Martin Luther King also believed…
Via Alternet:
4 Ways Martin Luther King Was More Radical Than You Thought
The slain civil rights leader was a critic of capitalism, the Vietnam War, and championed reproductive rights.
By Igor Volsky / ThinkProgress January 20, 2014, 7:32 AM GMTEvery January, Martin Luther King, Jr. is universally honored as a national hero who preached a peaceful fight against racial injustice. This saintly image is quite a departure from the kind of attacks the reverend endured over his lifetime. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover famously called King “the most dangerous Negro” and “the most notorious liar in the country” while keeping him under close surveillance. Over the years, Dr. King’s more controversial edges have been smoothed over, burying his more radical teachings.
1. He pushed for a government-guaranteed right to a job. In the years before his assassination, King re-shifted his focus on economic justice in northern cities as well as the South. He launched the Poor People’s Campaign and put forth an economic and social bill of rights that espoused “a national responsibility to provide work for all.”
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2. He was a critic of capitalism and materialism. King was a strident critic of capitalism and materialistic society, and urged Americans to “move toward a democratic socialism.” Referring to the now iconic Greensboro Lunch Counter sit-ins, he asked, “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?”
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3. He denounced the Vietnam War. King’s harsh words on the Vietnam War alienated even his allies on civil rights, especially President Lyndon B. Johnson. Still, King continued to speak out, asserting that American involvement in Vietnam “has torn up the Geneva Accord” and “strengthened the military-industrial complex.” He also accused the U.S. of being “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
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4. He championed Planned Parenthood and reproductive rights. King believed that the spread of family planning was a crucial tool in the fight to end poverty and racial inequality.
Did MLK denounce the Korean war too? Same difference, no?
Early 50s — North Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh’s guerillas enter a village, read off the names of five boys who participated in some government education or sports program; kill the boys; everyone gets the idea (same program Ho would institute in the south in the 60s-70s; think battle of Hue) — after winning election Ho had 50,000 peasants shot, 100,000 interred; communists must have their land reform, 98% of peasants in North own land they tilled so they would have to do (had a formula about how many pigs you owned, etc.); year after election Ho’s own home province revolted (taking their land, mind control police state), an infantry division killed 6,000 (wounded?) suppressing outbreak.
— This from a book by a French political scientist, Bernard Fall, that was too dry and scholarly for me to read in my early twenties. The Two Vietnams https://www.amazon.com/Two-Viet-Nams-Political-Military-Analysis/dp/0999141791
— Don’t forget the book that I think turned Anthony Bourdain around — an autobiographical novel by Bao Ninh, a North Vietnamese soldier whose real life Glorious 27th Youth Brigade went out with 500 and came back with 10.
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After that Ho turned his bloody attentions south to get three million Vietnamese killed and seven million wounded out of a north-south population of 33 million.
Mid-1972: the poor peasants in the south — armed with mostly obsolete WWII weapons against modern Russian weapons, e.g., M1 carbines v. AK47s (the gov sent 600,000 M16s into the countryside at one point — lest their be any question the peasants were rebelling against the gov) had cleaned the hated (they were the ISIS of their day) Viet Cong guerillas completely out of the countryside (the American ambassador could travel anywhere unescorted) — starving out the main force units who had lost their logistical nose (had to hide all their supplies in caches around the countryside) they were eating grass — leading the north to make one last desperate attack, a conventional attack across the border with every division they had left in the north (you may not have heard of that; they only had three divisions left in the north — we had killed or wounded two million North Vietnamese soldiers in the south).
With that the south had pretty much wrapped it up in my opinion. They could have gotten to this point a lot earlier if our lead general weren’t crazy-campaigning to out blood bath the blood bath king, Ho. Westmoreland’s idea was to inflict casualties until the north could no longer replace them — his infamous “cross-over point” (I guess he never heard of the birds and the bees).
I blame top-down leadership. All reports to all presidents were Korea like studies of where we were winning and losing the Westmoreland attrition contest. JFK, LBJ, Nixon were smart enough to put two and two together if they ever heard of the two twos: (1) how deeply hated the Vietcong guerillas were (all they did was kill anyone who disagreed, how they started in the north); (2) how wholly dependent the main forces were on their logistical nose, their caches hidden in the countryside (they couldn’t have trucks running down the road in the south to service them).
MLK didnt have access to the two twos either.
A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam 1st Edition
by Lewis Sorley 2007
The Village by Bing West 2003
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_1_11?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=the+village&sprefix=the+village%2Cstripbooks%2C211&crid=16HTELAJC40NR
This Labor Day, Remember That Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign Was for Workers’ Rights
by Peter Dreier September 03, 2017
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/09/03/labor-day-remember-martin-luther-kings-last-campaign-was-workers-rights
Invited to address the AFL-CIO’s annual convention in 1961, King observed:
“Our needs are identical with labor’s needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children, and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.”
He added:
“The labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who today attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them.”