7 ms·

Martin Luther King didn't live in a world where we imprison innocent men in legal limbo without trial or habeas corpus, or where we officially sanctioned tortur

by msg 13y ago

Martin Luther King didn't live in a world where we imprison innocent men in legal limbo without trial or habeas corpus, or where we officially sanctioned torture and the oubliette. He could trust that he would be vindicated by the justice system. The whole point of the Snowden story is that the government is not trustworthy in this era. I would not trust the US government to give him justice any more than they did Aaron Swartz. I think Snowden knew exactly what to expect if he "faced the music" and exactly how much attention he could keep on his story in exile.

SqMafia 13y ago
"Martin Luther King didn't live in a world where we imprison innocent men in legal limbo without trial or habeas corpus, or where we officially sanctioned torture and the oubliette. He could trust that he would be vindicated by the justice system." You're kidding me right?!? You honestly think the era he lived in was fair and just to people like him? Do you know how many lynchings there were in Florida alone? Does the name Emmett Till ring a bell? What did you think MLK fought for?
- msg 13y ago
  http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/resources/article/annotated_letter_from_birmingham/#1 http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/resources/article/an... Do any of you believe that there would have been a new Letter from Birmingham Jail if Snowden were imprisoned? Keep in mind the US authorities are calling this civil rights whistleblowing "treason". Aiding the terrorists and enemy combatant status cannot be far behind. Like it or not, the rule of law has been badly damaged by the endless emergency. These days you do your nonviolent resistance from behind the safety of a diplomatic minefield.
  - krapp 13y ago
    What Snowden did is, arguably, treason. Whatever you believe about the righteousness of his cause, or the evil of the programs he exposed, or the corruption of the government pursuing him, that he's being pursued is in fact a case of the system working as intended.
    - akiselev 13y ago
      I believe you have that backwards. The first statement is not arguable while the second one is, because of the nature of the first.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
    - alexqgb 13y ago
      "What Snowden did is, arguably, treason." Not by anyone who understands the legal definition of treason. Among other things, treason presupposes formally declared hostilities. Even Cold War turncoats convicted of espionage for aiding the Soviet Union couldn't be charged with treason, since technically, we were never at war with the USSR.
      - krapp 13y ago
        Fair enough, I'll concede the point. But of course, they would just as well argue we're in the War on Terror. It would be an obvious flimsy justification but, there you are.
        alexqgb 13y ago
        You really don't understand what a formal declaration of war is, do you?
        krapp 13y ago
        I do. I'm suggesting that will probably be the justification, regardless. What is treason and what gets treated as treason can be two different things.
        alexqgb 13y ago
        Sorry, but even the most agressive prosecutor is highly unlikely to bring a charge that is so easily and cleanly dismissed. It's like trying to charge someone with the murder of a person who clearly isn't dead. Our justice system has gotten hyper-agressive, but it's not that bad. At least not yet. A far more likely tack would be trying him under the Espionage Act, which is vague enough to make prosecution easy and defense hard. Relatively speaking, at least.
rdouble 13y ago
Right, MLK lived in a world where innocent men got strung up in trees.
krapp 13y ago
He could trust that he would be vindicated by the justice system. His belief that justice would someday inevitably prevail belied the injustice of his system. To the degree that any of what you suggest was true in the day, it wasn't true at all for blacks, less so for those who didn't 'keep their place'. In this modern case, Edward Snowden is the beneficiary of far, far more privilege and opportunity for fairness from his own government than Martin Luther King could ever have hoped for. Just imagine what the discourse would be if Edward Snowden turned out to be Arabic, or Muslim, or went by a Muslim sounding name. If he fled to the wrong country they might already be picking smoking chunks of him off a cafe wall. There would be no debate in the media as to whether he was a 'hero' or 'traitor'.
rayiner 13y ago
Its this sort of uneducated, a-historical crap that makes it impossible to read HN lately. If you think the government was less scary back then, in the grip of anti-communist paranoia, you're insane, deluded, or just plain uneducated. Saying that MLK could count on a fair shake from a justice system that didn't give any minority a fair shake back then, much less political radicals, is the height of ridiculousness.
- pg 13y ago
  You don't need to resort to insults.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    Frankly, I think the offending comment is insulting to the intelligence, as well as to the (collective) experience of people who were the target of racial discrimination laws. I don't want to be political about it, but HN as a community is sometimes subject to an alarming degree of demographic myopia.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    HN has been especially frustrating for the last 2 weeks. Maybe, instead of hoping that people will maintain perfect civility throughout a nonstop stream of political discussions, something could instead be done to ratchet back the politics on HN?
    - jessaustin 13y ago
      Perhaps reality has been especially frustrating? Although yeah, implying that blacks in the American South in the mid-20th C could rely on the justice system is ridiculous enough to force me to agree with rayiner for once.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Sorry, I got emotional and attacked him instead of his comment. For that I apologize. But he essentially implied that a black guy fighting segregation during the height of communist paranoia and racial tension in the 1960's could count on a fairer shake from the justice system than a wealthy white kid in 2013 with the support of a rich and influential segment of society. That's the kind of statement that tends to engender emotional, rather than cool and collected responses.
anigbrowl 13y ago
You need to read more history. Without commenting on Snowden, I think the US is a substantially freer nation then it was in the time of MLK.
- akiselev 13y ago
  I wouldn't say that the US is substantially more free today than it was then.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    Obviously it's a matter of opinion, but the comment I replied to offered a naively rosy picture of how justice was administered in MLK's day. It's a common error in political debates to invoke an earlier time as if it were a golden age of some sort. As a parallel example, I'm not too enthused about our use of drones in military conflicts these days, but a lot of people who object to the use of drones overlook the fact that 20 years ago we did the same thing with cruise missiles, and 20 years before that we engaged in carpet bombing, with a much higher loss of life in the aggregate as you go farther back in history. So it's reasonable to argue that drones are bad, but naive to omit the fact that they're substantially less bad than how we used to wage war.
    - akiselev 13y ago
      Sorry I think I got distracted, accidentally pressed enter while tabbing through pages, and never finished my thought. I totally agree with your point about nostalgia. I was going to say that we need to adopt a new understanding of what it means to be free. Maybe most people care more about security than freedom from surveillance or government corruption. If this is what they want, then this is what they'll get and if we're going to talk about being free we need to redefine freedom so that it reflects the unrestricted flow of information instead of arbitrary "endowed" rights, which aren't rights at all if we don't want them. The Civil Rights movement was a struggle of a minority against a majority for rights that were rightfully theirs. Today, the majority is handing its rights over on a silver platter to the security/intelligence agency. I think we are less free.
rst 13y ago
King lived in a world where extra-judicial killings were frequent in the South, and the perpetrators (many with connections to local law enforcement) had effective impunity. As to Federal law enforcement, the FBI tried to blackmail him personally with recordings implicating him in extramarital affairs; see http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/king-like-all-frauds-your-end-is.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/king-like-all-frauds-yo... Also, the 1950s Red Scare was a fairly recent memory; that resulted in ruining the livelihoods of numerous Americans, including at least one prominent and politically active African-American, Paul Robeson.

by msg 13y ago

SqMafia 13y ago

"Martin Luther King didn't live in a world where we imprison innocent men in legal limbo without trial or habeas corpus, or where we officially sanctioned torture and the oubliette. He could trust that he would be vindicated by the justice system." You're kidding me right?!? You honestly think the era he lived in was fair and just to people like him? Do you know how many lynchings there were in Florida alone? Does the name Emmett Till ring a bell? What did you think MLK fought for?

msg 13y ago
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/resources/article/annotated_letter_from_birmingham/#1 http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/resources/article/an... Do any of you believe that there would have been a new Letter from Birmingham Jail if Snowden were imprisoned? Keep in mind the US authorities are calling this civil rights whistleblowing "treason". Aiding the terrorists and enemy combatant status cannot be far behind. Like it or not, the rule of law has been badly damaged by the endless emergency. These days you do your nonviolent resistance from behind the safety of a diplomatic minefield.
- krapp 13y ago
  What Snowden did is, arguably, treason. Whatever you believe about the righteousness of his cause, or the evil of the programs he exposed, or the corruption of the government pursuing him, that he's being pursued is in fact a case of the system working as intended.
  - akiselev 13y ago
    I believe you have that backwards. The first statement is not arguable while the second one is, because of the nature of the first.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - alexqgb 13y ago
    "What Snowden did is, arguably, treason." Not by anyone who understands the legal definition of treason. Among other things, treason presupposes formally declared hostilities. Even Cold War turncoats convicted of espionage for aiding the Soviet Union couldn't be charged with treason, since technically, we were never at war with the USSR.
    - krapp 13y ago
      Fair enough, I'll concede the point. But of course, they would just as well argue we're in the War on Terror. It would be an obvious flimsy justification but, there you are.
      - alexqgb 13y ago
        You really don't understand what a formal declaration of war is, do you?
        krapp 13y ago
        I do. I'm suggesting that will probably be the justification, regardless. What is treason and what gets treated as treason can be two different things.
        alexqgb 13y ago
        Sorry, but even the most agressive prosecutor is highly unlikely to bring a charge that is so easily and cleanly dismissed. It's like trying to charge someone with the murder of a person who clearly isn't dead. Our justice system has gotten hyper-agressive, but it's not that bad. At least not yet. A far more likely tack would be trying him under the Espionage Act, which is vague enough to make prosecution easy and defense hard. Relatively speaking, at least.

rdouble 13y ago

Right, MLK lived in a world where innocent men got strung up in trees.

krapp 13y ago

He could trust that he would be vindicated by the justice system. His belief that justice would someday inevitably prevail belied the injustice of his system. To the degree that any of what you suggest was true in the day, it wasn't true at all for blacks, less so for those who didn't 'keep their place'. In this modern case, Edward Snowden is the beneficiary of far, far more privilege and opportunity for fairness from his own government than Martin Luther King could ever have hoped for. Just imagine what the discourse would be if Edward Snowden turned out to be Arabic, or Muslim, or went by a Muslim sounding name. If he fled to the wrong country they might already be picking smoking chunks of him off a cafe wall. There would be no debate in the media as to whether he was a 'hero' or 'traitor'.

rayiner 13y ago

Its this sort of uneducated, a-historical crap that makes it impossible to read HN lately. If you think the government was less scary back then, in the grip of anti-communist paranoia, you're insane, deluded, or just plain uneducated. Saying that MLK could count on a fair shake from a justice system that didn't give any minority a fair shake back then, much less political radicals, is the height of ridiculousness.

pg 13y ago
You don't need to resort to insults.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Frankly, I think the offending comment is insulting to the intelligence, as well as to the (collective) experience of people who were the target of racial discrimination laws. I don't want to be political about it, but HN as a community is sometimes subject to an alarming degree of demographic myopia.
- tptacek 13y ago
  HN has been especially frustrating for the last 2 weeks. Maybe, instead of hoping that people will maintain perfect civility throughout a nonstop stream of political discussions, something could instead be done to ratchet back the politics on HN?
  - jessaustin 13y ago
    Perhaps reality has been especially frustrating? Although yeah, implying that blacks in the American South in the mid-20th C could rely on the justice system is ridiculous enough to force me to agree with rayiner for once.
- rayiner 13y ago
  Sorry, I got emotional and attacked him instead of his comment. For that I apologize. But he essentially implied that a black guy fighting segregation during the height of communist paranoia and racial tension in the 1960's could count on a fairer shake from the justice system than a wealthy white kid in 2013 with the support of a rich and influential segment of society. That's the kind of statement that tends to engender emotional, rather than cool and collected responses.

anigbrowl 13y ago

You need to read more history. Without commenting on Snowden, I think the US is a substantially freer nation then it was in the time of MLK.

akiselev 13y ago
I wouldn't say that the US is substantially more free today than it was then.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Obviously it's a matter of opinion, but the comment I replied to offered a naively rosy picture of how justice was administered in MLK's day. It's a common error in political debates to invoke an earlier time as if it were a golden age of some sort. As a parallel example, I'm not too enthused about our use of drones in military conflicts these days, but a lot of people who object to the use of drones overlook the fact that 20 years ago we did the same thing with cruise missiles, and 20 years before that we engaged in carpet bombing, with a much higher loss of life in the aggregate as you go farther back in history. So it's reasonable to argue that drones are bad, but naive to omit the fact that they're substantially less bad than how we used to wage war.
  - akiselev 13y ago
    Sorry I think I got distracted, accidentally pressed enter while tabbing through pages, and never finished my thought. I totally agree with your point about nostalgia. I was going to say that we need to adopt a new understanding of what it means to be free. Maybe most people care more about security than freedom from surveillance or government corruption. If this is what they want, then this is what they'll get and if we're going to talk about being free we need to redefine freedom so that it reflects the unrestricted flow of information instead of arbitrary "endowed" rights, which aren't rights at all if we don't want them. The Civil Rights movement was a struggle of a minority against a majority for rights that were rightfully theirs. Today, the majority is handing its rights over on a silver platter to the security/intelligence agency. I think we are less free.

rst 13y ago

King lived in a world where extra-judicial killings were frequent in the South, and the perpetrators (many with connections to local law enforcement) had effective impunity. As to Federal law enforcement, the FBI tried to blackmail him personally with recordings implicating him in extramarital affairs; see http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/king-like-all-frauds-your-end-is.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/king-like-all-frauds-yo... Also, the 1950s Red Scare was a fairly recent memory; that resulted in ruining the livelihoods of numerous Americans, including at least one prominent and politically active African-American, Paul Robeson.