Ritual abuse of the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. is such a cherished tradition in America that we have an entire holiday set aside for it. Every year for decades now, public figures and institutions who stand against the living movement that gave us Dr. King—including many who actively opposed him in his own lifetime—have come out of the woodwork to invoke his name as a means of asserting that they, too, are invested in an imagined version of the political project to which he dedicated his life.

They bother doing this with King, and not with contemporaries like Bobby Seale or Claudia Jones, because MLK Jr. is a near-universally beloved figure in today’s America. This was not always so. Opinion polling from the 1960s shows us that King was a deeply polarizing figure when he was alive, with 63% of Americans viewing him unfavorably (and 44% “highly” unfavorably) shortly before his death. That might be confusing to those of us who have been taught to remember King as the moderate voice of reason who defeated Jim Crow through the power of persuasion and never asked for more than a formally inclusive American capitalism, but when we remember him in this way, we are remembering a Dr. King who never existed. In reality, he was an anti-war, communist-sympathizing democratic socialist. His graduation from hated radical to unifying national hero has come about not as a result of any tangible progress towards the fulfillment of his vision, but rather due to the determination of the very ruling-class institutions he struggled against to cynically co-opt his memory for their own ends.

The performance this MLK Day is more perverse than usual. The same voices who for the last three months have denounced any reference to the martyrdom of Palestinians as hateful extremism now see fit, without a moment’s hesitation or an ounce of shame, to celebrate the life of a martyred freedom fighter. Scores of American politicians bow their heads in false reverence for the slain son of one oppressed people while moving heaven and earth to support the mass slaughter of another. The name of a world-historic hero of the Black liberation and anti-war movements should scald the mouths of these racists and warmongers, but they deal in it as if it were their own.

Revolutionary solidarity, the most important tool a socialist can lay their hands on, cleaves like a machete through the thorny weeds of fraud, confusion, and slander the ruling class has nurtured around King’s headstone. It reveals to us that the forces responsible for King’s death in Memphis in 1968 are as strong as ever today, in part because they pretend to have already been vanquished by casting themselves in the tradition of those who supposedly vanquished them.

This year, when the Biden administration dares to utter King’s name, we should see behind it the thousands upon thousands of Palestinians gunned down by Israeli soldiers, pulverized under rubble by Israeli bombs, burned alive by Israeli white phosphorus, driven from their homes at Israel’s command to waste away in refugee camps like Maghazi, itself recently bombed—all killed as a consequence of American policy, all nameless to us but not to those they leave behind. Biden would not utter their names even if he knew them, for it is their blood that oils the gears of the machine he has been charged with operating, a planet-engulfing machine that generates profit by converting children into orphans, orphans into militants, militants into martyrs, and martyrs into paranoia to manufacture consent for beginning the cycle anew.

Before his grave was defiled so he could be given top billing in a revolting annual performance of enforced historical amnesia, King once struck terror in the hearts of the American ruling class because of what he represented. He was part of a mass movement for peace and liberation that cut across borders, saw the struggle for freedom by one oppressed people as an inseparable part of the struggle for freedom by all people, and sought to win real justice by upending the class structure of the American empire. We owe it to King, to the many other martyred freedom fighters who the powers-that-be have decided cannot be co-opted and would be better off forgotten, and to oppressed people the world over to instill that terror in the ruling class once again.