Martin Luther King Jr. and the courage of universality

Žižek implicitly stages this rapprochement in his writings on violence and civil rights. Against liberal celebrations of nonviolence, Žižek argues that figures like King functioned as necessary translations of militant antagonism into a universal register capable of destabilizing the symbolic order. Malcolm names the wound; King insists it indicts the whole. Liberal memory requires their separation because their convergence would expose liberalism itself as inadequate.

This also clarifies the meaning of King's nonviolence. It was not morally superior to militancy; it was strategically superior under specific historical conditions-and cannot be universalized as a moral norm. Nonviolence was a discipline of universality, a refusal to let the struggle collapse into reciprocal domination. It sought not to preserve order, but to expose the violence on which order depended.

What liberal ideology cannot abide is not King's anger but his diagnosis: that liberalism itself functions as a regime of objective violence, maintaining injustice precisely by appearing humane, procedural, and patient. The fabrication of a harmless King is not an accident of memory, but the condition under which liberalism survives its own contradictions.

King's assassination was therefore not merely a historical crime; it functioned-within the logic of American power-as a means of restoring a stability his universality had placed in question. By 1968 he had become intolerable. He was building multiracial class solidarity. He was naming capitalism and empire as inseparable. He was threatening to unite the poor across racial lines-an existential danger to the existing social order.

Systems do not fear criticism; they fear universality. King's insistence that exploitation anywhere indicts the whole could not be absorbed. It had to be erased, then repackaged. This is why the King we are offered today is safe. His critique of capitalism is omitted. His opposition to empire is forgotten. His demand for redistribution is ignored. In his place stands a moral icon compatible with neoliberal pluralism.

King did not die for a dream of inclusion. He died for a truth liberalism cannot bear: that freedom is incompatible with a social order built on exploitation, hierarchy, and permanent war. His courage was not merely the courage to suffer, but the courage to remain faithful-to universality, to equality, to the idea that human beings are not means.

If King is safe today, it is not because he was misunderstood, but because his demands have been refused-and we live off that refusal.