To quote my friend Tom Vee: “MLK was a radical. Don’t buy into the “white-washed, bastardized retrospectives of Martin Luther King, Jr’s legacy.”
this is a beginning of a rant that I will continue on and off: i am so, so fed up with people (particularly in Western discourse) repeatedly utilizing some highly problematic, westernized reading of history and the so-called “non-violent resistance” of Gandhi and Martin Luther King so as to delegitimize any form of resistance that does live up to the moral standards set by the assumed tools used by these retrospectively sanctified men. I HAVE HAD IT WITH THAT, fuck off if you think about coming at me with any such crap, read non-Eurocentric historiography of their liberation struggles instead!
the whole Gandhi-imagery is whole other topic on its own (white-man’s version of how he resisted and what led to India’s independence purposefully ignores the Indian revolutionary movement that used more radical tools of resistance – and played a major role in mobilizing particularly the youth. not saying that Gandhi wasn’t important or impressive, but saying that 1) the version disseminated mostly is the one approved by Western men and 2) that there were other movements that played a major role in mobilizing resistance to British colonization and that were so threatening to the Brits that Gandhi appeared much more attractive.
but back to MLK, Jr. here are excerpts from his last speech (watch the video) that don’t fit so well with the holier-than-thou image of his that is being shoved in the faces of anyone who dares to resist in anything that is not PURE non-violence (whatever that is). and even had he not said this, i would still (and do either way) insist that IT IS AND WILL ALWAYS BE THE OPPRESSED WHO CHOOSES HOW TO FIGHT THE OPPRESSOR. and if you give me that crap about the differentiation between oppressor and oppressed being not so clear, etc., you are white-washing and condoning oppression, so fuck off.
Excerpts from MLK: “Why I am opposed to the war in vietnam”
“There is…a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America […]. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such.[…] As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. […] They ask if our nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. […] There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, Be non-violent toward Jim Clark, but will curse and damn you when you say, “Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children. There’s something wrong with that press! […] We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. […] This is a role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible but refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. […] 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, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered. […] A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It 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 concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” […] Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing, unconditional love for all men. […]