Martin Luther King and the Inauguration/ Op-Ed by Lt. Col. Allen West

As I ponder the upcoming King Holiday two of his quotes come to mind, and have a very direct relationship to the 20 January inauguration;

“Change does not roll in on wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent”.

“A Nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan”.

My parents raised me to realize that every opportunity exists for one to excel and become as great as they desire to be. My 22 years of active duty service in the US Army built upon that theme with their slogan, “Be all that You can Be”.

There is nothing that holds one back from their own monumental achievement but their own minds, determination, and desire. And this is a refutable argument in the black community when you examine the ranks of professional sports and entertainment industry. On this coming King holiday let us realize, especially in the black community, that we need not look to any one person to enable our success in life, that indomitable spirit of change exists in us all.

Our black community suffers from so many social ills that cannot be solved by the rise and emergence of a singular entity. The remedy for the high murder rates, low High School graduation rates, and high teenage pregnancy rates will be realized by a personal commitment to excellence. If we continue to raise soft-minded men in our black community, then we shall indeed purchase the death of the community over time.

Therefore the real lesson to be learned from the election of President Barack Hussein Obama is that there is no longer any excuse. Our young men and women will only be ridden if their backs are bent. “Change” is an empty platitude if not followed by individual action, and that means positive action. If the black community just sees this as a historic moment and returns to the same status quo negative behaviors that afflict it, there has been no lesson learned, no gain.

It is inherent upon everyone to see this as the realization of Dr King’s dream, and focus on content of character. This moment is about individual responsibility and accountability. It is about seeking and securing the opportunities which this great Country affords us all, not waiting for socialized equal achievement programs. This moment is about what makes America the greatest Nation on earth.

However, if we all just see 20 January as a date when “manna will fall from heaven” then Dr King’s dream will be lost. This is truly the moment when the Latin maxim, “Carpe Diem” should be realized by all, and especially those in the black community. To see 20 January as anything else will result in a failure of character, and indeed a slow death from the neck up.

Look not to one Man, but rather to the principles and values that makes America, our Republic, like no other Nation in the world; individual freedom to excel.

Best Regards,

LTC(R) Allen West

Enjoy!

It is inherent upon everyone to see this as the realization of Dr King’s dream, and focus on content of character.

That's the scarey part. "Dr." King wasn't exactly an example of character. Neither is his mulatto successor.

"Dr." King, a married "preacher" spent his last night on earth with two white prostitutes. This has been pretty well documented.

Why this guy was picked as a black hero over Jesse Peterson, who knows.

I do not care for your post at all.

It is highly inflammatory and could easily make FR look like it has racist tendancies.

I have asked that it be removed.

Your argument could have been made without the derogatory racist remarks.

It is inherent upon everyone to see this as the realization of Dr King’s dream, and focus on content of character. This moment is about individual responsibility and accountability. It is about seeking and securing the opportunities which this great Country affords us all, not waiting for socialized equal achievement programs. This moment is about what makes America the greatest Nation on earth.

BTTT

Your argument could have been made without the derogatory racist remarks. K

I didn't make inflammatory remarks. I made historical remarks based on facts. As I said, FBI wire taps and bugs are out there and this isn't exactly "racist" and certainly not new news. Bill Clinton got caught too....he was actually white.

What other argument would I have made that MLK was a moral bigot when the FBI has him on tape. Hardly inflammatory when it is a not-much-talked about part of our history.

I wish to make it clear that I think that Martin Luther King was a man of enormous courage, charisma, and intellect that profoundly altered the course of American history and made it a better country in so far has its promise of justice for all is concerned.
This does not mean however that his legacy to the Civil Rights movement has been one of unalloyed good. I believe much of his bequeathment resulted in an over reliance on big government statist solutions to problems within the black community that require individual initiatives to correct. Martin Luther King’s frequent references to this nation’s founding documents are well known. His reflections on Communism are much less well known and undoubtedly contributed to his general philosophy. We owe it to ourselves to examine the effects of this legacy and contextualize it so has to solve the problems facing the black community today.
While King himself was not a communist, he did business with communists and was influenced by them. This delicate subject, made more so given the martyrdom and subsequent lionization of King, should nevertheless be broached as a means of providing insight into some of the darker forces that worked their way into what was essentially a pro American, conservative, Christian civil rights movement.
King surrounded himself with communists from the beginning of his career. His closest advisor Stanley Levison was a Communist. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, formed in 1957 and led by King, had Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth as Vice President who was at the same time president of the Southern Conference Education Fund, an identified communist front according to the Legislative Committee on un-American Activities, Louisiana (Report April 13, 1964 pp. 31-38). The field director of SCEF was Carl Braden, a known communist agitator who was also involved in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which counted Lee Harvey Oswald, the communist assassin of President Kennedy as a member. King maintained regular correspondence with Carl Braden. Bayard Rustin, a known communist, was also on the board of SCLC.

Dr. King addressed the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., 1957, previously known as the Commonwealth College until the House Committee on un-American Activities sited it as a communist front (April 27, 1949). HCAA found that Commonwealth was using religion as a way to infiltrate the African-American community by, among other techniques, comparing New Testament texts to those of Karl Marx. King knew many communists associated with the Highlander school.
King hired communist official Hunter Pitts O’Dell, 1960, at the SCLC. The St. Louis Globe Democrat reported (Oct. 26, 1962) “A Communist has infiltrated the top administrative post in the Rev. Martin Luther King’s SCLC. He is Jack H. O’Dell, acting executive director of conference activities in the southeastern states including Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.” Dr. King fired O’Dell when this became public but subsequently rehired him to head the SCLC New York office.
King himself expresses a Marxist outlook in his book “Stride Toward Freedom” when he stated, “in spite of the shortcomings of his analysis, Marx had raised some basic questions. I was deeply concerned from my early teen days about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, and my reading of Marx made me even more conscious of this gulf. Although modern American capitalism has greatly reduced the gap through social reforms, there was still need for a better distribution of wealth. Moreover, Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system”
King, unfortunately, didn’t understand that it was Capitalism and freedom that was responsible for the successes the African-American community already had achieved in his day and the key to future success. By “better distribution of wealth” King meant state control over the economy. His contempt for “the profit motive” was unfortunate given that African-Americans should’ve been encouraged by their leaders to seek fair profit to the best of their ability. King’s leftist ideas contributed to an opening of the floodgates to such radicals as Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, the Black Panthers, as well as the burning and looting of African-American neighborhoods, the institutionalizing of poverty perpetrating welfare, the destruction of the family, drugs, violence, racism, and crime.
In “Stride Toward Freedom” Dr. King states “In short, I read Marx as I read all of the influential historical thinkers from a dialectical point of view, combining a partial yea and a partial no. My readings of Marx convinced me that truth is found neither in Marxism nor in traditional capitalism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically capitalism failed to see truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. The Kingdom of God is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both.”
King, like Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, had “a dialectical point of view.” The goal of the dialectic is authoritarianism. A nation, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, cannot be half free and half slave. By advocating socialism, King chose an imperious stand toward his own people in contrast to a stand for genuine freedom, self-rule, self-sufficiency, private ownership, and the accumulation of capital. King did not advocate the American system of free market capitalism. Instead, he stood for a system that has stunted the growth of African-Americans as well as the rest of us.
All Marxists believe in Hegelian Dialectics. This is a belief that “progress” is achieved through conflict between opposing viewpoints. Any ideological assertion (thesis) will create its own opposite (antithesis). Progress is achieved when a conclusion (synthesis) is reached which espouses aspects of both the thesis and antithesis.
For example, Hitler had a dialectical point of view. He rejected Marxist class warfare, but embraced the basic socialist idea of the insignificance of the individual compared to the collective state.
This belief in dialectical progress is why liberals pit the rich against the poor, old against young, black against white, men against women, gay against straight, ad nauseam.
This issue is somewhat clouded by what Dr. King wrote in his 1957 book “Stride toward Freedom: the Montgomery story”, in which he wrote the following devastating critique of the sort of communism practiced in the Communist super state of the Union of Soviet Socialist republics.
“During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people. For the first time I carefully scrutinized *Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. I also read some interpretive works on the thinking of Marx and Lenin. In reading such Communist writings I drew certain conclusions that have remained with me as convictions to this day.
First, I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularist and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept, for as a Christian, I believe that there is a creative personal power in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality-a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.
Second, I strongly disagreed with communism’s ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything-force, violence murder, lying-is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end. This type of relativism was abhorrent to me. Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is pre-existent in the means.
Third, I opposed communism’s political totalitarianism. In communism, the individual ends up in subjection to the state. True, the Marxists would argue that the state is an ‘interim’ reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges; but the state is the end while it lasts, and man is only a means to that end. And if man’s so-called rights and liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside. His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, and his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.
This deprecation of individual freedom was objectionable to me. I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as means to the end of the state; but always as an end within himself.”
Martin Luther King Jr., *Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story* (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 92-93
Don’t forget that the above was written in 1957, a period in which the oppressions of the Soviet Union are painfully evident, evidenced by the brutal repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. At the time Stride toward Freedom was written, domestic attitudes toward communism could not have been more hostile. Toward the end of Dr. Martin Luther King’s life, the counterculture revolution of the sixties and the leftist tinted civil rights movement made favorable considerations of communism generally more palatable.
While Martin Luther King Day should be one of reflection and appreciation for what has been accomplished, and a reckoning of what still needs to be done, it should also be a day of understanding, in terms clear of emotionally driven rhetoric, where the civil rights movement went wrong. A major key to this understanding, I would contend, is the destructive effects that communist ideas and outright infiltration has had on the African-American community. Communists tried to use African-Americans as cannon fodder by stoking hatred and racial division. A predominantly white left-wing establishment promoted Black communists in order to preserve an informal system of oppression.
The fact is that he WAS a socialist and that goes to the heart of what went wrong with the civil rights establishment after the legal battles against codified discrimination were won.

I am a black man who has been getting calluses on my dome from butting heads with those in my community who refuse to relinquish big government statist solutions for the problems plaguing the black community in favor of free market solutions that are far more appropriate today. These forces frequently cite Dr. King and use his exhortations to government to lead the way. They specifically cite his socialist outlook as justification for their continuance. The two parent black family was destroyed by LBJ’s welfare state. That was the worst cultural calamity to EVER befall the black community in the US, and the most destructive force in its cultural life notwithstanding the imposition of Jim Crow law via the Supreme Court’s Plessy v Fergueson decision. MLK was a leading proponent for expanding the welfare state, whose baleful effects were just beginning to be seen in the black community.

MLK was a man of enormous charisma and courage and certainly a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement. There is much about him that I admire. An assessment of his life could creditably yield the adjective of great. Despite that, he does not deserve to be the ONLY American with his own holiday named after him. That honor should be reserved for only one person in American history, the greatest of all Americans, George Washington. More so than any other SINGLE figure in our history, he was the “indispensable man.” Without his courage, acumen, honor, and integrity, the US would simply not exist, and if it did, it probably would have been as a monarchy and certainly not as a constitutional republic.
MLK’s birthday holiday was a sop to PC and a reflection of the DemocRAT Congress that voted it. The depth of MLK’s association with the most anti-freedom ideology (Communism) of our time will prove to very embarrassing when it is fully revealed. Additionally, MLK’s legacy to the modern day civil rights movement is a socialist bequeathment that of looking to big government solutions for many of the behavioral problems in today’s black community. MLK continues to cast a long shadow over most of the modern day civil rights establishment and black politicians who largely reject free market, educationally based solutions to the unique problems plaguing the black community.

You'll get no argument here.

The essay is simply a celebration and joy at the surceases of the civil rights movement and the progress that has been made as evidenced by the upcoming inauguration. You cannot see the remark that was made because it was removed, which inspired my response. Trust me, it is not something you would have said and an embarrassment to FR.

No you didn’t, and of course you are right. However, the King Cult driven by the Liberal media and the education system is complete, he is now, for all effects and purposes, America’s ‘martyred saint’.

His often repeated quote: “People should be judged, not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.” is a practice in hypocritical double standards for the man who said it. Because MLK is the one person designated by the politically correct elite upon the masses, wherein that judgment will not be allowed.

Two other quotes are appropriate here:

“Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets.”-Luke 6:26

“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.” -George Orwell, ‘1984’

INSIGHT: MLK

"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.' ... I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. ... And if America is to be a great nation this must become true." --Martin Luther King Jr.

Historian Shelby Steele observed, "There is an awful lot of conservative sentiment in black America, but at the moment, the party line is ruthlessly enforced." Indeed, some of King's chief lieutenants, like Jesse Jackson, tolerate no dissension from their liberal ranks now. They have abandoned King's dream, and aligned themselves with political and social agendas obsessed with color at the expense of character.

Black conservatives of national stature, such as Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, Ward Connerly, Michael Steele, Jesse Lee Peterson, Alan Keyes, Don Scoggins, Alvin Williams, Ken Blackwell, Thomas Sowell, Star Parker and Walter Williams are routinely castigated by the Black Supremacists, as "Uncle Toms" and "puppets." Yet these are the men and women who really understand King's central message about character.

Today, president-elect Barack Hussein Obama will be waxing eloquently about King's legacy. But it is worth noting that prior to his murder in 1968, Martin King went to Obama's hometown of Chicago to meet with Mayor Richard Daley, father of the current Windy City Don. Chicago was a hotbed of racial hatred under Daley, and not much has changed.

King observed of that enmity, "This is the most tragic picture of man's inhumanity to man. I've been to Mississippi and Alabama and I can tell you that the hatred and hostility in Chicago are really deeper than in Alabama and Mississippi."

Chicago was not only a denizen of racial hatred but the violent black supremacist movement was born there. King said, "Those who are associated with 'Black Power' and black supremacy are wrong."

It is in that very racial hatred and hostility in which Obama has been steeped, particularly by mentors such as Jeremiah Wright.

At King's funeral, one Bible passage, Matthew 5:9, summed up his life's mission: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God."

Obama was not stewarded by peacemakers.

Finally, irrespective of one's conclusion about Martin Luther King's proper place in history (given the historical account of his personal integrity and character), the two texts cited below (from The Patriot's Historic Documents section) are well worth reading -- for each of them proclaim truth.

"I have a dream"

"Letter from a Birmingham jail"