PUBLIC POSTING MLK Tells It Like It Is This major speech on resistance to the Vietnam War still packs a relevant punch. It gets naive at about 10:10 as a powerful message speaks unto the good news and misses the point about the nature of revolutionary communism but the first ten minutes are powerful and still true today ... MLK was the sort of utopian socialist that reality put to one side after 1848 in Europe. America has never really had the debate that Marx forced on the Left - every time someone who might make that debate happen appears, American culture either manages to terrorise its proponents (the Red Terror of 1919), assassinate its leaders (MLK) or make it organisationally useless from naive activist enthusiasm (Occupy) and then ready for appropriation by the dark side as the Democrat Party. Around 15.10 MLK gets back into his stride with his utopianism but returns to the fundamentals of the first ten minutes. This is the quintessential Hegelian synthesis of religious fundamentalism and international socialism if ever it has existed. I, for one, am not convinced he has been consigned to history with his assassination. The damnes de la terre are curently rediscovering religion - Islam, pentecostalism, santa muerte - out of desperation at the Official Left (now little more than the sort of liberals and radicals who infested the Third Republic) who seem merely to demonstrate that the Enlightenment has failed them. Even Pope Francis is a sign that the Catholic Church finally gets it. At the moment, the representation of the young and the poor is criminal, traditionalist, nationalist and anarchist but MLK offers an alternative - charismatic, internationalist, utopian. The appropriation of his message and its weakening into a mere rights agency run by educated and permanently outraged NGO activists funded by the States to be vanguards for market penetration and values change was clever but self-defeating in the long run. MLKs actual words are now available again on the internet and not all graduates poured out for non-jobs in the liberal system (MLK is good on this in a sharp throwaway observation) are stupid or self-serving. As state funds become limited (despite the racket of trying to claim increased taxation as a progressive move), the gravy train for the middle classes may end in any case. The poor may be in a position to reclaim some power through their position as consumers, voters and threat if only they learn the skills of organisation and the new forms of religion have the potential to be organisational ready-mades. Around 19:40, he castigates America in ways that have global import today ... for Europeans, though, MLK is problematic: the future of the European Left does not rely in utopianism and charisma but in discipline, organisation and the further extension of the Enlightenment against the official Left. I write this on the day when, to our eternal shame, a bloc of so-called left-wing Government Leaders back a right-wing politician as the Head of the European Commission rather than adapt to the growing popular resistance to bureaucratic federalism and rule by party elites. In Europe, we do not need religion and should not import it. Bryan Alexander
Posted on: Sun, 22 Jun 2014 11:41:34 +0000
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