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The Real Martin Luther King Not The One The US Media Now Celebrate But Once Attacked

By A D Hemming

22 January, 2014
Countercurrents.org

As the day is here which is now set aside to honor Martin Luther King Jr, let's look beyond the frozen US mainstream media frame of August 1963 with Dr King's "I have a dream" speech with no mention of his inveighing against militarism, imperialism, and how those tied in with racism and poverty et al. Everywhere let's honor him for all what he was, as he deserves it. Let's not freeze him in that August 1963 frame which has become so cliche now that it's pathetic yet predictable.

Despite US mainstream media attempt to freeze that August 1963 frame of MLK the facts of Dr King's connecting the
dots too well on the links of poverty, racism, militarism, and imperialism are well recorded on TV footage and otherwise
to contradict this frozen, narrow, and false picture of MLK.

The US media had gone into its attack dog mode on Dr King about his beyond Vietnam talk which connected the dots
so well. Time chimed in with its whine of MLK's "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The
Washington Post claimed Dr King "diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and his people." Not to be
left out, Life piled on with falsely charging MLK with connecting "progress and civil rights here with a proposal which
amounts to abject surrender in Vietnam." "Surrender in Vietnam!" Was Dr King also a "Communist loving type"? The
"vile slander" as Franklin D Roosevelt would call it really reeks here.

Then again all the attacks on FDR followed a similar pattern on Yalta. Same BS about "selling to the Communists"
even though at the time Moscow's "terrible Communists" were holding up the Eastern Front for the Western allies
including the USA. Like FDR, Dr King would surely have embraced the four freedoms especially the one of "freedom
from want", as well as freedom of religion,' freedom speech and expression and freedom from fear,"

Dr King, with all his sense of history, solid education as a clergyman was so much more than this silly frame by speaking
out against the not the just the Vietnam War but all US militarism and imperialism and connecting the dots between that
and how this produced the terrible problems at home and abroad of poverty, racism, war, and disruption in this country
as well as discrediting the USA in the eyes of people internationally.

Much more than just a black Baptist minister in the US South helping blacks in their struggle, MLK led us all to a
point in history which much like the "rendezvous with destiny" Franklin D Roosevelt led us to was a point of movement
toward real reform and transformation despite every setback then and since. He led all to the opening of different and
better world for all on a broad range of issues and so many sought to seize the moment.

It should be noted that if MLK was ever in the least one who failed to connect the dots to such a degree as to see that
"all life is interrelated" as he put it, then that was an earlier period taken up seemingly almost exclusively with
combating Jim Crow style US Southern racism and discrimination. But in the 1960s and some would even say starting
to a degree in either 1965 or 1966 Dr King was very much connecting the dots including that of the Vietnam War and
classism being a part of a much larger picture of the US system's oppression and injustice which surely then would
include other people of color and working class whites.

By the year of his assassination MLK had connected the dots very tightly as revealed in such comments as "I never
intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism" as well the one of "A nation that continues year after year to
spend more on military defense than it does on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." That same
year he campaign wholeheartedly for the rights of sanitation workers in Memphis where gunfire claimed his life. MLK
at this point saw the role of class struggle in the whole picture and how that would be a link in getting "justice for all."

This was true on the Vietnam War, militarism, and imperialism and their role, when he explained "For about 12 years
ever since the Montgomery bus boycott. . . I have been working too long and too hard now against segregated public
accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns. . . justice is indivisible." With these words in 1967 MLK
rebuked the US mainstream media attacks on him for taking his strong stand on that war, militarism, and imperialism
and the link to poverty, racism, and other injustice.

Offering real solutions even if not seen that way at the time by calling for an end to the Vietnam War, the "madness of
war," and the "deadly Western arrogance" which the USA had fallen so victim to at the time, calling for aid to the those
beset by poverty in the Third World and the USA to address problems caused by Western and especially US policy
including Western companies exploitation of Third World resources and the "suction tube" of piles of money for
the war machine but little left over for real social needs of those in the USA and elsewhere.

From US militarism and imperialism to big Western companies exploiting the resources of the Third World with such
little regard for those there to US policies on race and poverty and so much else his was a voice in the wilderness crying
out for those with no voice to be as their voice for them when it was most needed

Dr King makes the salient point that as everyone "is somebody" and "a child of God," then we must say "that life is too sacred to be taken on the battlefields of this world" that Carlyle was right when he said 'No lie can live forever."

As Dr King said in his day the "problem we face is international in scope." It's one he said which must be treated as an
"international emergency which involves the poor, the dispossessed, and exploited of the world.' This requires the
internationalization of non violent civil disobedience to move to transformation and reform.

US citizens specifically have to aid their country in elimination of "her modern economic imperialism' as he pointed out.
This is due to the fact that as Dr King insists that the West through "political and economic exploitation has made the
poor nations poor."

As he said about Latin America in his day, it may well be true internationally today that "one of the most powerful
expressions of non violence may come out of that international coalitions of socially aware forces, operating outside
governmental frameworks."

If we're going to have a better world which Dr King envisioned with all beating "swords into ploughshares and . . .
spears into pruning hooks" which he talked about we'll have to do so by together to make it happen.

The fact that the FBI targeted him for heavy surveillance starting in the early 1960s took nothing away from Dr King, but it did show that that agency would pursue a vendetta against a critic which MLK became when he criticized the FBI for foot draggingon the 1964 homicides of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman as they sought as civil rights
workers to register blackvoters as a part of Freedom Summer in Mississippi. The FBI actually never arrested anyone
in connection with this case contrary to the Hollywood feature film, "Mississippi Burning."

The FBI used bedroom transcripts, photos, and tapes from the media and the FBI's "silent partners" as a black novelist
John A Williams called them became part of a vendetta and smear campaign as a product of J Edgar Hoover's voyerism
regarding MLK. The head of the FBI despised MLK all the way after Dr King's early criticism of the agency. None of the
media blew the whistle on this smear campaign.

So many years later Jeff Cohen of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting would confront one of the media stooges in this
dirty smear campaign. To Patrick Buchanan who had been one of those silent partners Cohen aptly compared this to "a
hack writer from Pravda" (pre glasnost) using this kind of garbage "on a Soviet dissident." Of course, Cohen was such a
gentleman in this case. This writer has no such problem and would have made reference to Der Sturmer attacking a
a Third Reich dissident.

Dr King has served as a great example refusing as he did to allow any including those in the media to pigeonhole him into just being a black leader and or freeze him in the August 1963 "I have a dream speech" frame. He was way too big in spirit and mind to ever allow that to happen.

A D Hemming has been an activist for progressive causes since the tearly 1960s, has been a researcher, poet, journalist, historian and got his feet wet as a progressive in the civil rights movement in US South as a teenager. Also I identify as black and see a person of color's from the heart of the US South perspective much needed on this topic.

*A D Hemming* is a pseudonym this writer uses on a regular basis.



 

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