I don't write about politics for a reason, you know

Because policy has become so insulated from politics that even discussing stuff doesn't seem like a worthwhile way to spend time.

Or my blood sugar level is low.

San Francisco Bay View | The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X | Part 1:

Following the assassinations, in the 1970s, the COINTELPRO (the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program) disruption operations by the government against the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement and radicals and socialists became public knowledge. Under COINTELPRO, U.S. spy agencies used informers, agents and agent provocateurs to disrupt these organizations.

One of the stated purposes of this program was to “neutralize” Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Elijah Muhammad in order to prevent the development, in the government’s terms, of a “Black Messiah” who could unite and lead a mass organization of Black Americans in their quest for freedom and economic equality.

A second assassination of these two leaders has been the attempt to distort what they really stood for in their last years of life. This is a process, described by Lenin in the opening to his book, “State and Revolution” that

in the course of history has happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

As one who was politically active at that time, I believe that it is important to tell the truth about Martin and Malcolm to help keep their ideas alive and prevent them from being reduced to “harmless icons.”

There. I think the mention of COINTELPRO and quote from Stalin should frighten away the idjits. I'd prefer to spend 2004 as far from them as possible, thank you very much.

Mind you, some of the conspiracy theorizing from Negroes worries me -- there's a link at Black Electorate now promising me the truth about HIV/AIDS that I'm quite deliberately not clicking on -- but this piece I did click on, and read, and link to.

Make of that what you will.