Honoring Martin Luther King Jr effectively — requires acting on a paragraph from Chris Hedges

© 2017 Peter Free

 

18 January 2017

 

 

Speaking of Martin Luther King Jr Day . . .

 

The Obama Administration — having successfully pretended to be a friend to the People — instead entrenched and expanded:

 

 

(a) George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's paranoidly fear-based (totalitarian) surveillance and murder systems,

 

as well as

 

(b) the bigoted Oligarchy that defines the United States.

                                                                

 

Riding on this anti-democratic series of First Black President accomplishments

 

President-elect Donald Trump is obviously comfortable being even more publicly fascist than the string of corporatist power mongers who preceded him.

 

This is not what the assassinated Reverend King and Mahatma Gandhi were aiming for.

 

 

Dr. King's legacy — has been kitten-ized by the Rich White Clan

 

Reverend King was more radically opposed to injustices everywhere than most Americans want to remember. And his proposed solutions were farther outside our predatory capitalist system than Oligarchs and plutocrat-wannabes are comfortable with.

 

Consequently, the ruling group and its millions of enablers pretend that Dr. King was milder than he actually was.

 

Intentionally propagandizing the uncomfortable prickles off Dr. King's legacy has deflated his social movement for fairness.

 

 

The most critical rule of social upheaval is this one

 

If they don't think that you can kick their faces in, they won't listen to you.

 

Chris Hedges' (below) words ring true to me:

 

 

Politics is a game of fear. Those who do not have the ability to make power elites afraid do not succeed.

 

All of the movements that opened up the democratic space in America—the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor movement, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists and the civil rights movement—developed a critical mass and militancy that forced the centers of power to respond.

 

The platitudes about justice, equality and democracy are just that. Only when power becomes worried about its survival does it react. Appealing to its better nature is useless. It doesn’t have one.

 

© 2017 Chris Hedges, Building the Institutions for Revolt, TruthDig (15 January 2017) (paragraph split)

 

 

The moral? — Remove the propagandized MLK kitten — replace the tiger

 

Malcolm X thought so, too. He was also assassinated.

 

See a pattern?

 

If we are alone, or few, in seeking justice and fair equity, we become targets. If a just society is what we want, we will have to take it — as an aroused populace that cuts across narrow lines of self-interest. A few dozen patriots, by themselves, won't do the Reversed Oligarchy trick.

 

As Chris Hedges and Michael Gecan indicate, organized and heterogeneously composed groups could retract the sneaked permissions that bigots and oligarchs use to impose their self-profiting oppressions.

 

However, being historically attuned and (therefore) of non-pacifistic (ex-cop) mind, I think that Chairman Mao probably got it right with his statement that — "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

 

Were I a free society strategist, I would probably make the Second Amendment less frivolously useless (in this endeavor) than it has been in American life so far. There are better uses for that bit of the Constitution than killing schoolchildren and shaving one's swastika-encumbered head in its support.

 

The bottom line, sociologically, is that — If they don't think you are willing to stick a saber into their repression-dispensing ways, they won't listen to you.

 

Therefore, a noticeable proportion of the United States' 322 million repressed sheep must become wolves.

 

This conversion in political temperament is always the hard part in keeping Liberty equitable.