Oliver Stone was probably going to CHAMPION King's later Marxist "labour party" talk and cite that as the reason "the US government" had REVEREND King killed.
Posted on 01/20/2014 8:01:16 AM PST by Behind Liberal Lines
Oliver Stone announced on Friday he is no longer involved with an upcoming movie about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after the studio rejected his script.
"Sad news. My MLK project involvement has ended. I did an extensive rewrite of the script, but the producers won't go with it," the director wrote on Twitter.
"The script dealt w/ issues of adultery, conflicts within the movement, and King's spiritual transformation into a higher, more radical being," Stone continued. "I'm told the estate & the 'respectable' black community that guard King's reputation won't approve it. They suffocate the man & the truth. I wish you could see the film I would've made. I fear if 'they' ever make it, it'll be just another commemoration of the March on Washington. Martin, I grieve for you. You are still a great inspiration for your fellow Americans--but, thank God, not a saint."
(Excerpt) Read more at syracuse.com ...
King should have had his own spies out to check on LBJ. Lyndon had more women than a sultan, and this was not covered up very well. All he had to do was talk to some Texas Observer reporters to get the dirt he needed.
Well, he was a great man, but great men are often not good men. But even holy men attract women, as a magnet does iron filing.
My second favorite Civil War general. My favorite is George Thomas, of whom Lee was fond. If he had gone South, lordy! Thomas never lost a battle. His victory at Nashville, with a thrown together force, was a masterpiece, and with almost no casualties, he broke Hood’s army.
Oliver just doesn't get it!
Well, here's a clue-by-four, Ollie ..... check out that statue of MLK on the National Mall. It's institutional Communist "ort" (that's what we call public eye-aborting decorations in Texas), the kind only North Koreans and Chicoms and hidebound Stalinists love.
And the sculptor was a dyed-in-the-wool Chicom.
MLK wasn't a Communist, but that won't stop American Communists from stealing him!
Get it now, Ollie?
Oliver Stone is a crackpot. He is an avant-garde agitator for the comintern. Therefore I dismiss anything he says, right or wrong, because he has no credibility.
My, my... thank you, Vigilanteman. ! I had forgotten about those files. I guess everyone is “making hay” while they still can. :-)
That's probably a good thing. MLK may well not have been a "saint", but his good works don't need the Hollywood pervert treatment, either. Good on his family.
I would suggest to Mr. Stone that he try writing a
script dealing with the questions of Obama’s record
and see what happens to him...
I can think of 50 Americans who are more deserving of a national Federal holiday than Martin Luther King. One would be Dwight D Eisenhower for winning WW2 and Henry Ford, the innovator of mass production.
I haven’t delved into it too deeply.
LBJ liked to impress people and show off. He courted the media including calling them in for late night drinks including the female members of the media at the time.
Oh, you betcha it would!! Now, someone call Glen Beck and tell him he’s on the left of Oliver Stone!
The real Black Democrat is portrayed best as #25 on Seattle SeaHawks
MLK claimed to be working for liberty. and notwithstanding the egregious racial bigotry of his time, he should have completely rejected the murderous tyranny of Marxism and communism as an unacceptable palliative in ANY context.
I wish to make it clear that I think that Martin Luther King was a man of enormous courage, charisma, and intellect that profoundly altered the course of American history and made it a better country in so far has its promise of justice for all is concerned.
This does not mean however that his legacy to the Civil Rights movement has been one of unalloyed good. I believe much of his bequeathment resulted in an over reliance on big government statist solutions to problems within the black community that require individual initiatives to correct. Martin Luther King’s frequent references to this nation’s founding documents are well known. His reflections on Communism are much less well known and undoubtedly contributed to his general philosophy. We owe it to ourselves to examine the effects of this legacy and contextualize it so has to solve the problems facing the black community today.
While King himself was not a communist, he did business with communists and was influenced by them. This delicate subject, made more so given the martyrdom and subsequent lionization of King, should nevertheless be broached as a means of providing insight into some of the darker forces that worked their way into what was essentially a pro American, conservative, Christian civil rights movement.
King surrounded himself with communists from the beginning of his career. His closest advisor Stanley Levison was a Communist. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, formed in 1957 and led by King, had Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth as Vice President who was at the same time president of the Southern Conference Education Fund, an identified communist front according to the Legislative Committee on un-American Activities, Louisiana (Report April 13, 1964 pp. 31-38). The field director of SCEF was Carl Braden, a known communist agitator who was also involved in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which counted Lee Harvey Oswald, the communist assassin of President Kennedy as a member. King maintained regular correspondence with Carl Braden. Bayard Rustin, a known communist, was also on the board of SCLC.
Dr. King addressed the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., 1957, previously known as the Commonwealth College until the House Committee on un-American Activities sited it as a communist front (April 27, 1949). HCAA found that Commonwealth was using religion as a way to infiltrate the African-American community by, among other techniques, comparing New Testament texts to those of Karl Marx. King knew many communists associated with the Highlander school.
King hired communist official Hunter Pitts O’Dell, 1960, at the SCLC. The St. Louis Globe Democrat reported (Oct. 26, 1962) “A Communist has infiltrated the top administrative post in the Rev. Martin Luther King’s SCLC. He is Jack H. O’Dell, acting executive director of conference activities in the southeastern states including Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.” Dr. King fired O’Dell when this became public but subsequently rehired him to head the SCLC New York office.
King himself expresses a Marxist outlook in his book “Stride Toward Freedom” when he stated, “in spite of the shortcomings of his analysis, Marx had raised some basic questions. I was deeply concerned from my early teen days about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, and my reading of Marx made me even more conscious of this gulf. Although modern American capitalism has greatly reduced the gap through social reforms, there was still need for a better distribution of wealth. Moreover, Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system”
King, unfortunately, didn’t understand that it was Capitalism and freedom that was responsible for the successes the African-American community already had achieved in his day and the key to future success. By “better distribution of wealth” King meant state control over the economy. His contempt for “the profit motive” was unfortunate given that African-Americans should’ve been encouraged by their leaders to seek fair profit to the best of their ability. King’s leftist ideas contributed to an opening of the floodgates to such radicals as Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, the Black Panthers, as well as the burning and looting of African-American neighborhoods, the institutionalizing of poverty perpetrating welfare, the destruction of the family, drugs, violence, racism, and crime.
In “Stride Toward Freedom” Dr. King states “In short, I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers from a dialectical point of view, combining a partial yea and a partial no. My readings of Marx convinced me that truth is found neither in Marxism nor in traditional capitalism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically capitalism failed to see truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. The Kingdom of God is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both.”
King, like Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, had “a dialectical point of view.” The goal of the dialectic is authoritarianism. A nation, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, cannot be half free and half slave. By advocating socialism, King chose an imperious stand toward his own people in contrast to a stand for genuine freedom, self-rule, self-sufficiency, private ownership, and the accumulation of capital. King did not advocate the American system of free market capitalism. Instead, he stood for a system that has stunted the growth of African-Americans as well as the rest of us.
All Marxists believe in Hegelian Dialectics. This is a belief that “progress” is achieved through conflict between opposing viewpoints. Any ideological assertion (thesis) will create its own opposite (antithesis). Progress is achieved when a conclusion (synthesis) is reached which espouses aspects of both the thesis and antithesis.
For example, Hitler had a dialectical point of view. He rejected Marxist class warfare, but embraced the basic socialist idea of the insignificance of the individual compared to the collective state.
This belief in dialectical progress is why liberals and “progressives” pit the rich against the poor, old against young, black against white, men against women, homosexuals against straight, ad nauseam.
This issue is somewhat clouded by what Dr. King wrote in his 1957 book “Stride toward Freedom: the Montgomery story”, in which he wrote the following devastating critique of the sort of communism practiced in the Communist super state of the Union of Soviet Socialist republics.
“During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people. For the first time I carefully scrutinized *Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. I also read some interpretive works on the thinking of Marx and Lenin. In reading such Communist writings I drew certain conclusions that have remained with me as convictions to this day.
First, I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularist and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept, for as a Christian, I believe that there is a creative personal power in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality-a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.
Second, I strongly disagreed with communism’s ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything-force, violence murder, lying-is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end. This type of relativism was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is pre-existent in the means.
Third, I opposed communism’s political totalitarianism. In communism, the individual ends up in subjection to the state. True, the Marxists would argue that the state is an ‘interim’ reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges; but the state is the end while it lasts, and man is only a means to that end. And if man’s so-called rights and liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, and his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.
This deprecation of individual freedom was objectionable to me. I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as means to the end of the state; but always as an end within himself.”
Martin Luther King Jr., *Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story* (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 92-93
Don’t forget that the above was written in 1957, a period in which the oppressions of the Soviet Union are painfully evident, evidenced by the brutal repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. At the time Stride toward Freedom was written, domestic attitudes toward communism could not have been more hostile. Toward the end of Dr. Martin Luther King’s life, the counterculture revolution of the sixties and the leftist tinted civil rights movement made favorable considerations of communism generally more palatable.
• King wrote in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? “I am now convinced…the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” But “to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure” it “must be pegged to the median income of society, not the lowest levels of income” and “must automatically increase as the total social income grows.” So far, his proposal was not materially different from Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth program. This was from his later works, but he had voiced support for “a modified form of socialism” for some time. While accepting his Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King told the press, “We feel we have much to learn from Scandinavia’s democratic socialist tradition and from the manner in which you have overcome many of the social and economic problems that still plague far more powerful and affluent nations. “Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic.”
•
• “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.”; and
• “Within common law we have ample precedents for special compensatory programs.”
While Martin Luther King Day should be one of reflection and appreciation for what has been accomplished, and a reckoning of what still needs to be done, it should also be a day of understanding, in terms clear of emotionally driven rhetoric, where the civil rights movement went wrong. A major key to this understanding, I would contend, is the destructive effects that communist ideas and outright infiltration has had on the African-American community. Communists tried to use African-Americans as cannon fodder by stoking hatred and racial division. A predominantly white left-wing establishment promoted Black communists in order to preserve an informal system of oppression.
The fact is that he WAS a socialist and that goes to the heart of what went wrong with the civil rights establishment after the legal battles against codified discrimination were won.
I am a black man who has been getting calluses on my dome from butting heads with those in my community who refuse to relinquish big government statist solutions for the problems plaguing the black community in favor of free market solutions that are far more appropriate today. These forces frequently cite Dr. King and use his exhortations to government to lead the way. They specifically cite his socialist outlook as justification for their continuance. The two parent black family was destroyed by LBJ’s welfare state. That was the worst cultural calamity to EVER befall the black community in the US, and the most destructive force in its cultural life notwithstanding the imposition of Jim Crow law via the Supreme Court’s Plessy v Fergueson decision. MLK was a leading proponent for expanding the welfare state, whose baleful effects were just beginning to be seen in the black community.
MLK was a man of enormous charisma and courage and certainly a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement. There is much about him that I admire. An assessment of his life could creditably yield the adjective of great. Despite that, he does not deserve to be the ONLY American with his own holiday named after him. That honor should be reserved for only one person in American history, the greatest of all Americans, George Washington. More so than any other SINGLE figure in our history, he was the “indispensable man.” Without his courage, acumen, honor, and integrity, the US would simply not exist, and if it did, it probably would have been as a monarchy and certainly not as a constitutional republic.
The fact that MLK, Jr. has come to represent the ENTIRE face of the Civil Rights movement is a slap in the face to scores of people who accomplished much, those that were trying to do the right thing without necessarily seeking personal glory for themselves, let alone martyrdom to try to equal Christ, which is blasphemous on its face.
What of the heroic Republican federal officials from Reconstruction, for which almost nobody can name today ? Those men had NOBODY to pave the way for them. Even a Black Republican minister and Congressional candidate from Chicago, the Rev. Archibald Carey, Jr., who delivered the “Let Freedom Ring” speech before the 1952 Republican National Convention, has been forgotten (a speech largely plagarized by MLK, Jr). Nobody knows who Rev. Carey is today or what he spoke.
MLK’s birthday holiday was a sop to PC and a reflection of the DemocRAT Congress that voted it. The depth of MLK’s association with the most anti-freedom ideology (Communism) of our time will prove to very discomfiting when it is fully revealed. Additionally, MLK’s legacy to the modern day civil rights movement is a socialist bequeathment that of looking to big government solutions for many of the behavioral problems in today’s black community. MLK continues to cast a long shadow over most of the modern day civil rights establishment and black politicians who largely reject free market, educationally based solutions to the unique problems plaguing the black community.
Damned. The nutcase Stoned wants to tell some of the truth about Dr. King Jr. and Hollywood goes into coverup, fire-his-ass mode. Well golly gee whiz! I’ll be knee high to a horned toad.
The shit has hit the fan and a lot of people are ducking. Problem is, nobody will tell the truth about King.
He was many things, some great, some good, some not so good. You’ll find a little about his shady side in David Garrow’s “The FBI and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
The problem was that Garrow, a respected left-liberal historian/professor, found things that he didn’t know about, didn’t understand, and didn’t research further.
He stumbled upon the FBI’s most successful Soviet penetration operation in history, “Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin”, (the book), by my late friend John Barron, Regnery, 1996. He could have blown the operation wide open but Barron finally got permission from the Bureau to write a real history of “Solo” and company. This prevented Garrow from exposing the deep penetration operation before it could be wrapped up and the people inside gotten out to safety.
Barron helped expose the Soviet/Communist Party USA backgrounds and allegiances of two of King’s top advisors - Stanley Levison (KGB money handler for the Party, CPUSA member, King’s financial and political advisor) and Jack O’Dell (Hunter Pitts O’Dell), CPUSA National Committee Member as of 1961 (See: “Structure and Organization of the Communist Party of the United States”, Part 1, Hearing, House Committee on Un-American Activities, nov. 20, 21 & 22, 1961, p. 576.
O’Dell was King’s personal secretary/advisor, a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organization (New York Chapter), then he became Jesse Jackson’s top man as the head of the much-needed (sarc) “International Department” of Operation Breadbasket (Jesse’s first conjob), then its successor, Operation PUSH, and then the Rainbow Coalition.
O’Dell was involved deeply in the “Hanoi Lobby” and the “Anti-Defense Lobby”, including the 1982-83 Nuclear Freeze/Mobilization for Survival protests against the cruise missile and Honest John missiles for Germany to prevent any Soviet invasion.
O’Dell was also a US delegate/member of the KGB/Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union “peace” front, the World Peace Council, from at least 1977-1980, according to ther “List of Members 1977-1980” book.
In this book, O’Dell was described as “Associate Editor, “Freedomways” Magazine (the CPUSA’s magazine aimed at the American black population); International Affairs Director, “People United to Save Humanity” (PUSH)”.
O’Dell was one of the communists behind Jackson’s trip to Syria in 1983 to “bring back” an American pilot shot down over Lebanon/Syria (Goodman), and turn it into an anti-American propaganda operation.
I wonder if all of this would have been in Stone’s movie. Guess we will never no.
Re Dr. King’s “adultery”, it was reasonably well known within the King family that he was “fooling around” (but the extent to which has never been made public). Our new FBI director Comy referred to wiretaps on Dr. King (they were mainly for internal security reasons because of his extensive contact with CPUSA/KGB operatives (some of whom he probably didn’t know were such, as they used and played him like a second-hand violin).
Comy said that he didn’t the Bureau to ever do to anyone what they did to Dr. King. Comy is full of crap. Perhaps he should read all the files on Dr. King. he might learn a few things about subversion along the way.
He might also learn about something that reportedly happened overseas that could have exposed him to Soviet blackmail and/or would have wrecked his marriage and his organization. Or so my source told me, and he should know.
No wonder Hollywood had a leftist shitfit when Stone actually proposed telling some of the truth about Dr. King in his planned movie.
As Harvey Weinstein and other wealthy leftists would say, “We don’t need no stinkin’ truth in our movies. Lies and coverups will do just as fine”.
Gee, I can hear the papers burning at FBI headquarters right now. The King files up in flames. Crackle, crackle, crackle.
Sometimes the “truth will not out”.
In the old days you could be in the mix on internal security issues if you knew the right people and they trusted you. And I knew some of the right people, yessire’.
Good men, good patriots. Sorely missed!(Bill, Ray, Ray, and Richard, among others).
FReepers. You can try to guess who these men were, if you want, or just trust me, they were in the “know”.
I hadn't heard that before but it makes it somewhat similar to the Lawrence v. Texas case then. From DAY 1 they said they would challenge the arrest up to the Supreme Court to have same sex sodomy laws overturned.
Jefferson did not have a “relationship” with Sally Hemmings. It was apparently his brother, according to DNA samples tested over the past 10-15 years ago.
Google “Robert Turner and Thomas Jefferson” to see the articles Prof. Turner has written about this allegation. He disproves it in an academic and intelligent manner, something which the Left has tried to keep covered up in order to discredit Jefferson as not only a slave owner, but a slave screwer.
Don’t let the Left get away with anything that you can disprove. Do the research and write about it, either in letters to the editor, columns, on talk shows, or here at FR. We can then spread the “documents” facts around, unlike the Left’s smearing bullshit lies around.
That is how you kick the Left in the nuts, with facts and intelligence. They hate that.
Oliver Stone was probably going to CHAMPION King's later Marxist "labour party" talk and cite that as the reason "the US government" had REVEREND King killed.
Not everything King did was wrong or associated with Communists. He really did believe in the goodness of man and of brotherhood, but like a couple other key figures in American history, he was sandwiched between Soviet operatives and pushed leftward into the Communist Party orbit (Highland School for one. His anti Vietnam speech of 1967, for another. Need to know who wrote it, but it was reported as written in Harry Belafonte’s home, which may open another can of red worms).
Even Ralph Abernath, after a stint with the Soviet propaganda machine of the World Peace Council and other fronts, turned away from them and joined a national anti-communist organization. I got that from its head, a well known American political figure.
King was Greek opera figure of both good deeds and tragedies due to personal flaws.
If you understand this, then you will begin to understand the complexities of the man and how he was exploited by the Reds. It happened to Oppenheimer, Einstein, and even Eleanor Roosevelt until the Congress/FBI told her the truth about some of her associations, which she publicly dropped and denounced as Communist fronts.
Welcome to the wonderful world of subversion, which leads today, right to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW, DC.
To DMZFrank: Extremely well written and documented post about King’s early years and Communism. Ironically, I hadn’t seen your comments when I wrote mine, which appeared in the next post position.
You’ve done a good job assessing the times and context of Dr. King in the 1950’s, esp. he comments about communism. By 1957 or so, Stanley Levison had wormed his way into King’s confidence because he helped him get out of southern jails. Thus the KGB got their man “in the door” of an up and coming young black preacher and civil rights leader.
This is how they worked. Then they got Jack O’Dell, one of the CPUSA’s top southern organizers, in as his secretary. (I wonder if Shuttlesworth was the insider on this, or Bevel?)
Either way, King ended up in the infamous “Communist Sandwich”, with, in the slightly rearranged words of “Steelers Wheel”, “Communists to the left of me, Commies on the Right, here I am stuck in the middle with you”.
Could your “DMZ” be up north in I Corps? If so, I never got there. A typhoon wiped out our flights. Did get to Panmunjean in Korea. Well, one DMZ out of two ain’t back, but the real story was in Nam.
Keep writing. I like your approach to telling the truth.
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