We’re from the Government, and We’re Here to Help
Daniel Luban, ladies and gentlemen:
But to illustrate this obvious fact more sharply, consider the following thought experiment. In 1963, as King delivers his famous speech to the March on Washington, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev delivers a public message of his own to the protesters. “We would like to tell these brave voices of freedom,†Khrushchev says, “that they have the full support and solidarity of the USSR. The Soviet Union and the United States Communist Party are ready and willing to perform any measures within our power to help our American brothers and sisters obtain their rights from this oppressive regime. And although Dr. King pretends that he holds no hostility toward the American capitalist system of government itself, and wishes only to secure the ideals of the American founding for all of its citizens, we all know that he and his supporters really yearn for complete regime change in Washington. We in Moscow will do whatever it takes to help you achieve this goal.â€
Comment by Thoreau —
June 22, 2009 @ 11:38 pm
You know what the world needs right now? We need a Bin Laden video. We need Bin Laden to come out and condemn those Persian dogs and Shia heretics for taking to the street in the name of such abominations as women’s rights and democracy. Bin Laden should explain that every true Muslim knows that women are to be ruled by men and men are to be ruled by God, not by popularity contests.
If Osama isn’t available, some other Sunni Arab fanatic will do, but Osama would be perfect for the role.
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 22, 2009 @ 11:40 pm
That’s actually the best idea ever.
Comment by Thoreau —
June 22, 2009 @ 11:46 pm
Coming from the man who wrote the most snarktastic post ever, that really means something!
Comment by Brendan —
June 23, 2009 @ 6:08 am
Actually, at the top of the post, it says:
Comment by abb1 —
June 23, 2009 @ 6:40 am
Yeah, Angela Davis was a big hero in the USSR; King wasn’t. King is a liberal hero, very little class consciousness there.
Comment by rm —
June 23, 2009 @ 9:02 am
Being a conservative means never imagining that people have other points of view. All the people of Iran must secretly wish for our support, because they all know in their hearts we are right. Everyone not like us is just stubbornly pretending to disagree with us.
Comment by TGGP —
June 23, 2009 @ 9:59 am
Actually, King accepted communist economics and worked with a number of communists. Saul Alinsky said that anyone in the civil rights movement who claimed not to have worked with reds was full of it (though he himself was briefly targeted by communists during the Hitler-Stalin pact as a warmonger).
Comment by Walt C —
June 23, 2009 @ 1:48 pm
Did MLK accept communist economics? I know he accepted support from the Communist Party, but I don’t recall him embracing their economics or much of their philosophy.
Early in his life he doesn’t seem at all disposed to communism:
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/9641.html
Comment by Solar Hero —
June 23, 2009 @ 6:53 pm
Well, MLK Jr. did get pretty anti-capitalist around ‘67 or so…interestingly, not long thereafter his head was blown off.
Comment by Gary Farber —
June 24, 2009 @ 8:21 pm
“Jim Lobe, ladies and gentlemen”
?
“by Daniel Luban”
We’ve been discussing this piece at ObWi and what I find odd is that Luban puts it in the hypothetical: Krushschev and Soviet officials and publications (Pravda, etc.) praised the U.S. civil rights struggle all the time; this is a major reason why Eisenhower and Truman made what civil rights gestures they did, and a huge part of why JFK did: because of the international embarrassment Southern racism was causing. It played particularly badly in Africa and the “Third World.” There’s like three billion tons of documentation about this.
Who has to imagine anything about this?
Comment by graeme —
June 25, 2009 @ 8:21 pm
Re: Gary
Sure, but american newspapers are full of criticism of Iran, many american officials do and have been doing the same, and Obama has criticized the country in the past. These parallel the points you mention.
Where the imagined Kruschev quote differs is to go far beyond that, as Obama’s conservative critics are demanding that he goes stridently beyond his current position.