Political comments

As this thread concerns Dr. King's dream of economic justice, I will not concern myself with his personal life. And Mrs Kennedy, like Ms. Clinton, has enough problems with the infidelities of her own spouse to be worried about King's activities.
The fact remains: DR. KIng was a DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST.
His OWN WORDS confirm this. Zaius if trying to deflect the discussion from a REAL ANALYSIS of King's economic thought.


-Savant


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It is capitalism which extorts labor (and the world) while creating babbling sycophants and apologists like Zaius.

By the way, Dr. King was a child during the Depression. The capitalistic extortion, its immiseration of the masses which he saw in his childhood helped push him in an ANTI-CAPITALIST direction. Bless his heart. 
"I can see the effects of this on this early childhood experience
on my ANTICAPITALISTIC FEELINGS." (pp. 1--2 of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR).

I guess I take king himself as a better authority on his own thinking than his ignorant, reactionary neice Or racist scalawag, poseur called Zaius


-Savant


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Brian_G wrote:

So you see the problem, justice built on inconsistency can create unrest and lawlessness but law based on swift expected justice creates stability and growth.
They want sympathy for a mascot group of victims who have been picked on, I want written law with the consent of the governed. You can be sued if you don't support your children, it's a federal crime.

For better or worse, written law is often open to diverse interpretations. But it's more complicated than that.
Once the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, it was a crime to refuse to assist federal authorities in tracking down escaped slaves.
What we forget is that the purpose of law is JUSTICE. Positive law is not sacred in its own right.
Not only can law be differently interpreted, even without difference of interpretation, there may be an issue of justice.
Laws that allowed slavery almost certainly would not have been overturned by referendum. For AT THAT TIME many--probably MOST--people accepted what we mostly regard as an injustice today.


-Savant




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Cadetgrey wrote:

I wouldn't even argue with "Savant" or whatever is his name. He's a pure socialist who wants to ban weapons for private use. He wants a government to control everything. Look at Nazi Germany and his ideal nation USSR, they all banned guns from the people. He won't come out and say it but that's the goal he wants. His kind will never control America!

You would not try to debate me because you wouldn't have a leg to stand on. The fact that you state--without evidence--that the USSR is my ideal society, clearly indicates that you don't rely much on critical thinking. You could have ASKED, and I would have told you what I think, and kind of society I want to see.
But it would be interesting to know what you think a "pure" socialist is. Or what the idea of pure socialism is. Is it socialism as described by Karl Marx, or Martin Buber? Is it socialism as envisioned by Albert Einstein or by Martin Luther KIng, Jr? Is is socialism as understood by Lenin or by an anarchist socialist such as Emma Goldman or Noam Chomsky?
Also, in case you don't know this, a good number of DEMOCRATIC NATIONS have greater controls on the dissemination of weapons than does the USA. 
Can you explain why they've not degenerated into Nazi or Soviet style totalitarianism?

-Savant

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America is Not the Same wrote:

Walters is a Radical with a agenda and most Democrats are against her

If you think Maxine Waters is a "radical", then you must be a fascist or a Nazi.
She's a liberal Democrat. Radicals (of left) are people like Nelson Peery, Malcolm X, Bobby Seale (during 60s), Angela Y. Davis, Charlene Mitchell, etc.
Almost anywhere except in politically illiterate America, most of the liberal folk (Barack Obama included) who rightists think to be radical would be seen as centrist, or maybe even RIGHT of center.
A nation has to be politically BACKWARD to think of Waters (let alone Obama) as politically radical.


-Savant




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Savant wrote:

I take it by now you read one of the chapters on King that I sent you.....

Yes, brother. We need to discuss further this vision of community and how very differently African-Americans might relate to one another.


-Harrisson

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emperorjohn wrote:

o all blacks who are conservatives must hate being black? I mean I was a black conservative once, but I did not hate my people.

I don't know whether all black conservatives hate their own people, though statments by SOME clearly suggest that.
But I'm reasonably sure that the kind of blacks supported by racists like Zaius are, as I suggested, those most likely to be contemptuous of other black people.
White supremacists don't support Blacks who love their people, and fight for the liberation of their people. Nor would I expect them to.

However, none of this changes my view--amply supported by King's words and works of King scholars--that Dr. Martin Luther King was a PROGRESSIVE, and even (as his own words show) a "democrtic socialist." Anyone can pick out conservative words here or there (often extracted from original context), but that doesn't change the fact that his basic orientation as early as the NINETEEN FIFTIES was progressive.
Again, people should look at the July 18, 1952 letter to Coretta Scott. Or in Volume 1 of THE PAPERS OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR, the 1951 diary entry called "Notes on American Capitalism." And King becomes MORE left of center as time goes on.
A good historical account of this which I mean to reread when I've the time is, FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO HUMAN RIGHTS: MARTIN LUTHERK KING, JR. AND THE STRUGGLE FOR ECONOMIC JUSTICE.
And as for affirmativ action, probably the earliest reference to such (maybe even to the phrase iteelf) I found in a chapter of WHY WE CAN'T WAIT (1964) by Dr. King---along with his famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."
Now the question is: Why did Black "leaders" abandon or water down King's quest for economic justice? Lack of understanding? Myopia? Narrow class interests?


-Savant


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Savant wrote:

....Now the question is: Why did Black "leaders" abandon or water down King's quest for economic justice? Lack of understanding? Myopia? Narrow class interests?

Now...answering THAT question is getting to the 'nitty-gritty' of understanding our contemporary dilemma, brother Savant.

I will suggest that a convergence of all three factors you just mentioned is at work. There always has been, in my opinion, a class schism within the AA community - a division between the lumpen proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie; and a division between the latter and the professional classes; and further division right up to the ultra-elite ranks of the rich.

In one of his prior works, brother Cornel West talks about how the 1970s saw an explosive boom in the collective fortunes of the AA middle class - including, I would add, people like our corporate brother Barack. It seems that removing the lid off the long-suppressed ambitions of bright, upwardly-mobile, ambitious AAs diverted a great deal of otherwise social-reformist talent towards the more narrow interests of self-aggrandizement and conspicuous consumption.

I'm sure there is more to it than just that, but that is what seems apparent to me at the moment...


-Harrison


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Barros Serrano wrote:

As for all these socialists... lol!!! These rightwing Faux-News-addled dittoheads never heard of any of them but Einstein, Marx, King and MAYBE Chomsky.
Writers important to me included those but also Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky and Ángel Palerm, this latter an anthropologist from Catalonia who was a refugee from Franco in Mexico, and wrote a tome which is the best anthropological work on anarchy, called “Antropología y Marxismo”, in which, despite the title, he rips Marx a new one for ignoring the peasantry, for assuming that capitalism has subsumed all culture, and there is a simplistic evolution then via revolution a socialist culture. Through all of this, Marx, and even moreso his Soviet followers, treat the peasantry as “a sack of potatoes”(Marx's own words for them), ignoring that any real traditional culture has survived or is valid.
Palerm asserts, similarly to Julius Nyerere in “Uhuru na Ujamaa”, that traditional cultures are alive, inherently socialist, and valuable in the transition to a sane society. Unlike the Soviets Russifying everyone (or the Chinese Han-izing everyone) under an umbrella of “socialist culture”, indigenous cultures are revitalized, integrated in alliances of autonomous communities and ethnicities... in other words, anarchy, but with culture!
Well, I'm talking to you now, as obviously I lost the rightists early in the first paragraph...
¡Pinche pendejos malcriados y maléficos!

I ESPECIALLY like Rosa Luxemburg. Radically DEMOCRATIC, libertarian and sociailist. Though herself a Marxist (even if Lenin sometimes doubted it) she didn't shrink from critiques of Lenin, or even Marx himself. But especially Lenin and Trotsky, whose authoritarian methods (though in the name of defeating counterrevolution) began to create a counterrevolution WITHIN the revolutiion. Rosa Luxemburg to Lenin:

"Freedom only for supporters of the government, only for members of one party--however numerous they may be--is no freedom at all. Freedom is always freedom one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of justice but because all tht is instructive, wholesome an purifying in politicval freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when "freedom" becomes a special privilege.....
Socialism in life demands a complete spiritual transformation in the masses degraded by centuries of bourgeois class rule. Social instincts in the place of egotistical ones, mass initiativein the place of inertia, idealism which conquers all suffering....No one knows this better than Lenin...But he is MISTAKEN in the means he employs. Decree, dictatorial force of a factory overweer, draconian penalties, rule by terror...The only way to a REBIRTH is the school of public life itself, the most unlimited, the broadest DEMOCRACY and public opinion. It is rule by terror which demoralizes..." (THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION, p69 & 71)

Little anecdote. I had an undergrad German philosophy prof who was a child during the Third Reich. I studied Kant, Hegel, Marx and Frankfurt school figures (Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas) with him. He like to annoy his neighbors by naming his dog Rosa Luxemburg and his cat Karl Liebknecht. When they quried him about those "strange" names they'd get a small history lesson and a brief note on socialism which they didn't expect.
Undergrad was an HBCU. And this is he German professor who told a white neighborwho queried "what do THOSE PEOPLE want anyway" in so many words: "Madam, THOSE PEOPLE are your FELLOW CITIZENS. Perhaps you should ask them that question."
Dr. O.B is retired now. He was a goldmine of kowledge regarding European philosophy and socialism. Lefty Catholic turned secular lefty, but with repsect for Christian and othere religous progressivs.(Met Che while still a student, knew Allende, met Oscar Romero. Older brother died in anti-Nazi resistance, maybe with Sophie Scholl)


-Savant


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Latin Sno-Bird wrote:

During WW2 the democrats and socialists were running the government... FDR could hardly be called a conservative and no it wasn't the left it was the right when FDR tried to stack the supreme court... Who was friendly and played by Stalin... who advised FDR to let Stalin take eastern Europe... Again study your military history...

Liberals had the ascendancy during the administration of FDR. Socialists didn't win even 2% of the popular vote during the elections of the 1930s. The largest popular vote for any socialist was one by Eugene V. Debs (I believe in 1912, but must check the date). And he got only 6% of the vote. There was no socialist administration in America during WW2. That's a right wing myth...unfortunately.
Moreover, both the liberal FDR and the Conservative UK prime minister Winston Churchill decided to ally with Stalin for the simple reason that at that time it was HITLER--most extreme right politial leader of the time--whose armies were marching all over Europe and even into North Africa.
It was an alliance of convenience--or rather NECESSITY. It required no great love of Stalin to make such a desperate alliance.
Winston Churchill---extremely anti-Communist--when question about his alliance Stalin given his animosity toward the USSR, simply said that he'd make a deal with the DEVIL if he had to in order to stop the Nazis. If you want to use that quasi-religious language, Roosevelt and Churchill decided upon an alliance with a (then) less dangerous devil to stop a more dangerous devil.


-Savant






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Given the Western record of violent barbarity, of which the crimes of Stalin, Hitler or genocidal white killers of Native Americans, you are the last person who needs to be talking about the violence of savagery of Blacks. And I've no doubt what would happen to you or Loonyblitz if you spouted your anti-Black racist diatribes in person in certain Black communities. Suffice it to say that while I don't advocate such measures, your ignominious end would elicit no tears from me. 


-Savant

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Haiti is also impoverished and exploited by imperialism. The issue isn't only the Diaspora induced by the slave trade (wehtehr Arab or Western trade), but also colonization, which involved the pillaging of African labor and resources. Colonialism also often involved the destruction of native industries and agricultural forms. Actually, the fighting of European colonialism--inclu ding fighting in the form of armed struggle--was an integral part of African history. Guinea-Bissau, Moazmbique, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa all (in varying degrees) resorted to armed struggle to free their lands from European colonialism and imperialism. If you want to say that there were Africans who who were involved in this whole bloody mess, that's true. Wherever there is oppression, the oppresssor nearly always finds collaborators from within the oppressed group. Not only among Africans, but also Native Americans, Indians, Chinese, etc. Indeed among Europeans themselves, wherever the Nazis invaded they found collaborators. French, Polish, Italians, Dutch, Ukrainian had among their ranks traitors, collaborators who aided the oppressors of their own people. Though probably less common, there were even Jewish collaborators with the Nazis. And within the Black movement here in America, there were Negro collaborators like those who infilatrated movements led by Dr, King, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. Nonetheless, the only morally just attitude is one of SOLIDARITY with the oppressed--not feeling sorry for them. Pity is often demeaning while solidarity is empowering. And I do think you should read those books I suggested reaarding HOW African became underdeveloped. Opinions are ok, but it's even more important to be informed. 

-Savant

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The 0riginal Doby wrote:

Brother Savant, in in Lloyd Marcus' book titled "Confessions of a Black Conservative", he clearly demonstrates King's rightist tendancies. Have you read his work?
Marcus is a native of the same East Baltimore ghettos you proudly hail from, brother. Surely you can't dispute his authorotative discourse on the subject.

No, I've not read the person you mention But I have read KING himself, and also a number of King scholars. So, I see from King's own words and scholarly, that King was overwhelmingly LEFT of center.
One can point out that King had some conservative views on this or that issue. You can point to some conservative opinions here or there in the writings of Ernesto Che Guevara. But that wouldn't make Che a conservative.
Similarly, you can find some liberal ideas in the thinking of some conservatives, but they are still overwhelmingly conservative.

Now I will read Lloyd Marcus. Apparently, you already have. So,what it is that makes Marcus' discourse on Dr. King so "authoritative" that I cannot dispute it?


-Savant






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Unfortunately, Alveda King hasn't clue to the social and political thught of Martin Luther King, Jr. Her blood kinship is irrelevant. She may know more than I about King's favorite color, or whtt his favorite food was. She knows next to NOTHING about King's social thought.
I wonder if Alveda or Zaius could explain these words of Dr. King to his future wife Coretta:

"So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes." 

Simply check out THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR (p.36)


-Savant


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