Martin Luther King Day: Every Day is On!

Of course, King was murdered by the Deep State on Steroids:

Both the Jowers and the Wilson allegations suggest that persons other than or in addition to James Earl Ray participated in the assassination. Ray, within days of entering his guilty plea in 1969, attempted to withdraw it. Until his death in April 1998, he maintained that he did not shoot Dr. King and was framed by a man he knew only as Raoul. For 30 years, others have similarly alleged that Ray was Raoul’s unwitting pawn and that a conspiracy orchestrated Dr. King’s murder. These varied theories have generated several comprehensive government investigations regarding the assassination, none of which confirmed the existence of any conspiracy. However, in King v. Jowers, a recent civil suit in a Tennessee state court, a jury returned a verdict finding that Jowers and unnamed others, including unspecified government agencies, participated in a conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King. (source)

I know King would be with class criticizing this sort of 2023 Black Un-Activism: Here’s What Black Celebrities Wore To The 2023 Golden Globes

Boy, what would King Say — WWKS?

“Volodymyr Zelensky Talks Hopes of War Ending During Golden Globes Video Message: ‘There Will Be No Third World War. It is not a trilogy,’ the Ukraine president said in his impact video message.”

Think of that Goebbels-Mengele-Hitler moment, would you? I had a friend who was watching these multimillionaire frauds, the beautiful people (sic) would laugh at her and at me — she’s going through domestic violence hell, divorce hell, with systems that make the victim feel and be guilty. Me? I can write circles around most of those Holly-Dirt frauds, but alas, I am a communist, so, those frauds wouldn’t touch me with a social distancing stick of a thousand yars while all masked up and girdled up with a ZioAzovNaziLensky blue and yellow half assed flak jacket.

Imagine, how many Goyim, Gentiles, even Christians (not all UkroNazi’s are hard-core Nazis and Satanists) are not dead and wounded in the latest meat grinder the little dictator Zelensky is heading up? And he spoke to the Golden Shower Award Recepients while they, 12,000 were KIA-ed and another 13,000 wounded? Some of the UkroNazi soldiers had frostbite on many many feet and toes and fingers, while the multimillionaire war monger, Zelensky, spoke to the cocaine and 12-step Botox folk.

You think King would be angry?

No message of peace from Julian Assange’s wife or father? No real heroes of peace and reconciliation speaking at the dumb-down awards. No heroines of journalism at the awards, uh?

“A major effect of junk politics — its ceaseless flood of patriotic, religious, macho and therapeutic fustian — is to pull position after position loose from reasoned foundations,” writer BenjaminDeMott noted (Hedges and Hedges).

And so, all the creeps in politics, all the heads of corporations, the heads of universities, even military generals, and of course, the Press, Media, they are all two-bit actors, like ZioAzovNaziLensky. (Note: I went to the story on Golden Globes ZioLensky appearance, and it is absolutely disgusting. Sean Penn said the most ludicrous thing, and ZioAzovLensky said nothing, really, pure tripe. Read at your onw risk, and, of course, WWKD — What Would King Do?

And that my kind readers, I know for a fact, would be putting steam under King’s collar if he were around today to see this complete blasphemy of humanity actually entertaining nuclear war, limited strikes, and more war here, there, and everywhere. And a mixed race woman, as VP!

Here, enough of these fascists and perversions of humanity.

King:

The following (scroll down a bit) ran today, Jan. 11, in the little twice-a-week rag out here on the Central Oregon Coast —

It’s mellow for me, not exactly milquetoast, but still the reality if this USA and Canada are racist countries based on Anglo Saxon invasions and pogroms of genocide and land theft and subjugation and insanity. Get those Puritans and Smith Colony and Pilgrims and Mayflower folk here so the City of London to this day can hold it’s genocidal sway over much of the world, even in this post/new colonialism.

From Zinn’s People’s History of the United States: In that first year of the white man in Virginia, 1607, Powhatan had addressed a plea to John Smith that turned out prophetic. How authentic it is may be in doubt, but it is so much like so many Indian statements that it may be taken as, if not the rough letter of that first plea, the exact spirit of it:

I have seen two generations of my people the…. I know the difference between peace and war better than any man in my country. I am now grown old, and must the soon; my authority must descend to my brothers, Opitehapan, Opechancanough and Catatough-then to my two sisters, and then to my two daughters-I wish them to know as much as I do, and that your love to them may be like mine to you. Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love? Why will you destroy us who supply you with food? What can you get by war? We can hide our provisions and run into the woods; then you will starve for wronging your friends. Why are you jealous of us? We are unarmed, and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in a friendly manner, and not so simple as not to know that it is much better to eat good meat, sleep comfortably, live quietly with my wives and children, laugh and be merry with the English, and trade for their copper and hatchets, than to run away from them, and to lie cold in the woods, feed on acorns, roots and such trash, and be so hunted that 1 can neither eat nor sleep. In these wars, my men must sit up watching, and if a twig break, diey all cry out “Here comes Captain Smith!” So I must end my miserable life. Take away your guns and swords, the cause of all our jealousy, or you may all the in the same manner.

When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indigenous peoples. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, created the excuse to take Indigenous land by declaring the area legally a “vacuum.” The Indians, he said, had not “subdued” the land, and therefore had only a “natural” right to it, but not a “civil right.” A “natural right” did not have legal standing.

The Puritans also appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” And to justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”

*****

Heroes — A million of them, but for now, Paul Robeson, King and Malcolm X (NPR, be careful):

King would be proud of this hero,

Ana Belen Montes has repeated history by saying what she said during her trial 21 years ago: the US government’s policies against Cuba are very harsh and she behaved according to her conscience rather than the law. She added: “I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it.”

If alive, King would be protesting and getting jailed for this hero:

The U.S. imperialists “want Alex Saab like they want Julian Assange to suffer,” charges human rights and international law expert Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, who the United Nations’ Human Rights Council appointed to serve as a special rapporteur.

What is the great “crime” Alex Saab is accused of committing, that caused this South American diplomat to be physically pulled off of a jet while refueling at a remote African island, imprisoned, and reportedly tortured there for about a year before being kidnapped to the U.S.A.?

The U.S. has no extradition treaty with Cabo Verde. Saab was simply seized and flown to Miami without any notification to his lawyers or family. (Source)

And, King, if he were alive, what might he have been doing to free and condemn USA-UK-Sweden-Australia-The World for this hero? Assange.

King would be holding this book, and thousands of others, exposing the cruelty of Capitalism and USA:

Part One of review and discussion of Linda G. Ford’s Women Politicals in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart (Part Two)

I was born a protester … My mother had to go to the school a lot and talk to the principal.— Dorli Rainey

I am being jailed because I have advocated change for equality, justice, and peace. … I stand where thousands of abolitionists, escaped slaves, workers and political activists have stood for demanding justice, for refusing to either quietly bear the biting lash of domination or to stand by silently as others bear the same lash.— Marilyn Buck, at her 1990 sentencing (epigram in Linda Ford’s book, Women Politicals in America)

Yeah, I sure do miss King as a topic in schools, as a centerpoint to our thinking about war and materialism and predatory and parasitic capitalism! Here, today’s Op-Ed in our small rural county, Lincoln County!

A Day On, Not a Day Off

MLK Jr. 56 years ago stated a point more relevant today than a half century ago: The systemic flaws of America have incubated the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”

This MLK Jr. Day was so deemed by Congress in 1994 to mark the holiday as “a national day of service.” Martin Luther King was born Jan. 15, 1929. I’ve done plenty of service-in-service-community service projects with students over the 29 years of the day’s relevance: river clean-ups, working in food kitchens, getting blankets and tents to homeless folk, cleaning up graffiti, and having teach-ins and drive-by photo shoots of neighborhoods.

Here’s this German-Irish white guy (me) today writing about the power of not just King and his activism, but the power of so many people in the civil rights and anti-racist movement who transformed my point of view on so many global and national social justice issues.

In addition, King, for me, would not be so vaunted without my study of Malcolm X. Or Paul Robeson, Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, and so many activists in the Black Liberation Movement.

For this county [with 89.1% white, .09 percent African American, 1.5 percent Asian, and then 4.1 percent American Indian and Alaska Native], the concept of not just celebrating King, but drilling down deeply into what he represents/-ed might fall on deaf ears. Putting him into historical context, i.e. learning about those around him before he rose to fame and afterward, adds to the value of King’s prominence.

I had a father who was shot in Korea as a 19 year old and then in Vietnam as a 36 year old. He was in two branches of military as a regular uniformed soldier; for 32 years total. He was always supportive of my journalism, my teaching, my college pursuits, but more importantly, he backed me on my activism. He was a student of history, and the history I embraced wasn’t what mainstream historians were delving into.

For example: Cesar Chavez and his work — National Farm Workers Association, which later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to become the United Farm Workers labor union. John Trudell, son of a Santee Dakota father and a Mexican mother, who was a poet, song writer, performer and activist.

In this county and in other places, just what does it mean to a majority of the country to give pause around King’s work? The “I Have a Dream” speech will be played in parts, over and over. I have emphasized his letter to clergy and other white leaders, in his jailhouse essay titled, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” written in longhand April 15, 1963.

King’s letter: “In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known.”

He also penned from the jail, “The Negro is Your Friend.”

This third Monday in January marks the birth of Dr. King Jr. We need to go beyond a few lines played back from the “Dream” speech or some of the black and white images of his 1963 march on Washington

Throughout my college teaching – in heavily military populated El Paso, Tucson, Las Cruces, and Spokane, including instruction on military bases and posts – I got students to think deeper about King’s life, work, and teachings. Having students read, analyze and discuss his April 4, 1967 speech against the Vietnam War, delivered at New York’s Riverside Church a year to the day before he was assassinated, I ended up rallying sophisticated critiques of King’s impact on the USA.

It was the Vietnam War in King’s time, but my students were facing the Panama Invasion, Grenada, Kuwait, Iraq, contras in Nicaragua, dirty US-backed wars in Guatemala, Afghanistan, and so many other so-called interventions and these proxy wars. Some were Vietnam and Korea combat veterans.

This speech was eviscerated by mainstream Press, including the New York Times and dozens of large daily newspapers. That was the point of having this speech and the Jail speech looked at and parsed – self-critique as a people, as a nation.

King’s first point in drawing the connection between ending racism at home and curbing militarism abroad had to do with the waste of precious resources:

“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.”

My father was his soldiers’ advocate, having verbally defied some of the businesses in the South that refused to serve his fellow uniformed men in the Big Red One (Latino and Black Americans).

I never got to challenge my CW4 father with so much of history I absorbed. For instance, Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that the United States is militarily still engaged in 85 countries, enabling or prosecuting wars in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen and beyond. Maintaining over 750 overseas military bases have unfortunately spun spending for military purposes out of control, more than at the height of the Vietnam or Korean Wars.

If Dr. King were alive today, he would be expounding against the state of our foreign and domestic policies, and would despair at all this war mongering, especially now with China in America’s sights. An arms race with China is anathema to King’s hopes and dreams of a socially, economically and culturally just world.

King was the antiwar preacher, and he is so right about those triplets – militarism, materialism and racism.

The post Martin Luther King Day: Every Day is On! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

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