MLK was actually thought to be way more subversive than Malcolm X, by the CIA and the FBI.

Slightly off topic, but this goes back to something we talked about recently in another discussion regarding injustice begetting injustice. All the people up in arms about Edward Snowden today need to recognize that the surveillance state monster we have now started as COINTELPRO, an illegal and unethical extension of FBI surveillance.

And how did COINTELPRO gain steam? Serving white supremacy, of course, when it was expanded from its ostensible purpose of keeping tabs on communists and tasked with tracking and defaming black civil rights leaders, starting with T.R.M Howard, in 1956, mere months after its inception. It later expanded to tracking and smearing Martin Luther King and the Black Panther Party, among myriad others. Many of the lies they told still circulate today.

In other words, yet again, we see systemic racism used to prop up an injustice (illegal state surveillance) that, decades later, white people on the left are mad about because Edward Snowden is forced to live in asylum in Russia. Were it not for systemic racism, COINTELPRO likely would have died out sooner, and illegal surveillance tactics may not have become the absolute norm that they are today.

To people upset about the surveillance state today, if all you want is for Snowden to be exonerated and for the NSA to stop reading your email, your lack of empathy has failed you, and you are missing the bigger picture that all injustices are interlinked, and, when you open the door for one, all of them coming pouring in together, and the machine (white supremacy, patriarchy, oligarchy, military industrial complex, etc.) keeps grinding us down.