9 ms·

This story needs some historical context. This is pointed out in the blog post, but the main reason for wiretapping King wasn't his civil rights advocacy, but h

by hooande 13y ago

This story needs some historical context. This is pointed out in the blog post, but the main reason for wiretapping King wasn't his civil rights advocacy, but his communist leanings. This in no way excuses or apologizes for the dirty tricks used by the federal government against a non-violent protestor. But this should make sense to students of US history. Communism was the absolute defining political issue of the 20th century in America. Today communism seems like a failed political ideology, a cute thing that hippies like along with pot and drum circles. But in the 50s and 60s communism was the most evil thing imaginable, like aids spreading terrorists who block cell phone signals. Hoover in particular had spent his entire life fighting communism and saw it as the greatest threat our country had ever faced. Many of our parents or grandparents had nuclear bomb drills in elementary school, ducking and covering under their desks to protect themselves from the communist threat. Growing up like that, you can imagine the fear and rabid hatred that people had for the ideology. This isn't a story of "Evil US government subverts wiretapping power to go after peaceful protestor". This is a case of the government executing the will of the people at the time. Hindsight is 20/20 and looking back their actions seem evil, but in historical context the FBI was doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing: fighting communism with everything they had. It may sound silly to us, but back then that was the only fight that mattered. The FBI and the public didn't see it as wiretapping a private citizen, but as a part of a decades long political struggle. Recently on HN people have been acting like the government can dominate the world through wiretapping. As if the NSA can find out a few secrets and people will bow their heads and be silent. Government wiretapping found a true dirty secret involving MLK and threatened to reveal it if he didn't change what he was saying. Did he stop? No. Did he slow down for a single second? Fuck no. True political reformers aren't cowed by blackmail and intimidation. As long as we have leaders like Martin Luther King, democracy will live forever.

foobarqux 13y ago
COINTELPRO did not only target suspected communists. > As if the NSA can find out a few secrets and people will bow their heads and be silent. To say that it doesn't have a significant influence is not credible.
glurgh 13y ago
The government at the time saw communism everywhere and Hoover's FBI was eager to paint any dissenter as a communist. The civil rights movement and racial relations in the US themselves were used for propaganda purposes by the Soviet Union. The evidence of MLK's 'communist leanings' of any significance is pretty weak. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.#Allegations_of_communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.#Allega... The idea that Hoover's FBI was somehow 'executing the will of the people' rather than the will of J. Edgar Hoover seems pretty tenuous.
- mjn 13y ago
  One bit of evidence supporting that view is that COINTELPRO targeted not only King, but basically the entire civil-rights movement. The NAACP, CORE, the SCLC, etc. were all targeted as potentially subversive. Which in a way they were, since their purpose was to oppose the prevailing social policy in much of the country.
- gruseom 13y ago
  The evidence of MLK's 'communist leanings' of any significance is pretty weak. Pretty weak, or non-existent? Unless I'm missing something, that Wikipedia page doesn't contain weak evidence, it contains no evidence.
  - glurgh 13y ago
    It's just a roundabout, equivocating way to say 'you're full of it', since that would be rude and against site guidelines.
jluxenberg 13y ago
Communism may or may not be incompatible with the US constitution. A surveillance state is _certainly_ incompatible with the constitution and threatens our civil liberties. Having not lived during the Cold War nor studied it, I don't have a perspective on what that is like. But I find it difficult to understand the idea that a political ideology like Communism ought to be "illegal."
- unimpressive 13y ago
  >Having not lived during the Cold War nor studied it, I don't have a perspective on what that is like. But I find it difficult to understand the idea that a political ideology like Communism ought to be "illegal." Let me help: http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/pdf/4-1.pdf#zoom=100 http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/c... Basically, every communist (Read: Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist/etc) party that existed during the 20th century took its orders from the U.S.S.R. The authoritarian form of Marxism practiced by the Bolsheviks would never fly with the population of the United States, so the Soviets would use the sympathies of American communists to leak info and sabotage national defense programs. This meant that every communist was a de facto U.S.S.R spy in the eyes of the USA. The above document is a report to President Truman in 1946 about the ideological underpinnings that would go on to cause the cold war.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    And we had our own Democracy cheerleaders trying to export our system to every corner of the globe as well. If they were honest, they would have allowed discussion and dialog rather than the McCarthyite witch hunts and branding communism as AIDs-spreading terrorists strapped with nuclear suicide bombs. They didn't even trust in their own ideology to survive a rigorous examination, and that's why they turned to demonization.
    - btilly 13y ago
      Not so fast. We backed multiple military coups in multiple democracies. Basically any tin-pot dictator who wanted our support could declare themselves "anti-communist" and they had it. And many, many did so. No matter how obvious it should have been that we did not want to support their actions.
movingahead 13y ago
> Recently on HN people have been acting like the government can dominate the world through wiretapping. As if the NSA can find out a few secrets and people will bow their heads and be silent. In a democracy where we have constitutionally protected rights, why should one need the courage of MLK to do the right thing. Also, why go through the pain of following a constitution if we define right/wrong by "the will of the people at the time".
twelvechairs 13y ago
> This is a case of the government executing the will of the people at the time. How do you know that it was the will of the people of the time to persecute communists? There was no referendum. In any case there are important protections in the US system to prevent 'mob rule' and the persecution of people for ideological purposes. These override "the will of the people at the time". Also - "I thought i was doing the right thing" should (and generally does) not get you off the hook for any crime.
cadlin 13y ago
>This story needs some historical context. This is pointed out in the blog post, but the main reason for wiretapping King wasn't his civil rights advocacy, but his communist leanings. Marin Luther King, Jr. leaned "communist" in the sense that he was an opponent of the Vietnam war and a proponent of social and economic equality. The US has a history of branding dissidents as traitors. It's no different than today when the government repeatedly uses "because terrorism" to justify any action it takes.
Alex3917 13y ago
"Today communism seems like a failed political ideology, a cute thing that hippies like along with pot and drum circles." That's because today it's basically illegal to be liberal, so the only openly liberal folks left are super fringy. The reason why communism seems this way today has less to do with the fact that the US triumphed over communism, and more with the fact that the US triumphed over freedom.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  Uhhh communists and liberals _hate_ each other, I'm not sure where you get that it's 'basically illegal to be liberal,' either. Neoliberalism is the prevailing social order at the moment.
  - cynest 13y ago
    Which != left liberalism.
gruseom 13y ago
the main reason for wiretapping King wasn't his civil rights advocacy, but his communist leanings What communist leanings? My understanding is that he had none, and that this was just made up by people who disliked King for other reasons. A bit of Googling corroborates this [1], but if there's evidence I'd be curious to hear it. If King's "communist leanings" didn't exist then they could hardly have been "the main reason for wire-tapping him" or indeed the reason for anything at all. Something non-existent can't provide any "historical context" either. I think the context you're trying to draw leads in fact to the opposite conclusion. "Suspicion of communism" then equals "suspicion of terrorism" now, and what the story shows is how easily these powers become abused. "Suspicion of X" is a self-confirming charge after all. Edit: I also think you're really stretching things to argue that Hoover going after King was "the government executing the will of the people". 1. http://www.snopes.com/history/american/mlking.asp http://www.snopes.com/history/american/mlking.asp. The email circular at the top of that page indicates the quality of thinking among some people who like to believe in King's "communist leanings". Thanks to Google I've just learned that there's a whole world in which this is still a thing: http://www.martinlutherking.org/thebeast.html http://www.martinlutherking.org/thebeast.html.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  If Iraq's WMDs didn't exist they could hardly have been the main reason for invading, yes?
  - gruseom 13y ago
    Sure, I guess the distinction is between "WMDs", which couldn't cause a war because they didn't exist, and false beliefs about them, which did exist and were (arguably) one of the reasons.
- Karunamon 13y ago
  The bottom of that last page links to Stormfront. Disgusting, really.
- winfred 13y ago
  What communist leanings? My understanding is that he had none, and that this was just made up by people who disliked King for other reasons. Which was a fairly common practice at the time. Anyone expressing a political opinion that ran contrary to the ruling class was flagged "communist".
YesThatTom2 13y ago
"communist leanings" -- When he was talking about racism it was fine. Then he started talking about poverty and Vietnam. That's what set off alarm bells. Poverty: i.e. talking about the economic injustice that perpetuates racism. That is... how we won't all be free until poverty is eliminated. Simple-minded people can't figure out that one can be against poverty without being a communist. Vietnam: He started asking, "Hey, why are so many black people being sent to Vietnam to die?" Well, since we were fighting communism in Vietnam anyone against the war must be for communism, right? (wrong, but that's how simple people think) Ironically he wasn't a communist... at all. In fact, he often started public speeches (like this one http://depts.drew.edu/lib/archives/online_exhibits/King/index.html http://depts.drew.edu/lib/archives/online_exhibits/King/inde... ) with a diatribe against communism. Listen to the first few minutes of that speech, it is both hilarious (he opens with some jokes) and serious.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  "When gave bread to the poor, I was called a saint. When I asked why they were poor, I was called a communist."
rmc 13y ago
I'm well aware of how big the cold war was in the west. And it got me thinking. If I W's sent back in time to the 70s or 80s, I wouldn't really be able to explain how the Soviet union fell. "it just sorta dissolved, there was no invasion, no great catastrophe...". Which is weird to think that the greatest shaper of 20th century political life just vanished
markdown 13y ago
> This story needs some historical context. This is pointed out in the blog post, but the main reason for wiretapping King wasn't his civil rights advocacy, but his communist leanings. How does that make it any different? It was not illegal to support communism.
TheCondor 13y ago
Replace "communism" with "terrorism" and you see where we are now. There are some differences though, get labeled a "terrorist" and you might not even go to court. It's just a lot of power to give to a few. Fear of MLK had a lot more to do with him being black than communism too, think about that. You think there is a reason the batman shooting and Sandyhook weren't called terrorism? Did you observe that outright odd exchange between Romney and Obama on whether Bhengazi was "terror?"
coldtea 13y ago
>This is pointed out in the blog post, but the main reason for wiretapping King wasn't his civil rights advocacy, but his communist leanings. A black pastor fighting for civil rights had "communist leanings"? LOL. A "commie" was just what the government used to call everyone in favour of change, regardless of what relation he had with communism, or if he had any at all. If the "Dixie Chicks" had spoken against Bush back in 1960, they would have been labeled "commies" too. In fact, they were called that even in 2004. >Hoover in particular had spent his entire life fighting communism and saw it as the greatest threat our country had ever faced. Many of our parents or grandparents had nuclear bomb drills in elementary school, ducking and covering under their desks to protect themselves from the communist threat. Let's not do the old trick of pining it to somebody's whimsy ("one bad apple"). Those ideas were spread in all government, not because of some irrational fear of communism, but because they wanted to protect their and their buddies interests. Anything pro-worker, pro-civil rights, or anti-war, was labelled communist -- in a similar way to today's Fox News commentary. But the same tactics were employed far before the nuclear bomb, Hoover, or even USSR even existed. Even in the 19th century, workers demands and ethnic groups fighting for equality were met with similar tactics, police brutality and government spying. >This isn't a story of "Evil US government subverts wiretapping power to go after peaceful protestor". This is a case of the government executing the will of the people at the time. No, it's not. It's a case of a government that continually crashed the people and their will, to support the interests of the few (industrialists, corporations, etc). Check the history of the labour movement in the US for more details. I'd also recommend Howard Zinn's "A people's history of the United States". >Hindsight is 20/20 and looking back their actions seem evil, but in historical context the FBI was doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing: fighting communism with everything they had. No, history doesn't absolve crimes. If it did then the SS did what they supposed to be doing to: fighting jews with everything they had (Godwin's law be damned). And why should they "fight communism with everything they had"? Wasn't the US supposed to be a free country, with freedom of speech and freedom to adhere to any ideology you wanted to?
sciurus 13y ago
Accusations of communism were often nothing more than a polemical tool used to attack more liberal forces in politics, such as proponents of the New Deal or racial equality, that the accuser opposed for other reasons.

by hooande 13y ago

foobarqux 13y ago

COINTELPRO did not only target suspected communists. > As if the NSA can find out a few secrets and people will bow their heads and be silent. To say that it doesn't have a significant influence is not credible.

glurgh 13y ago

The government at the time saw communism everywhere and Hoover's FBI was eager to paint any dissenter as a communist. The civil rights movement and racial relations in the US themselves were used for propaganda purposes by the Soviet Union. The evidence of MLK's 'communist leanings' of any significance is pretty weak. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.#Allegations_of_communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.#Allega... The idea that Hoover's FBI was somehow 'executing the will of the people' rather than the will of J. Edgar Hoover seems pretty tenuous.

mjn 13y ago
One bit of evidence supporting that view is that COINTELPRO targeted not only King, but basically the entire civil-rights movement. The NAACP, CORE, the SCLC, etc. were all targeted as potentially subversive. Which in a way they were, since their purpose was to oppose the prevailing social policy in much of the country.
gruseom 13y ago
The evidence of MLK's 'communist leanings' of any significance is pretty weak. Pretty weak, or non-existent? Unless I'm missing something, that Wikipedia page doesn't contain weak evidence, it contains no evidence.
- glurgh 13y ago
  It's just a roundabout, equivocating way to say 'you're full of it', since that would be rude and against site guidelines.

jluxenberg 13y ago

Communism may or may not be incompatible with the US constitution. A surveillance state is _certainly_ incompatible with the constitution and threatens our civil liberties. Having not lived during the Cold War nor studied it, I don't have a perspective on what that is like. But I find it difficult to understand the idea that a political ideology like Communism ought to be "illegal."

unimpressive 13y ago
>Having not lived during the Cold War nor studied it, I don't have a perspective on what that is like. But I find it difficult to understand the idea that a political ideology like Communism ought to be "illegal." Let me help: http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/pdf/4-1.pdf#zoom=100 http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/c... Basically, every communist (Read: Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist/etc) party that existed during the 20th century took its orders from the U.S.S.R. The authoritarian form of Marxism practiced by the Bolsheviks would never fly with the population of the United States, so the Soviets would use the sympathies of American communists to leak info and sabotage national defense programs. This meant that every communist was a de facto U.S.S.R spy in the eyes of the USA. The above document is a report to President Truman in 1946 about the ideological underpinnings that would go on to cause the cold war.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  And we had our own Democracy cheerleaders trying to export our system to every corner of the globe as well. If they were honest, they would have allowed discussion and dialog rather than the McCarthyite witch hunts and branding communism as AIDs-spreading terrorists strapped with nuclear suicide bombs. They didn't even trust in their own ideology to survive a rigorous examination, and that's why they turned to demonization.
  - btilly 13y ago
    Not so fast. We backed multiple military coups in multiple democracies. Basically any tin-pot dictator who wanted our support could declare themselves "anti-communist" and they had it. And many, many did so. No matter how obvious it should have been that we did not want to support their actions.

movingahead 13y ago

> Recently on HN people have been acting like the government can dominate the world through wiretapping. As if the NSA can find out a few secrets and people will bow their heads and be silent. In a democracy where we have constitutionally protected rights, why should one need the courage of MLK to do the right thing. Also, why go through the pain of following a constitution if we define right/wrong by "the will of the people at the time".

twelvechairs 13y ago

> This is a case of the government executing the will of the people at the time. How do you know that it was the will of the people of the time to persecute communists? There was no referendum. In any case there are important protections in the US system to prevent 'mob rule' and the persecution of people for ideological purposes. These override "the will of the people at the time". Also - "I thought i was doing the right thing" should (and generally does) not get you off the hook for any crime.

cadlin 13y ago

>This story needs some historical context. This is pointed out in the blog post, but the main reason for wiretapping King wasn't his civil rights advocacy, but his communist leanings. Marin Luther King, Jr. leaned "communist" in the sense that he was an opponent of the Vietnam war and a proponent of social and economic equality. The US has a history of branding dissidents as traitors. It's no different than today when the government repeatedly uses "because terrorism" to justify any action it takes.

Alex3917 13y ago

"Today communism seems like a failed political ideology, a cute thing that hippies like along with pot and drum circles." That's because today it's basically illegal to be liberal, so the only openly liberal folks left are super fringy. The reason why communism seems this way today has less to do with the fact that the US triumphed over communism, and more with the fact that the US triumphed over freedom.

steveklabnik 13y ago
Uhhh communists and liberals _hate_ each other, I'm not sure where you get that it's 'basically illegal to be liberal,' either. Neoliberalism is the prevailing social order at the moment.
- cynest 13y ago
  Which != left liberalism.

gruseom 13y ago

the main reason for wiretapping King wasn't his civil rights advocacy, but his communist leanings What communist leanings? My understanding is that he had none, and that this was just made up by people who disliked King for other reasons. A bit of Googling corroborates this [1], but if there's evidence I'd be curious to hear it. If King's "communist leanings" didn't exist then they could hardly have been "the main reason for wire-tapping him" or indeed the reason for anything at all. Something non-existent can't provide any "historical context" either. I think the context you're trying to draw leads in fact to the opposite conclusion. "Suspicion of communism" then equals "suspicion of terrorism" now, and what the story shows is how easily these powers become abused. "Suspicion of X" is a self-confirming charge after all. Edit: I also think you're really stretching things to argue that Hoover going after King was "the government executing the will of the people". 1. http://www.snopes.com/history/american/mlking.asp http://www.snopes.com/history/american/mlking.asp. The email circular at the top of that page indicates the quality of thinking among some people who like to believe in King's "communist leanings". Thanks to Google I've just learned that there's a whole world in which this is still a thing: http://www.martinlutherking.org/thebeast.html http://www.martinlutherking.org/thebeast.html.

thaumasiotes 13y ago
If Iraq's WMDs didn't exist they could hardly have been the main reason for invading, yes?
- gruseom 13y ago
  Sure, I guess the distinction is between "WMDs", which couldn't cause a war because they didn't exist, and false beliefs about them, which did exist and were (arguably) one of the reasons.
Karunamon 13y ago
The bottom of that last page links to Stormfront. Disgusting, really.
winfred 13y ago
What communist leanings? My understanding is that he had none, and that this was just made up by people who disliked King for other reasons. Which was a fairly common practice at the time. Anyone expressing a political opinion that ran contrary to the ruling class was flagged "communist".

YesThatTom2 13y ago

"communist leanings" -- When he was talking about racism it was fine. Then he started talking about poverty and Vietnam. That's what set off alarm bells. Poverty: i.e. talking about the economic injustice that perpetuates racism. That is... how we won't all be free until poverty is eliminated. Simple-minded people can't figure out that one can be against poverty without being a communist. Vietnam: He started asking, "Hey, why are so many black people being sent to Vietnam to die?" Well, since we were fighting communism in Vietnam anyone against the war must be for communism, right? (wrong, but that's how simple people think) Ironically he wasn't a communist... at all. In fact, he often started public speeches (like this one http://depts.drew.edu/lib/archives/online_exhibits/King/index.html http://depts.drew.edu/lib/archives/online_exhibits/King/inde... ) with a diatribe against communism. Listen to the first few minutes of that speech, it is both hilarious (he opens with some jokes) and serious.

steveklabnik 13y ago
"When gave bread to the poor, I was called a saint. When I asked why they were poor, I was called a communist."

rmc 13y ago

I'm well aware of how big the cold war was in the west. And it got me thinking. If I W's sent back in time to the 70s or 80s, I wouldn't really be able to explain how the Soviet union fell. "it just sorta dissolved, there was no invasion, no great catastrophe...". Which is weird to think that the greatest shaper of 20th century political life just vanished

markdown 13y ago

TheCondor 13y ago

Replace "communism" with "terrorism" and you see where we are now. There are some differences though, get labeled a "terrorist" and you might not even go to court. It's just a lot of power to give to a few. Fear of MLK had a lot more to do with him being black than communism too, think about that. You think there is a reason the batman shooting and Sandyhook weren't called terrorism? Did you observe that outright odd exchange between Romney and Obama on whether Bhengazi was "terror?"

coldtea 13y ago

>This is pointed out in the blog post, but the main reason for wiretapping King wasn't his civil rights advocacy, but his communist leanings. A black pastor fighting for civil rights had "communist leanings"? LOL. A "commie" was just what the government used to call everyone in favour of change, regardless of what relation he had with communism, or if he had any at all. If the "Dixie Chicks" had spoken against Bush back in 1960, they would have been labeled "commies" too. In fact, they were called that even in 2004. >Hoover in particular had spent his entire life fighting communism and saw it as the greatest threat our country had ever faced. Many of our parents or grandparents had nuclear bomb drills in elementary school, ducking and covering under their desks to protect themselves from the communist threat. Let's not do the old trick of pining it to somebody's whimsy ("one bad apple"). Those ideas were spread in all government, not because of some irrational fear of communism, but because they wanted to protect their and their buddies interests. Anything pro-worker, pro-civil rights, or anti-war, was labelled communist -- in a similar way to today's Fox News commentary. But the same tactics were employed far before the nuclear bomb, Hoover, or even USSR even existed. Even in the 19th century, workers demands and ethnic groups fighting for equality were met with similar tactics, police brutality and government spying. >This isn't a story of "Evil US government subverts wiretapping power to go after peaceful protestor". This is a case of the government executing the will of the people at the time. No, it's not. It's a case of a government that continually crashed the people and their will, to support the interests of the few (industrialists, corporations, etc). Check the history of the labour movement in the US for more details. I'd also recommend Howard Zinn's "A people's history of the United States". >Hindsight is 20/20 and looking back their actions seem evil, but in historical context the FBI was doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing: fighting communism with everything they had. No, history doesn't absolve crimes. If it did then the SS did what they supposed to be doing to: fighting jews with everything they had (Godwin's law be damned). And why should they "fight communism with everything they had"? Wasn't the US supposed to be a free country, with freedom of speech and freedom to adhere to any ideology you wanted to?

sciurus 13y ago

Accusations of communism were often nothing more than a polemical tool used to attack more liberal forces in politics, such as proponents of the New Deal or racial equality, that the accuser opposed for other reasons.