If MLK was a Commie, so much the better for Commies

[KingOrfeo]

He wasn't one, of course, or the FBI would have found the proof -- certainly they looked hard enough. Martin Luther King was a liberal Republican (a species now extinct). But he definitely had democratic-socialist leanings, and we should keep that in mind, as a good thing about him, as we celebrate him every year.

For instance, at the time of his death he was working on a multiracial Poor People's Campaign.

“His dream was for all poor and working people to live lives of decency and dignity”. -- Cornel West

In a speech to staff in 1966, King explained: “There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.” If he had lived and pursued this project, the radical King would be well known.

On April 4, 1968, in Memphis—the last day of his life—Martin Luther King, Jr., phoned Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta with the title of his Sunday sermon: “Why America May Go to Hell.” If he had preached this sermon, the radical King would be well known.

Yet in Dr. King’s own time, he would say repeatedly, “I am nevertheless greatly saddened . . . that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling.” It is no accident that just prior to King’s death, 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of blacks disapproved of his opposition to the Vietnam War and his efforts to eradicate poverty in America. When much of the black leadership attacked or shunned him, King replied, “What you’re saying may get you a foundation grant but it won’t get you into the kingdom of truth.”

In short, Martin Luther King, Jr., refused to sell his soul for a mess of pottage. He refused to silence his voice in his quest for unarmed truth and unconditional love. For King, the condition of truth was to allow suffering to speak; for him, justice was what love looks like in public. In King’s eyes, too many black leaders sacrificed the truth for access to power or reduced sacrificial love and service to selfish expediency and personal gain. This spiritual blackout among black leaders resulted in their use and abuse by the white political and economic establishment that constituted a kind of “conspiracy against the poor.” This spiritual blackout—this lack of integrity and courage—primarily revealed a deep fear, failure of nerve, and spinelessness on behalf of black leaders. They too often were sycophants, cheerleaders, or bootlickers for big monied interests, even as the boots were crushing poor and working people. In stark contrast to this cowardice, King stated to his staff, “I’d rather be dead than afraid.”

<snip>

The radical King was a democratic socialist who sided with poor and working people in the class struggle taking place in capitalist societies. This class struggle may be visible or invisible, manifest or latent. But it rages on in a fight over resources, power, and space. In the past thirty years we have witnessed a top-down, one-sided class war against poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes, and cutting spending for those who are already socially neglected and economically abandoned. America’s two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule. The radical King was neither Marxist nor communist, but he did understand the role of class analysis in his focus on poor and working people.

MLK’s radical vision got distorted: Here’s his real legacy on militarism & inequality.

Today, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s federal holiday, many will write of Dr. King’s dream for equality for all people and his heroic leadership that inspired very real progressive change in our country’s laws and culture. Most will politely ignore the more radical currents of Dr. King’s vision, his activism for living wage jobs as a human right and an end to U.S. imperialism abroad, ideas that remain outside mainstream American thought to this day.

In the latter years of his life, Dr. King, already a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, frequently spoke publicly of the three evils holding back his society: racism, poverty and militarism. In one controversial speech,“Beyond Vietnam,” delivered on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination and almost six years before U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, Dr. King called his government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He argued national investment in the war had already doomed President Lyndon Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’ to failure—a claim that the New York Times objected forcefully. In the address, Dr. King implored the necessity for the nation to undergo a “radical revolution of values,” explaining, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

The speech prompted President Johnson to revoke Dr. King’s standing invitation to the White House. According to Tavis Smiley, it also earned Dr. King denunciations from 168 major newspapers the next day, including the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black newspaper. Dr. King continued in his final year, now an unpopular public figure, to support workers around the country—he was in Memphis, where he was assassinated, in support of striking public sanitation employees. He organized a Poor People’s Campaign, often at odds with the Southern Christian Leadership Council that he helped to create, advocating for a Freedom Budget that sought to use the public treasury to extend genuine economic opportunity and material security to all Americans. After peaking at fourth on Gallup’s 1964 list of Most Admired Men, Dr. King had disappeared from the list by 1967. He died with disapproval ratings similar to those enjoyed by George W. Bush upon his exit from office. Yet, in a Gallup poll conducted in 1999 to determine the most admired Americans of the 20th century, Dr. King is listed second. Unpopular in his time for challenging mainstream opinions of U.S. poverty and militarism, Dr. King is sanitized in our cultural memory, stripped of the radical roots of his values. He is now loved in death by the same economic-political establishment he opposed in life.

<snip>

In “Beyond Vietnam,” Dr. King noted the double impact of war on the poor: War spending is a budgeting priority in competition with social spending, and the American military disproportionately draws its fighting force from the poor. He concluded, “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”

<snip>

Dr. King also decried the coexistence of extreme wealth and poverty in American society.

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar,” he said. “It comes to see that the edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation.”

<snip>

Dr. King’s social critique did not shy away from identifying causes of the economic inequality that underscores racial and social inequality. He called out a military-corporate alliance, arguing, “This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary actions in Guatemala,” and in Indonesia, Cambodia, Venezuela and Peru throughout the 1960s. One day, Dr. King warned, “[We] will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no consideration for the social betterment of the countries and say this is not just.”

Prophetic.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Which reminds me, we haven't seen the Vetteremf's annual "MLK was a REPUBLICAN" rant yet.

He's probably still at the MLK parade.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

MLK may not have been a card carrying member of the CPUSA, but a few of his aides and advisors were, Stanley Levison was a Communist, as was his assistant Jack O'Dell, as was Bayard Rustin.

Nah, Rustin was a Socialist, they hate(d) Commies like Baptists hate(d) Catholics. (Seriously, the whole point of the American Socialist Party as an organization separate from the Communists was that the ASP was democratic-socialist and anti-Soviet; the split went back to 1917.)

 

[miles]

Nah, Rustin was a Socialist, they hate(d) Commies like Baptists hate(d) Catholics.

Jesus, you're a bigot.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Jesus, you're a bigot.

Jesus, you're ignorant.

 

[Dumpington]

Gentlemen, gentlemen... why can't we all remember the words of revered civil rights hero Rodney King:

"Can't we all just get along?"

I rank Rodney right up there with Trayvon Martin & that Ferguson, Missouri thug who's name escapes me, but whom this White House sent three representatives to his funeral!

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[IrezumiKiss]

& that Ferguson, Missouri thug who's name escapes me, but whom this White House sent three representatives to his funeral!

Oh, you must be thinking about the virtual cyborg Darren Wilson.

No, that thug is quite comfortably alive, nested in scaredy-cat seclusion with a million dollars granted to him by white privilege and general ignorance for the murder of what they fear the most.

 

[Dumpington]

IrezumiKiss --- Are you now ranking Darren Wilson right up there with Trayvon Martin & Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Aren't you the same guy who told me that people who respect & admire George Washington are all RACISTS because Washington owned slaves?

But you admire Islam because you believe it's a religion of peace & tolerance?

Hmmm... I'm not sure I can agree with any of that.

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

MLK may not have been a card carrying member of the CPUSA, but a few of his aides and advisors were, Stanley Levison was a Communist, as was his assistant Jack O'Dell, as was Bayard Rustin.

Again, so much the better for Commies -- right? Does not taking up the civil rights cause speak well of them?

 

[KingOrfeo]

I rank Rodney right up there with Trayvon Martin . . .

Of course you do, my dear.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

IrezumiKiss --- Are you now ranking Darren Wilson right up there with Trayvon Martin & Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Where'd you get all that? I'm just calling him for what he is, a murdering thug.

According to the criteria of a thug going around these days. I didn't make the rules, Dumpy. Take it up with management if you got issues.

Why is he a thug? For lawfully defending himself?

Defending himself from what?

Non-existent orbital skull fractures from imaginary demons?

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[IrezumiKiss]

Defending himself against a felonious assault and battery.

Yeah, I saw the official medical photo of his "assault and battery" from the demonic hulking thug. I could make a better bruise bumping my knee against the edge of a squared-off table.

Milked that fucking lie straight to the bank. I hope you didn't donate money to him, because he's laughing at you, too.

 

[unregistered]

 

[KingOrfeo]

You really are an ignorant, naive, fool. Why do you suppose they choose to get involved with racial politics? You think they actually care about elevating black people, increasing their freedom and liberty? Why do you think they have an interest in class warfare agendas like labor, race, and gender politics? Do you think it's because they really want to help out the workers and the sexes?

1) What difference does it make? What matters is that they helped. So much the better for Commies.

2) Yeah, I'm pretty sure Rustin, Levison, O'Dell, etc., really cared about elevating black people, etc.

 

[badbabysitter]

MLK only matters to the rwcj when they're trying to paint him as a republican.. then he's a hero

when he's talked about in any other aspect... he's a monster

its funny...in a sad way

 

[IrezumiKiss]

That was a false report, not claimed by the officer or the official report. The Grand Jury, and its black witnesses backed the officers version. So go peddle that bullshit somewhere else.

Riiiiiight. The entire show was run on lies from the very start. And they got what they wanted. It's coming to bite them back in the ass now. Keep on milking that fraudulent cow, it's the only one putting out for you.

 

[Dumpington]

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican because, during the 100-years immediately following the American Civil War, it was the DEMOCRATIC PARTY that controlled the south, and like it or not, the Democrats were the party of segregation and the Ku Kux Klan!

And the Democrats kept black people down.

Today, of course, the American south is dominated by REPUBLICANS! I don't think there's a single Democrat from the south anymore in the entire U.S. Senate! And the only BLACK U.S. Senator is a Republican from South Carolina!

Does racism still exist in the south? I'm sure it does, in places, but Democratic Party SEGREGATION is non-existent, as is the KKK --- I've been living down here for the past twenty years and if the Klan still exists it sure is quiet --- unlike the days when the Democrats ran this region!

Prominent Democrat U.S. Senator Robert Byrd (West Virginia) was an actual officer in the Ku Kux Klan, while Al Gore's Democrat U.S. Senator father, Al Gore, Sr. (Tennessee) was a segregationist who voted to OPPOSE the Civil Rights Act of 1965! True stories!

 

[badbabysitter]

awww.. another idiot unaware of the history of the dixiecrats and still clinging to the myth of MLK being a republican