadly and disastrous, nation-wrecking and regionally
destabilizing air war on Libya, Obama (unlike Bush prior to the
invasion of Iraq) did not even bother with the pretense of seeking
Congressional approval. “It should be a scandal,”
Stansfield Smith wrote
on CounterPunch one
year ago,
“that left-liberals paint Trump as a special threat, a war mongerer
– [but] not Obama who is the first president to be at war every day
of his eight years, who is waging seven wars at present, who dropped
three bombs an hour, 24 hours a day, in 2016.” As Alan
Nairn told Democracy
Now’s
Amy Goodman in early 2010,
Obama kept the nation’s giant imperial machinery “set on kill.”
Meanwhile,
Obama far surpassed the Cheney-Bush regime when it came to repressing
antiwar dissenters, not to mention those who opposed the rule of the
1 percent – smashed by a coordinated federal campaign in the fall
of 2011. “As all kinds of journalists have continuously pointed
out,” Glenn
Greenwald noted in
early 2014, “the Obama administration is more aggressive and more
vindictive when it comes to punishing whistleblowers than any
administration in American history, including the Nixon
administration.”
Furthermore,
and to make matters far worse, Obama helped keep the planet set on
burn. As Stansfield Smith noted two days before the horrid
Trump’s inauguration:
Obama,
who says he recognizes the threat to humanity posed by climate
change, still invested at least $34 billion to promote fossil fuel
projects in other countries. That is three times as much as George W
Bush spent in his two terms, almost twice that of Ronald Reagan,
George HW Bush and Bill Clinton put together…Obama financed 70
foreign fossil fuel projects. When completed they will release 164
million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year
– about the same output as the 95 currently operating coal-fired
power plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Oklahoma. He financed two
natural gas plants on an island in the Great Barrier Reef, as well as
two of the largest coalmines on the planet… Moreover, under Obama,
the U.S. has reversed the steady drop in U.S. oil production
which had continued unchecked since 1971. The U.S. was pumping just
5.1 million barrels per day when Obama took office. By April 2016 it
was up to 8.9 million barrels per day. A 74% increase.
As
Obama proudly said in 2012, in the film This
Changes Everything:
‘Over
the last three years I’ve directed my administration to open up
millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different
states. We’re opening up more than 75% of our potential oil
resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs
to a record high. We’ve added enough oil and gas pipelines to
encircle the earth and then some. So, we are drilling all over the
place, right now.’
“Drill,
baby, drill!”
Perhaps
the dismal neoliberal Obama presidency – a key midwife to the Trump
atrocity – was at least an object lesson on how real progressive
and democratic change is about something bigger than a change in the
party or color of the people in nominal power. That is certainly
something King (who would be 88 today) would have understood very
well had he been able to witness the endless mendacity of the
nation’s first half-white president first-hand.
“The
black revolution,” King wrote in a
posthumously published 1969 essay titled
“A Testament of Hope” (embracing a very different, authentically
progressive sort of hope than that purveyed by Brand Obama in 2008)
“is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is
forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws – racism,
poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are
rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals
systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical
reconstruction society of society itself is the real issue to be
faced.”
Those
words ring as true as ever today, with heightened urgency as it
becomes undeniable that the profits system is driving
humanity over an environmental cliff. They
are words we never hear during official King Day commemorations.
King,
it is worth recalling, was recruited by antiwar progressives to run
for the U.S. presidency in 1967. He politely declined, claiming that
he’d have little chance of winning and that he preferred to serve
as a force of moral conscience for all the nation’s political
parties.
The
deeper truth, clear from his late-life writing and speeches, is that
he had no interest in climbing into the power elite: his passion was
directed toward a “revolution” of “the dispossessed” and a
mass grassroots movement for the redistribution of wealth and power –
a “radical reconstruction of society itself” – from the bottom
up. Dr. King was interested in what the late radical U.S.
historian Howard
Zinn considered the
more urgent politics of “who’s
sitting in the streets,”
very different from what Zinn saw as the comparatively superficial
politics of “who’s
sitting in the White House.”
King’s
officially deleted radical record and Zinn’s clever and sage
dichotomy are worth bearing in mind in coming months and years as we
watch the nation’s “left” liberals try to call forth and herald
a new Obama (Oprah perhaps?) in 2020. That is certainly one of
the last things we need.
Help
Paul Street keep writing here.
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