Yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr's Day and it was observed by many as a day of community service. Others headed straight to the nation's capital to continue enjoying the inauguration celebration. Others like me stayed home sick or had to go to work thanks to employers who still refuse to acknowledge the day as a national holiday.
Juan Cole has been on a roll tying up the historical threads that are going to make the next 4 to 8 years rather interesting. As a Middle Eastern Politics scholar, he's been relentless in his dismantling of the pro-Zionist propaganda that justified the invasion of Gaza all the while smacking ruthlessly Hamas and all those involved in islamocentric power struggles.
Tis the reason why you need to read "King's Anti-Imperialism and the Challenge for Obama" :
The Martin Luther King, Jr. that most Americans know is the man who said, "I have a dream" at a massive rally 250,000 strong in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963, while standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. That speech is about racial justice and ultimate reconciliation in the United States, and with the changes wrought in American law and practice by the Civil Rights movement, it is a speech that Americans can still feel hopeful about, even if we have not, as Dr. King would have said, "gotten there yet."
But there was another King, the critic of the whole history of European colonialism in the global South, who celebrated the independence movements that led to decolonization in the decades after World War II. The anti-imperial King is the exact opposite of the Neoconservatives who set US policy in the early twenty-first century. Barack Obama, who inherits King's Civil Rights legacy and is also burdened with the neo-imperialism of the W. era, has some crucial choices to make about whether he will heed the other King, or whether he will get roped into the previous administration's neocolonial project simply because it is the status quo from which he will begin his tenure as commander in chief.
The Civil Rights movement was not just about sitting on the front of the bus or eating at a cafeteria counter. It was about reparations. Reparations for the crimes of imperialism. Reparation for the subjugations, enslavement and exploitation of whole races and social classes of peoples.
In the "Let Freedom Ring" speech, the speech that I believe had him finally killed, Dr. King expresses rather poetically :
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