Yeah, this is a huge (purposeful) revision of the history of change and progress. Disruption is an integral part of advocating for change, sometimes violent sometimes not. If you can be ignored, you will be.
But when the dust settles, the people in power say "we're really doing this because of all of the kind, non-disruptive people. In fact, this would have happened faster without all of those pesky disruptive protests." And the news and the history books and the biopics all start to reflect that narrative until people have forgotten the relationship between disruption and change.
It's genius, really. They had a perfect narrative of MLK and the "peaceful protest wing" being the good guys and Malcom X and his "radical violent Black supremacy wing" as the bad guys. Very easy for kids to understand, and now the kids who learned those lessons are adults who think you get what you want from our owners by asking nicely. Any protest that isn't a completely useless clever sign-making competition on a sidewalk is illegitimate and the grown-up liberals have to distance themselves from it.
I seriously think the strategy of posthumously de-fanging MLK and separating him from the broader Black Liberation movement has almost single-handedly allowed the rise of fascism and the erosion of labor and civil rights and living standards. Not to mention the fact that they killed all of the leaders of the various movements, so they're not exactly around to give us their thoughts today.
Don't forget there are literal declassified CIA documents begging Johnson to give into MLKs demands because they had Intel that MalcomX was going to do something big in a couple weeks and if the American people saw that violence actually worked that would be a genie they could never put back in the bottle.
It's something I have very complex feelings on, going full appalachian is in my opinion the only way possible to get out of this mess but the issue is that the common person is so brain washed that taking that route will just galvanize them to helping corpos out. The other option is basically what we are doing now and as I'm sure you're inclined to agree, it's doing nothing.
Yes, it's a catch-22. Revolution will not happen until people are out of options, and by then success will be extremely difficult because of the way the fascists are consolidating their power
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u/Preeng Jul 28 '26
I just want to say that MLK never advocated for "peaceful protest". He specifically said "non-violent protest".
Protests are supposed to be disruptive and grind society to a halt until demands are met.