YSK: The US Government Assassinated MLK

https://pawb.social/post/41696417

YSK: The US Government Assassinated MLK - Pawb.Social

>In 1993, Loyd Jowers was interviewed on the ABC News program PrimeTime Live. He said he had been paid $100,000 by the alleged Memphis mobster Frank Liberto to help organize the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. > Jowers owned a restaurant, Jim’s Grill, very near the Lorraine Motel, where King often stayed while in Memphis and where the assassination took place. >Jowers claimed that besides Liberto, a man named “Raoul” and several Memphis Police Department officers were also involved in the assassination planning and execution. Jowers identified Memphis Police Lieutenant Earl Clark as the shooter. Martin Luther King Jr’s wife and children saw the interview, and sued Loyd Jowers… for $100. The trial occurred in late 1999. > William Pepper represented the King family. The three-and-one-half-week trial, referred to in U.S. government records as simply King v. Jowers, was conducted in Memphis in Shelby County Circuit Court with presiding Judge James E. Swearengen. Thousands of documents were presented; over 70 witnesses took the stand or were cited by deposition, audiotape, videotape, or by other witnesses. >Some observers commented on what they perceived as a surprising lack of American media interest in the trial. Bárbara Reis was a correspondent for the Lisbon daily Público who attended several days of the proceedings. She was quoted as saying, “Everything in the U.S. is the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson’s trial was the trial of the century. Clinton’s trial was the trial of the century. But this is the trial of the century, and who’s here?” > The jury required only one hour of deliberations to reach a unanimous verdict that King was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. They found Jowers responsible, and also found that “government agencies” were among the co-conspirators. > >The King family was granted the $100 they requested in damages, and they saw the verdict as vindication. You should know this because those who do not learn from their history are doomed to repeat it. You may have reason to be suspicious of high profile assassinations.

First they murdered him, then they killed him again by building his memorials. Give him a memorial in DC and a day in his honour, but god forbid anyone finds out he was a socialist. The whitewashed narrative of MLK is a way of erasing him.
History will continue to repeat itself until all of the Billionaires have been assassinated. Until this happens, don’t get your hopes up
Simply killing billionares without changing the underlying systems that create them will just result in a power vacuum. We need to go beyond simple violence, we need to build a true social revolution.
Section J - What do anarchists do?

They won’t let that happen. Kill them and then have a social revolution. Double win

They won’t let that happen.

They won’t get a choice. I’m sure by the time the ruling class perceive the threat, they’ll try to use violence to destroy us, but that will just harden our resolve and stir the hearts of those not yet on our side. There are so many more of us than them, and a civillian population just trying to make a better world is a very difficult target, both in practical terms and moral terms.

On the other hand, if you kill a billionaire, their children will inherit the wealth, and more billionaires are created, with a specific, very personal reason to use their wealth directly against the movement, either to hire private security, strikebreakers, propaganda, and so on.

I’m sorry, but your plan is very, very weak. It isn’t a plan at all. It’s just thoughtless revenge.

You sound like a government simp
I’m the furthest possible guy from that. I want to dismantle the government entirely. I just have an actual viable plan for doing that, rather than an epic revenge fantasy.

Missing context: this was a civil trial, not a criminal one, which means there doesn’t have to be evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt and the verdict doesn’t have to be unanimous from the jury. If marginally more evidence supports the plaintiff, they win the case.

Which isn’t to say any of the conclusions the jury reached are necessarily incorrect, just that a civil trial doesn’t have the same level of required evidence, and it doesn’t make a guilty/not guilty determination, just one of liability.

Also potentially relevant is that Jowers’ sister claimed he lied about it to make money off the media attention, and that she backed him up so that she could pay off back owed taxes.

Trump declassifying the files about the assassination earlier this year also doesn’t scream to me that the government definitely did it.

Interesting. By couching your skepticism in very dull (but no doubt accurate) legalese, you managed to avoid getting brigaded for effectively dissenting from the (also very dull) jaded-US-progressive groupthink in this community.
I mean I don’t even see where the government fits into the account outside of local cops.

Check out the history of the FBI and the civil rights movement.

Who do you think informed the local cops?

“Discredit, disrupt, and destroy.”

The FBI is a federal organization (i.e. government).

Yes, but this trial didnt get the details right.

I like this quote from Martin Luther King Jr.:

Ultimately you must do right because it’s right to do right. . . . You must do it because it has gripped you so much that you are willing to die for it if necessary. And I say to you this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

Holy shit. Powerful.

I really believe everyone has their thing. I would die to keep trees from being wiped off the face of the Earth, or to permanently free the world from nuclear weapons. Or to protect another member of my family.

This is how I read King’s quote. Not as “You piece of shit! You won’t die for the cause?” But more as “if you really don’t see anything world dying for in this world, you must not be looking, because it doesn’t take much to find something.”

I’m depressed, so I guess he thinks everyone who’s depressed should kill themselves? It’s a good quote, but it’s too generalising, if you ask me.
Superman himself couldn’t make the leap from “you should do the right thing, even if it kills you” to “mentally-ill people should commit suicide”.

Sorry to hear about your depression, I’ve been there myself.

To paraphrase how I understand the quote.

Sometimes doing the morally right thing is hard to do, but it is important to do that as a human. If you haven’t found something important enough for you to take a stand on, to stick to your convictions and defend, then what are you doing?

I’m sure there is something you think is morally correct or morally wrong, like maybe you think harming children is wrong. If that were the case, you should defend children, as it would be good to stop children from being harmed.

“Fun” fact: MLK championed civil rights for black people for damn near two decades. But once he pivoted to directly addressing the issue of class, he was killed within four months.

Public announcement of the Poor People’s Campaign: December 4, 1967
Assassination: March 29, 1968

I think he also came out against the Vietnam War not long before he was assassinated.

He said the US is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.

Truer words have not been spoken.

Professor Jiang on the assassination
Secret History #10: The Conspiracy of Evil

YouTube
Just a heads up, Professor Jiang is an interesting character, I’d say he has pretty good analysis most of the time, but some of the predictions and some of the things he says are just absolutely insane. Take it all with a pinch of salt.

And remember, they abuse MLK today, even in death; he gets the vast majority of credit for the civil rights movement (with Parks), while the Black Panthers are totally left out of the narrative. At the time, they had a huge influence that sent a shudder throughout the suburbs.

Many civil rights protestors died, who knows how many were murdered by the state? The cops and feds colluded to kill a lot of people.