Morten fra midtimod.dk huskede at markere Martin Luther Kings jr. død med en dags forsinkelse den 5. april 2008. Jeg bringer her hele Mortens indlæg:
I går var det 40 år siden Martin Luther King blev dræbt - en begivenhed der pudsigt nok faldt sammen med danske mediers gengivelse af en amerikansk meningsmåling, der på abnorm vis viser, at den amerikanske befolkning nu mener, at landet er "parat" til en sort præsident - ikke at der derfor nødvendigvis er nogen der har stillet sig selv det spørgsmål, på hvilken måde en generisk sort præsident adskiller sig fra en generisk hvid præsident, eller hvordan en generisk kvindelig præsident adskiller sig fra en generisk mandlig præsident for den sags skyld.
Forlagsredaktøren Patrick Nielsen Hayden minder os om, at King var meget andet og mere, end det glansbillede som i dag fremstår som en slags national helteskikkelse i USA. Og henleder opmærksomheden på en tale King holdt et år før han blev myrdet - en tale der afstedkom markant kritik bl.a. fra de store medier:
"For this speech, Time accused him of "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post announced that he had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.""
Og indholdet af Kings tale? Hele talen kan ses her, og er en kritik af den amerikanske indsats i Vietnam.
"A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor. "
For de der ønsker at grave et spadestik dybere, er der en vigtig lektie at finde i sådanne sager - ikke mindst i disse kanon-tider.
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