{"id":126313,"date":"2019-01-21T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2019-01-21T12:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=126313"},"modified":"2019-01-21T06:57:48","modified_gmt":"2019-01-21T06:57:48","slug":"martin-luther-king-day-and-the-unspeakable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/01\/martin-luther-king-day-and-the-unspeakable\/","title":{"rendered":"Martin Luther King Day and the Unspeakable"},"content":{"rendered":"

21 Jan 2019 – <\/em>As Martin Luther King\u2019s birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, his death day disappears down the memory hole. Across the country \u2013 in response to the King Holiday and Service Act passed by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton in 1994 \u2013 people will be encouraged to make the day one of service. Such service does not include King\u2019s commitment to protest a decadent system of racial and economic injustice or non-violently resist the U.S. warfare state that he called \u201cthe greatest purveyor of violence on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Government sponsored service is cultural neo-liberalism at its finest, the promotion of individualism at the expense of a mass movement for radical institutional change.<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing in all the world is more dangerous,\u201d warned Dr. King, \u201cthan sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.\u201d<\/p>\n

How true those words. For the government that honors Dr. King with a national holiday killed him. This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted day of service. It is what you are not supposed to know. It is what Thomas Merton, as quoted by James W. Douglass, called The Unspeakable: \u201cIt is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and officials declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.\u00a0 It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his service.\u201d<\/p>\n

The word service is a loaded word; it has become a smiley face and vogue word over the past 35 years. Its use for MLK Day is clear: individuals are encouraged to volunteer for activities such as tutoring children, painting senior centers, or delivering meals to the elderly, activities that are good in themselves but far less good when used to conceal an American prophet\u2019s radical message. After all, Martin Luther King\u2019s work was not volunteering at the local food pantry with Oprah Winfrey cheering him on.<\/p>\n

The Assassination <\/strong><\/p>\n

King was not murdered because he had spent his heroic life promoting individual volunteerism. To understand his life and death \u2013 to celebrate the man \u2013 \u201cit is essential to realize although he is popularly depicted and perceived as a civil rights leader, he was much more than that. A non-violent revolutionary, he personified the most powerful force for a long overdue social, political, and economic reconstruction of the nation.\u201d Those are the words of William Pepper, the King family lawyer, from his comprehensive and definitive study of the King assassination, The Plot to Kill King<\/em>, a book that should be read by anyone concerned with truth and justice.<\/p>\n

Revolutionaries are, of course, anathema to the power elites who, with all their might, resist such rebels\u2019 efforts to transform society. If they can\u2019t buy them off, they knock them off. Fifty one years after King\u2019s assassination, the causes he fought for \u2013 civil rights, the end to U.S. wars of aggression, and economic justice for all \u2013 remain not only unfulfilled, but have worsened in so many respects. And King\u2019s message has been enervated by the sly trick of giving him a national holiday and then urging Americans to make it \u201ca day of service.\u201d The vast majority of those who innocently participate in these activities have no idea who killed King, or why. If they did, they might pause in their tracks, and combine their \u201cservice\u201d activities with a teach-in on the truth of his assassination.<\/p>\n

Because MLK repeatedly called the United States the \u201cgreatest purveyor of violence on earth,\u201d he was universally condemned by the mass media and government that later \u2013 once he was long and safely dead and no longer a threat \u2013 praised him to the heavens. This has continued to the present day of historical amnesia.<\/p>\n

Educating people about the fact that U.S. government forces conspired to kill Dr. King, and why, and why it matters today, is the greatest service we can render to his memory.<\/p>\n

William Pepper\u2019s decades-long investigation not only refutes the flimsy case against the alleged assassin James Earl Ray, but definitively proves that King was killed by a government conspiracy led by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, Army Intelligence, and the Memphis Police, assisted by southern Mafia figures.<\/p>\n

The Trial <\/strong><\/p>\n

This shocking truth is accentuated when one is reminded (or told for the first time) that in 1999 a Memphis jury, after a thirty day civil trial with over seventy witnesses, found the U.S. government guilty in the killing of MLK. The King family had brought the suit and Pepper represented them. They were grateful that the truth was confirmed, but saddened by the way the findings were buried by the media in cahoots with the government.<\/p>\n

Pepper not only demolishes the government\u2019s self-serving case with a plethora of evidence, but shows how the mainstream media, academia, and government flacks have spent years covering up the truth of MLK\u2019s murder through lies and disinformation. Another way they have accomplished this is by convincing a gullible public that \u201cservice\u201d is a substitute for truth.<\/p>\n

But service without truth is a disservice to the life, legacy, and radical witness of this great American hero. It is propaganda aimed at convincing decent people that they are serving the essence of MLK\u2019s message while they are obeying their masters, the very government that murdered him.<\/p>\n

It is time to rebel against the mind manipulation served by the MLK Day of Service. Let us offer service, but let us also learn and speak the truth.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery,\u201d King told us, \u201cFreedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

21 Jan 2019 – \u201cNothing in all the world is more dangerous,\u201d warned Dr. King, \u201cthan sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.\u201d How true those words. For the government that honors Dr. King with a national holiday killed him. This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted day of service. It is what you are not supposed to know. It is what Thomas Merton, as quoted by James W. Douglass, called The Unspeakable.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":89352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}