Some Posts Remembering Rev. Martin Luther King

A sampling of current and past blog posts remembering the Rev. Martin Luther King:

Peace & Justice

Honestly Reflecting on Martin Luther King Jr. in the Age of White Lies

Excerpt:

The ubiquitous white lies of our times obfuscate the depth and meaning of King’s message. The annual tradition of sharing favorite MLK quotes, which enters into full swing during the celebration of his birthday, is so fashionable that everyone but the most extreme racists will participate, and even many of them will too. Donald Trump’s racist career does not preclude his participation. His defenders throughout the GOP have cynically done so as well. 

Back in 2011, then-House majority whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA 23^rd) posted this to mark MLK Day:

Today we celebrate the life and work of a great man who has left his imprint on our nation and this world for generations to come: Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us to love one another, accept each other, celebrate our differences, and remember that which brings us together – we are all God's children and we are all charged with making this world a better place. Dr. King dedicated his life to this effort, and as we honor his memory, we must ensure that we too are always striving to make a difference.

That was then; now McCarthy and virtually all elected Republicans support Trump no matter how egregious his racialized statements and policies, e.g., calling refugees fleeing war zones “animals” and urging crowds to tell elected representatives who are people of color to go back to their countries of origin (all but one of them born in the US, but let’s not let the facts get in the way of a great racist chant). Send them back! Send them back! Um, sure, like Detroit, the Bronx, Chicago—the places three of them were born? 

The Poor People’s Campaign is still struggling to find ways to alleviate the conditions of poverty—everywhere. The US enters into “free trade agreements” promising to help people, but the deals tend to increase poverty on both sides. NAFTA, for example, has left persistent poverty and increased unemployment in Mexico, and reduced wages while costing 100,000-700,000 jobs in the US
. The agreements work well for elite owners, not so much for millions of workers.

FBI, King and the Tremors of History

Excerpt:

And then there was his stand against the Vietnam war: "Each day the war goes on the hatred increased in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."

These words, delivered at Riverside Church in New York, a year to the day before his assassination, drove LBJ nuts. Who did King think he was? He got his civil rights legislation! Now here he was, opposing America’s noble war."

Social Justice and Activism

r. King’s Radical Revolution Of Values

Excerpt:

Some politicians who invoke Dr. King this holiday will try to reduce his memory to an emoji they can paste onto their platitudes. But Dr. King was a troublemaker, in the best sense of the word. He knew what it meant to create tension, and discomfort, and disharmony.

While he lived, Dr. King was the target of almost unimaginable hatred and condemnation. It rained down on him from the streets of Southern towns and the corridors of FBI headquarters, from the boardrooms of bus companies and the booths of Boston diners.

Dr. King preached communication, but experienced excommunication – from that cozy world of ‘insiders’ who may argue but will never risk their lives or careers for higher ideals.

The Conspiracy to Assassinate Martin Luther King ... - Brane Space

brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-conspiracy-to-assassinate-martin.html

Excerpt:

William F. Pepper's breakthrough (and what led to his book) arrived on learning that a film existed of the King assassination. It was in the hands of Army psyops (psychological operations) officers who had been in Memphis that day to take photographs of everything, everyone in the vicinity of the Lorraine Motel.  One of the officers, as Pepper noted - in his speech and in the book - just happened to spin his camera around on hearing the shot, toward the bushes in front of the motel.  The film held the clues Pepper needed and rather than do an injustice to the findings, I think blog readers need to get hold of the entire book, or at least avail themselves of this abbreviated account of Pepper's findings from the speech he gave:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFP020403.pdf

In the preceding, Pepper observes that:

"Martin King was killed because he had become intolerable.  It was not just that he opposed the war and was going to the bottom line of a number of the major corporations of the United States, those forces that essentially rule the world at this point in time - the transnational entities. But more importantly, I think the reason is because he was going to bring a mass of people to Washington in the spring of '68 and that was very troubling. "

Yes, LBJ Ordered The Hit On Rev. Martin Luther King ... - Brane Space

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2018/04/beyon-any-reasonable-doubt-lbj-ordered.html

Excerpt:

This "James Earl Ray did it"  twaddle could be accepted - more or less - up until  the Jan. 1998 Baltimore Sun revelations which referenced the U.S. Army's admission that its intelligence agents had monitored the public appearances of Rev. King in Memphis.  These disclosures then could be seen to dovetail with earlier revelations (from William Pepper's 1995 book, Orders to Kill)  that an Alpha 184 unit had been in Memphis and the purpose was not at all benign. They were to serve as backup to a hired contract killer (via New Orleans' crime boss, Carlos Marcello) - but more on this later. For the moment readers can refer to the image of the attached orders issued to the 20th AFG Alpha 184 team members.  Let me note before moving on, that such orders could not have come from any old government lackey or official, not even J. Edgar Hoover or then Attorney General, Ramsey Clark.  No, they could only have come from the top dog himself, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

For those who've been involved in deep politics research, and especially got their "baptism" with the Kennedy assassination, it's abundantly clear the lone nut assassin in the King case is another  cover story. In fact, all the evidence - including from LBJ's role in the Kennedy assassination - masterminding the plan from Big D-   we know he is the one who also engineered the King assassination. And why not? He'd already gotten away with the first assassination via the cover fraud "investigation" known as the Warren Commission, which even  54 years later has gullible twits buying it lock, stock, and barrel. Emboldened by that, why not take down Rev. King too - who'd become a gadfly over the Vietnam War?
The incredulity of too many in the face of these facts traces to how King has mainly been erected as a civil rights totem in the last 50 years. This hyper emphasis has minimized his fierce pacifism - especially against the Vietnam War- which brought him into direct conflict with Johnson.  An April, 1998 Baltimore Sun piece by Colman McCarthy  ('A Fierce Advocate of Pacifism') summarized how King had been turned into a one-dimensional Milquetoast by the media:

"All the textbooks, for sure, carry excerpts from the 'I Have a Dream' speech. After three decades of being sentimentalized into an historical relic mummified by the formaldehyde of nostalgia, King has been marginalized in ways never thought possible while he was around to defend himself."

McCarthy, like Pepper, cites the powerful moral voice against Johnson's war - and yes, it was his war, given he signed the original NSAM (273) formalizing it, and then confected the Tonkin Gulf incident to justify a massive troop commitment. (Again for more on the backstory of LBJ's  NSAM 273 check out this link:

http://www.jfklancer.com/NSAM273.html )

Brane Space: Why Rachel Maddow Is Wrong on James Earl Ray

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/09/why-rachel-maddow-is-wrong-on-james.html

Excerpt:

No less an esteemed author than James Douglass ('JFK and the Unspeakable')  has held all of us to account for not seeing that all the 1960s assassinations (JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X) were interconnected and done by the National Security State. Also, each one, according to Douglass, made the next one easier because we all became susceptible to the anti-conspiracy mindset and thereby enmeshed in the media's lies that "one lone nut" was involved each time. Hence, to the extent we gave the media apparatchiks a pass we became accomplices and parties to the "unspeakable" - a term first coined by Thomas Merton meaning incomprehensible evil. Douglass' implication was that the Deep State factored into each assassination and it required deep politics to get beyond the hand waving, and BS stories confabulated by media - most of which was infected by national security trolls (please Google "Operation Mockingbird'.) It was the responsibility of each of us to rip the veneer of lies and deceptions away and probe the document base to the truth.


In an earlier blog post (March 8, 2014), I noted that deep politics is usually too much for network commentators (including the so-called "liberals" on MSNBC) to handle.  In a way this is understandable because  many Americans, as I've often observed, are unpracticed and untutored in deep politics (the dark underbelly that surface politics barely touches)  which is why so many adhere to the "middle" or what author Curtis White once called  "the Middle Mind". Thus, network sensitivities will be oriented toward not pissing off that Middle Mind too much, or forcing it too far from its comfort  zone and belief system.

Maddow, while a sometime incisive narrator, often blows it on key issues. For example, numerous times in 2013-14 one beheld Maddow avoiding like the plague Obama's chained CPI proposal for cutting Social Security. She didn't wish to "go there" because she didn't want to be seen as an Obama basher.  Then there were other Maddow shows  - specifically segments on guns- where she kept the false narrative going that Lee Harvey Oswald was the one who killed John F. Kennedy e.g.   http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/02/rachel-maddow-again-lies-about-lee.html
By hewing to the "Oswald did it" faction of the Middle Mind, she chose to play it safe in her narrative, rather than risk being called a "conspiracy theorist" or tin foil hat wearer. But by doing so she showed: a) she didn't truly grasp the lying nature of the deep state to use cover stories and b) preferred to bamboozle her audience rather than inform them.