At some early point in the political career of Martin Luther King Jr. a stranger bearing an unusual gift strode into his life. His name was Harris Wofford a World Federalist and the civil rights advisor to John Kennedy. His gift originated in India where nonviolent passive resistance had successfully been the political strategy that ended the centuries old British occupation.
After 90 years of softening up, every province in India had its sympathetic newspaper or journal echoing the wishes of all classes crying for independence. With the advent of Mahatma Gandhi and his belief in nonviolent passive resistance, a messiah and plan of action were in place. The key ingredient to making it all work has been overlooked by history – the well publicized reactionary violence of the opposition required to give passive resistance the moral sanction. That stimulus-response combination allowed the collaborative Indian press in its primitive paper form to supply the moral outrage.
When Harris Wofford came bearing the gift of nonviolent passive resistance, he delivered it to two camps: to America’s 22 million Negroes led by Martin Luther King Jr. and to the American media giants who were in the process of refining political perception with television. The civil rights movement succeeded in only 14 years benefitting just 12% of citizens in a divided America. That success alerted the media moguls to the devastating capabilities of their new electronic weapon.
The implementation of nonviolent passive resistance to America’s racial problem to relieve the plight of a minority with civil rights legislation was a pyrrhic victory because it permanently altered for the worse America’s legitimate power structure. The technique revealed to a developing media class its power potential. That potential reached its zenith first with the appropriation of the presidential vote tabulation, second with Watergate when two members of the Executive Branch were ousted and an election reversed, third, with the refining of election rigging by the electronic touch screen, and lastly, the seizure of the nominating process making state parties virtually obsolete. America today is mere experimentation.
The record shows that passive resistance became the first weapon’s test of a new Media class that went on to eclipse government. When the Media became the government, nonviolent passive resistance lost its old collaborative friend. Why should the Media sympathize with grass roots movements from the Left or Right or a mass coalition of sympathies? It means all avenues of legitimate protest are gone. The Media is the real power in America.
