Cartoon by David Cohen

If Martin Luther King Jr were alive today, politicians would denounce him

The Guardian: Today is the day American many politicians pretend to care about the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr, one of the wisest souls who attempted to save this sorry nation. Don’t fall for their scams.

While King did care about black and/or poor people in the United States and around the world, he was no American exceptionalist. “Don’t let anybody make you think God chose America as His divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world,” King once said.
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He also criticized how Americans “have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice,” when “the fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, here and abroad”.

And yet, modern day Republicans and Democrats often speak as if they love King, even as they excoriate the real heirs to his legacy: the Black Lives Matter activists and other social justice warriors who fight for racial and economic liberation. But the truth is, many of these American politicians would have hated King when he was alive as much as they hypocritically dishonor his radical legacy today.

Take President Trump, who signed a bill a week ago turning King’s birth place into a national park, only to viciously refer to immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti and all countries as Africa as “shithole countries” a few days later – stirring up the kind of racist hatred King died trying to defeat over the weekend the nation remembers him >>>