Right Wingers Try to Claim Dr. King, Spread Lies About His Beliefs

[marmar]

from AlterNet's PEEK:



Right Wingers Try to Claim Dr. King, Spread Lies About His Beliefs

Posted by Mister Leonard Pierce, Sadly No! at 2:56 PM on January 21, 2008.

Conservative columnist Paul Greenberg called the lifelong liberal activist "the very definition of an American conservative".




It's Martin Luther King Day, and you know what that means: yes, it's the day when conservatives all over the country get together and tell us that racism isn't a problem anymore and that if MLK were alive today, he would certainly not countenance any black people talking about how they are treated unfairly.

No, what MLK was all about was color-blindness! Yes, he was only interested in a unified world where everyone behaved exactly like white people. He was not interested in nonsense like affirmative action or restitution for slavery, despite his many public statements to the contrary; even the fact that he wrote an entire book about it shouldn't sway us into thinking that Dr. King supported anything as crazy as racial quotas or economic compensation in addition to legal equality.

This year, it falls to Paul Greenberg to write the definitive column on the legacy of Dr. King, who apparently, despite his opposition to the Vietnam War, support of democratic socialism, and economic bill of rights that called for a revolutionary change in the way that the government treated the problem of poverty, was a conservative!

Greenberg calls this lifelong liberal activist "the very definition of an American conservative", and, after quoting the 'not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character' part of the 'I have a dream' speech (which is the only thing MLK ever said that conservatives seem to know anything about), he asks:

Is any passage more frequently cited against the quota system called Affirmative Action?

Well, not by right-wingers, that's for sure. Anyway, let's leave Greenberg, and his claims that a man who forty years ago was being denounced by people like him as a dangerous Communist insurrectionist is actually an icon of conservativism, and move on to Big Boy Jammies, where the appropriately-named Michael Weiss puts up another iteration of the argument that the last thing Martin Luther King would have wanted is for people to talk about racism. After approvingly quoting sections of the letter from Birmingham jail that distance King from radical black Muslims, Weiss says, in reference to Barack Obama's campaign:

How's that for self-criticism and telling people what they don't want to hear? And when's the last time you heard the moral conscience of any movement argue that the middle-class was a hindrance rather than an agent of social progress? Such candor came, moreover, from a man who really might have benefited in the short-term by selling his core principles to purchase a broader coalition of desegregationists. No candidate for high office, whatever the out-group he or she purports to represent, would ever get very far by striking such a "polarizing" chord.

.....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/74485/

[KharmaTrain]

1. This Happens Every Year...

In the mid 80's I did a talk show with an "author" who claimed that Martin Luther King Jr. was a conservative...going down the laudry list of fundie issues at the time...abortion, gay rights, equal rights...and claiming that as a Reverend he always was a social conservative and it was the "librul" media that made him look different. He even said that King was a capitalist cause he had enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle for a black man of the time compared to the "austere" lifestyle of Ghandi. This dude was real polished in the up is down, black is white game. His underlying thesis...that Rushbo later picked up on...was that black people have a "plantation mentality" and that the diefication of King as a liberal or Democratic idol was brainwashing by the media.