April 4 2023 How Can We Live the Truth Taught to Us By Martin Luther King?

jayofdollhousepark

Apr 4

On this anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King by agents of the American government, we re-evaluate how we can honor the truths he revealed and bore witness to, and bring meaning to the sacrifices of our martyred sacred dead.

For myself and possibly for us all, the meaning of this as a signifier of our shared history which binds us together as a nation has been forever changed by its connection with the most important trial in American history, which links Martin Luther King with George Floyd and with every Black American murdered, tortured, re-enslaved as prison labor, and marginalized, silenced, and erased by the carceral state and its forces of repression and white supremacist terror.

How can we bear forward his message and live the truth he taught us?

America watched aghast and hypnotized at the litany of evils exposed by the George Floyd trial, our shock, grief, and rage at the complicity of our police in racist violence comparable to that of the Nuremberg Trial, as a secret truth becomes horrifyingly clear; our America, our government and its institutions and structures, and our broader sociocultural systems which form their context, has become the enemy America was founded to defend us from.

And while this national reckoning plays out, the Party of Treason enacts laws to silence the voices of the people with vote suppression in a panicked and last-ditch effort to maintain an elite hegemony of white power and privilege, and the killology of the police proceeds unimpeded.

A Kafka-esque absurdity of the trial of George Floyd's murderer, a policeman whose family name gave us the word chauvinism, is the claim of the defense that the authorization of kneeling on the breathing passage of handcuffed prisoners in the official training manual of the police absolves police of murder in its use. It is instead damning proof of institutional torture and murder, and all police officers who have accepted employment under the direction of a torture and murder manual are complicit in its crimes, as are all bureaucrats, administrators, and elected officials who have with these rules and procedures authorized and legitimized a culture of racist killology.

Our police are a cult of death, a criminal syndicate, and an instrument of white supremacist terror.

Within our police, criminal syndicates and networks of white supremacist infiltration rule our cities in feudal dominion, acting from within the shield of immunity which has made police an unaccountable and independent force of repression of dissent, racist violence, and state terror since the origins of police forces in slavecatching and the founding of the carceral state as a system for the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor.

Abolition and disarmament of the police, prison abolition and justice system reform, and control of gun violence are three linked issues of racial justice and equality, which we can honor the memory of Martin Luther King in action to achieve.

Let this be the last year in which the police and other forces of state terror and tyranny can assassinate and murder our citizens with authorized immunity as instruments of elite wealth, power, and privilege.

As I wrote in my post of April 4 2020, America's Racist Death Squads: How Prosecutors and the Police Enact Ethnic Cleansing; On this the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, iconic figure of liberty and Gandhian nonviolent resistance, my thoughts turn to the distance we have yet to go to achieve his dream of a just society undivided by race.

There is no betrayal of public trust more terrible than that of those with whom we entrust our security and justice; police shootings, the unchecked power of the Prosecutor's office in the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor, and a racialized system of justice designed to enact white supremacist terror and ethnic cleansing runs on and on, undisturbed by mass protests and national political action.

The school to prison pipeline itself is prejudicial and an innate public harm, corrupting and subverting key institutions of public service into a malign shadow state through the counterinsurgency model of policing, which enculturates officers to respond to any disturbances of civil order as if all criminals were terrorists.

By such means has our vast bureaucracy of courts, police, Homeland Security, and other assets armed with guns and legal writs been turned from the cause of our protection from unequal power to that of our subjugation to it, from a guarantor of our democracy and equality to an instrument of state terror, and to the insidious, pervasive, and endemic evil of the re-enslavement of our Black citizens.

And this we must resist.

The Other America: Martin Luther King Speaks