JOHN KIRBY
On this Martin Luther King day, as a proxy war rages in Ukraine, as regular people
are divided against each other along antiquated racial lines, and as the world wakes
up from the nightmare of “lockdowns” and other egregious violations of our civil
and human rights, let’s honor the man who risked and lost his life to defy “the
greatest purveyor of violence on earth”: our own government.
King knew that the “evil triplets of racism, militarism, and extreme materialism”
were the lifeblood of establishment power, which would fall apart without its
manufactured enemies, its disposable economy, and the organized division of its
subject peoples.
Back then, King fought the vestiges of Jim Crow and the unofficial, if no less
virulent, racism of the north. Today, he would fight state-corporate sponsored “intersectionality,” the weaponized “critical race theory” that masquerades as
radicalism but, in reality, divides in order to conquer.
Back then, King defied much of the civil rights community, not to mention the
federal government, to call the war in Vietnam the criminal occupation that it was.
Today, he would call out the US role in provoking the conflict in Ukraine, and note
how the war further extends the goals of the World Economic Forum’s “Great
Reset”: more scarcity, more surveillance and control, more money concentrated in
fewer hands.
Back then, King planned to gather Americans of all races in Washington DC to
demand an end to poverty in America. Today, he would have railed against the
effort to destabilize the working class and dehumanize immigration by means of an
open border; he would have wondered at the science behind health dictates that
closed small businesses, but left open giant monopolies; he would have been
aghast at worldwide mandates that violated our most basic civil rights—the choices
we make with our own bodies—in order to keep a job or get an education. Back
then, King organized lunch counter sit-ins and bus boycotts to fight the evil of
segregation; today, he would have sat-in at restaurants demanding vaccine
passports and boycotted countries that required an experimental injection to enter
their borders.
Like many of us, King might have been bewildered and disheartened by the world
he found today. But not for long. Just as he broadened his vision to see how “the
bombs in Vietnam explode at home, making the poor, both white and Negro, bear
the heaviest burden,” so too would he see how the world has been denied its very
humanity under the banner of “public health,” how globalization has finally robbed
us of all sovereignty, and how those who wield advanced technology have both
canceled our speech and privatized our immune systems.
Let’s remember the forgotten King of yesterday, the anti-war, anti-poverty activist
who knew working people had to reach across racial lines to overcome oppression.
Let’s also imagine the King of today, who would have wept to see his children so
broken in spirit, and so bereft of wisdom, that we would let our schools and places
of worship be shuttered even as the liquor stores were mandated “essential.”
Today’s King would force us to confront the new power that has settled over the
globe, that hideous strength that makes nothing true and every transgression
permissible. He would make us ashamed of how low we’ve become. And he
would command us to stand.
John Kirby is the director of FOUR DIED TRYING, a feature documentary series
about the extraordinary lives and calamitous deaths of President John F. Kennedy,
Malcom X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The
series will premiere in November of 2023.