dollarvigilante.com / By Gary Gibson / January 21, 2013
The air is thick with sad ironies today as we remember the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and watch Barack Obama’s inauguration just hours after rapper Lupe Fiasco is confronted for criticizing Obama in a pre-inauguration performance. We have a murderous, warmongering and conveniently brown executive’s second inauguration being celebrated as the perfect symbol of a day dedicated to a black man who was dedicated to peace and who bravely opposed both state segregation and aggressive foreign war. Meanwhile another black man who rightfully criticizes the warmonger gets the bum’s rush.
While King’s politics and ideas about “recompensation” via government redistribution grate on anti-state sensibilities, we laud his non-violent opposition to state-supported racial discrimination. Hey, if you don’t want certain people on your property or trading with you commercially, fine, go ahead and discriminate based on their height, weight, ethnicity, accent, body odor or whatever…just don’t expect the monopoly on violence known as government, funded by money stolen in the form of taxes, to enforce your policies in other places that aren’t your property.
Our first irony, therefore, is how King, a man of non-violent protest was eager to use the violence of the state to redistribute property to make up for past injustices. King might not have been an out-and-out communist, but he did have that commie flavor to his brand of statism. He was your typical democratic socialist who believed in gentle, “fair” theft and redistribution versus the totalitarian property grab that the hardcore commies love. King did suggest an actual figure for recompensation for past injustice — i.e. a precise amount of money to steal from living people to correct the wrongs of long dead people — but his main public opponent was state apartheid. What King fought against peacefully was the state’s attempt to proscribe human associations.
But now we come to what King considered central to his work: his opposition to US imperialism in general and to the war in Vietnam in particular…
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