Atlanta; Memphis
I’ll take the opportunity of the American holiday this is, to reiterate my long standing party line on such things.
Martin Luther King did not create the civil rights movement, the civil rights movement created Martin Luther King. Even if he never existed, the civil rights movement still would have won the victories it actually did. If he would have been born much earlier than 1929, he would have been unable to accomplish much of anything, whereas if he was born much later than 1929, he would have been seen as a charlatan trying to win an already won cause. I happen to think that Gandhi, another very similarly overrated figure for whom the times made him instead of the other way around, and was far more an effect than a cause of the big historical event to which he is associated, also benefited from the lucky circumstance of being born during the right year.
Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General enthusiastically supported the civil rights movement, but at the same time, his FBI was spying on MLK. It’s easy to think that a contradiction, but it’s not a contradiction when one realizes that MLK was not that critical to the civil rights movement.
In one of the final polls taken before his assassination, the civil rights measures of the Great Society had a very high approval rating, in the 75%-ish neighborhood, but Martin Luther King himself had only a 20-25% approval rating. Once again, that is evidence that, in the public’s mind circa early 1968, Martin Luther King wasn’t that important to the civil rights movement.
I’ll also point to the fact that most white countries enacted race equality and immigration liberalization laws in the same general time frame as the American civil rights movement, in spite of the fact that those other countries did not have a Martin Luther King. As an example, the country I’m currently in, or rather, the former split part thereof, opened the borders to Turks in 1969, upon the Social Democrats winning national control in West Germany for the first time, though I think that, even if the CDU would have held on, it, too, would have eventually done the same thing; Remember, Angela Merkel is CDU.
The real and taboo for discussion in polite society causes of the success of the civil rights movement were: (1) Organized activist Jewish interests winning key marginal control and influence in key American institutions in the 1930s, and (2) The outcome of World War II. No matter what or who happened or didn’t happen, just about everything else was inevitable from there.
And the reason our sector calls this holiday today “James Earl Ray Day” isn’t just to be snide, but because Ray’s single thirty-aught-six round made MLK something in death that he never really was in life.
Note: We’re only seven years away from the MLK files being unsealed. If they tell us what we all suspicion they do, and if it does so happen that it causes public outrage, in spite of what we all know will be the mainstream media ignoring the matter, then Official America will diffuse the situation by reminding us of what I just wrote, that MLK wasn’t important to the civil rights movement, and the only reason for the holiday was the collective feeling sorry for him and his widow and children because he was assassinated.
