Martin Luther King

Earlier this month Democracy Now! aired the audio of a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., found by the the director of the Pacifica Radio archives, Brian DeShazor, about apartheid in South Africa and the struggle for black civil rights in the United States. Dr. King gave the speech in December 1964 at London’s City Temple.

This article won’t look at the parts of the speech that focus on civil rights, segregation (legal and de jure), or the “abyss of exploitation,” as King called it, that blacks faced (and continue to face) in America. Rather, it will compare what King said about South Africa and how that compares to the fight for justice in occupied Palestine.

During his 1964 speech, he compared the “struggle for freedom and justice in the United States” by black Americans to those engaged in a “far more deadly struggle for freedom in South Africa.”

In part, he said:

Despite being disproven as a strategy for reducing crime, the broken windows policing theory is still used in New York and throughout in the United States to crack down on disorder and nonviolent crime. To think that harsh enforcement of this type of “crime” would prevent serious crime like homicide and assault is patently absurd on its face. If you want to rid society of the most serious crimes, you should be enforcing the most serious crimes, like aggressive war.

Call it broken countries policing.

In the United States in 2014, you may be arrested for selling loose cigarettes, jumping turnstiles, dancing on the subways, and having small amounts of marijuana, but not for assassination, torture, anal rape, illegal surveillance, or invading, occupying and bombing sovereign countries.

Martin Luther King’s Lost Speech & The BDS Movement

Broken Countries Policing: American Terrorism & Racist Violence