Monday, January 16, 2017

King of Rebels

The pablum "celebration" of Dr. King that typically appears today always pisses me off.

The man was nothing like the kindly saint of "civil rights" that usually appears in them. King wasn't some sort of foofy, kumbaya-singing pacifist. He was a hardass. He was a bombthrower. He was routinely condemned as a "communist" and a "public enemy". His "nonviolence" was a slit-eyed, cynical tactic that offered up the bodies of his troops to the racist thugs because he knew damn well that the Great American Public would seize on the slightest hint that the Rapacious Negroes were coming to Get Them to bury him and his cause.

He wasn't violent because violence wouldn't have worked, not because he was some sort of secular saint.

He also hated the sort of wealth-fellating and poor-bashing that the modern GOP so desperately represents.

The linked article is a cautionary tale of King's real views on things like equality, wealth, poverty, and the "American Dream" as opposed to the usual tepid encomiums of peace, love, and brotherhood that we're going to hear from radical reactionaries like Paul Ryan and whichever former Pravda stringer His Fraudulency trots out today; Dr. King would have fucked your shit up, wingnuts. He hated and despised everything you stand for.
And so do I.

2 comments:

mike said...

1965:

Trump is scheming to submit the 2nd of his five draft deferments.

John Lewis is leading 'over 600 peaceful, orderly protestors across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama . . . marchers were attacked by Alabama state troopers in a brutal confrontation that became known as Bloody Sunday." Lewis himself is beaten viciously with an ax handle. Lewis, probably much more than MLK, was responsible for the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

FDChief said...

Yeah, mike. I think you saw this on my FB feed acouple days ago:

"One of these people is a true hero, a man who put his body, and his life, on the line for freedom.

The other is a tangerine shitgibbon who played soldier then sniveled his way into five draft deferments rather than actually fight in Vietnam.

I'll let you figure out which is which."