FBI ‘honors’ Martin Luther King Jr., 50 years after plotting to ‘neutralize’ him | Hacker News Reader

FBI ‘honors’ Martin Luther King Jr., 50 years after plotting to ‘neutralize’ him

thegrayzone.com

59 pointsnagums19 comments

Are any of the FBI staffers of modern day also ones that were present 50 years ago? Is it possible the people that compose the FBI currently have different morals and viewpoints from the ones from 50 years ago? The organization known as the FBI is just a collection of people, and the members that make it up can change over time, it's not an everlasting entity itself. Thus it seems unfair to say/imply the FBI is being hypocritical in their message.

Does that actually follow?

If you run an organisation and recruit people who think on a certain way, train them in a way that makes them more likely to think that way, and promote the ones that think that way, wouldn't the organisation stay pretty similar even as actual humans join and leave?

Lots of organisations (political parties, religions, whole classes of people) have remained largely the same for very long periods this way.

Im not saying the FBI is the same today as it was 50 years ago. I'm just saying institutional memory is a thing (as is institutional racism...).

If the majority of the FBI staff were replaced all at once, perhaps, but a gradual ship-of-theseus style replacement leaves it the same organization. I doubt that individual modern FBI staffers have the same views as their forebears, but the institution still bears the legacy of its past actions.

A large amount of the American way of thinking is to believe that people cannot and will not change, and so that's not a question that would traditionally be asked.

It's wrong, but it powers a lot of American thinking.

Do you have any sources for that, or is it just prejudice?

It’s an analysis of what I’ve seen.

People hate Biden for stances he has in the past and they bring them up regularly.

Same with Harris.

People are thrown in prison for decades to keep them away from everyone and then they’re denied jobs on then basis that they were once a criminal.

People mocked John Kerry on the very basis that he _did_ change his mind on an issue, and so on.

The very basis of a lot of relationship advice on Reddit, at least, is that “people never change”, therefore ‘you should dump the person’.

I’m sure that if you asked a person about a specific person that they know and have known, they’ll say how this person isn’t the person they were; but then that same person will go on and talk about someone they don’t in absolute terms about how a change is not genuine or cannot happen.

I don’t have sources, I’m sorry, just life experience and an attempt to understand the world I live in.

> People hate Biden for stances he has in the past and they bring them up regularly.

> People are thrown in prison for decades to keep them away from everyone and then they’re denied jobs on then basis that they were once a criminal.

These two things are related though, are they not? Biden wrote the '94 crime bill, which contributed to this criminalization. Sure it's good that he admits he was wrong, but do we just forgive and forget? People's lives were ruined. Considering he is accountable to the public, doesn't it make sense this poisons people's opinions of him for good?

For instance with gay marriage, Bernie Sanders was supportive of gay marriage much before Joe Biden was. Should Bernie not be credited with being ahead of the curve with this, and should it not give him more credibility that he did not flip his opinion when it became popular?

I think this applies even less to large orgs like the FBI where the is a lot of inertia with regards to cultural shifts

No. No. No.

The US government was found guilty at trial of conspiring to assassinate King. They paid an award to the estate.

Not exactly... https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/government-mlk-assassinati...

I am reading it right that they were awarded only 100$?

The point was to show that the trial was not about the money.

I read the title as FB instead of FBI and assumed it was yet another hit piece by the NYT or Guardian blaming Facebook for MLK's assassination.

Does the US have a mechanism for retroactively stripping people of rank?

Seems like there have been a lot of old white dudes who did evil things for intelligence services, retired with honors, died, and then declassified knowledge of their crimes is made public.

Would be nice if he had something like a posthumous dishonorable discharge to apply in these cases.

> Would be nice if he had something like a posthumous dishonorable discharge to apply in these cases

This is a politician's dream. Rally your base over a dead guy's stickers and jewelry so you don't have to tackle the problems of today.

Reminds me of the time when a Pope had a former (and formerly living) Pope exhumed and his corpse put on trial[0], retroactively nullified his papacy, then had him reburied in a pauper's grave from which he was dug up again and then thrown into a river.

The papacy was hardcore back then.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod

Yeah, this wouldn’t be abused in the least.

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