Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to re: "Were Gandhi and Martin Luther King self-respecting radicals? Did they cooperate with the Man?"

Better than their masters
Mary Anne — (archived)

Gandhi and MLK deliberately broke the law. The laws they broke were bad ones, and they chose to highlight that by requiring the laws to be enforced, and embarrassing law enforcement and the governments that made the laws in the process. As a result, it became important to attempt to gather negative information on the upstarts, in the hopes of discrediting them.

They behaved like gentlemen to their persecutors because they had a point to make to their followers. Individuals in the organizations that they led sometimes had less self-control and did indeed act in the ways you describe. That does not make the law just, nor the people spying on the founders of the organizations into protectors.

Your suggestion that the police should be able to spy on anyone they want because of folkloric associations between political dissidents and hardened criminals, rather than because of any hard evidence linking specific people to known criminals or criminal activity, is an offense against our Constitutional right not to be harrassed by the government for our political and religious activities. I can see you don't understand that.

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