Posted on 01/17/2005 11:03:12 AM PST by mrustow
It's back. The most important day of the year. More important than the deposed Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays, respectively. More important than Columbus Day. More important than Thanksgiving. More important than Christmas.
I know what you're saying. How can MLK Day be more important than Christmas? Easy. MLK was the most important person ever to live. Anywhere. Just ask his widow and children.
Let's look at the man's accomplishments. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in competition with Jack Kennedy and Wilt Chamberlain for the title of world's greatest womanizer. His favorite male company consisted largely of communists. He began his last day on Earth by beating the hell out of his mistress of the moment. He was a compulsive plagiarist who not only got his doctorate through fraud, but stole other men's words, and then copyrighted and re-sold the purloined pearls. And as the pre-eminent leader of the civil rights movement, he supported racial quotas, reparations, and racist law. What's not to like?
(As Theodore Pappas showed, in Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Other Prominent Americans, one-third of King's Boston University doctoral dissertation consisted of copying directly without attribution from the dissertation of his classmate, Jack Stewart Boozer, in addition to thefts from famous theologians.
And even if King hadn't gotten his doctorate through massive plagiarism, I wouldn't call him "Dr." What is it about the same black folks who show contempt towards whites with legitimate titles, that has them obsessively refer to "Dr. King"? Max Weber (1864-1920) was one of the greatest social scientists of all time, and he had a real doctorate, but no one today refers to him as "Dr. Weber." Unless you're Austrian or something, it's not normal to refer to dead people as "Dr." Heck, while teaching college, I stopped referring to the living as "Dr." or "Professor," unless the person in question was my boss or a medical doctor. If you're my colleague, I'm not referring to you by any title, Pal. And nowadays, outside of the real sciences, most of the doctorates being issued aren't worth the paper they're written on.)
Lest I forget, one is nowadays compelled to note that King displayed great physical courage on behalf of his convictions. But having the courage of one's convictions is a dependent variable -- the independent variable is the righteousness of one's convictions. Over 100,000 men and women currently in uniform in Iraq also display great physical courage every day, and the vast majority of them seek to defend, not to destroy America. And yet, to my knowledge, none of them has had a national holy day enacted by Congress in his honor.
About 16 years ago, when I watched the PBS documentary series Eyes on the Prize for the first time, I loved the first half - the Martin years. But following King's assassination, the second half celebrated the Black Power movement as a seamless continuation of the civil rights movement whose dominant figure the martyred King was. "How dare you sully King's name!" I shouted at the TV screen, or words to that effect.
Eyes on the Prize celebrated black supremacists such as the "community control" activists (Rhody McCoy, Milton Galamison, the Rev. C. Herbert Oliver, et al.) who terrorized white teachers in the experimental, Ford Foundation-funded Brooklyn school district called "Ocean Hill-Brownsville." (Ocean Hill and Brownsville were and are two adjacent, poor, black-dominated parts of Brooklyn.)
For many years, I considered MLK one of America's greatest heroes. I once even published an encomium to him. Then I started to study the man. Big mistake.
For several years now, neoconservatives have presented King as a ... neoconservative, on race, at least. (And race is all they talk about, regarding King.) That means that he opposed affirmative action. They cite his "content of character" line:
"I have a dream that my four little 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. I have a dream today!"
That line is from King's most famous speech, "I Have a Dream," which he gave on August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial. That's the only time he used such language. (Variations on the phrase "I have a dream" were then common in the American vernacular. In the 1959 Jules Styne-Stephen Sondheim musical, Gypsy, for instance, Mama Rose sings, "I had a dream ...")
In the next passage, King uses a powerful image to promote integration.
"I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today!"
"I Have a Dream" is the speech, whose high points ("Let freedom ring!") King stole from a speech the Rev. Archibald Carey gave, of all places, at the 1952 Republican National Convention. King then copyrighted the stolen words as his own. Since his assassination, his family has compounded the plagiarism by shaking down individuals (including scholars, which no one had ever done before) and organizations for millions of dollars for the privilege of quoting a mishmash of Archibald Carey's stolen words and King's own words. That the copyright is fraudulent is, thanks to my old editor Ted Pappas and a few other writers by now well-known, but no one has so far had the gumption to take on the sanctimonious, self-righteous bunco artists who comprise the King family.
MLK didn't believe in any hooey about "the content of one's character." He was a race man! And taking his fine talk about black and white children playing together and holding hands seriously, requires a belief in race mixing that he also did not have. As journalist George S. Schuyler (1895-1977) understood, integration means, above all, blacks and whites making babies together.
Meanwhile, on MLK Day every year, black leftists insist on King's radicalism. That's the man they want celebrated. And they are right. King was a radical. The neoconservatives notwithstandsing, King supported affirmative action and reparations, and he got both. When the programs of the War on Poverty were initiated, it was understood that they were racial reparations programs. Thirty-odd years and a few trillion dollars later, contemporary civil rights hustlers developed amnesia, and demanded new reparations to blacks, but this time to the tune of as much as $1 million per black (an additional app. $37 trillion).
The proper meaning of "civil rights" is the rights due to citizens. In changing "civil rights" from something due all Americans to something due to some, based on the color of their skin, and not others, King committed the most egregious act of linguistic legerdemain since FDR turned the term "liberal" upside down, from the belief that government should interfere as little as possible in a citizen's life, to the notion that the government may meddle in all of a citizen's formerly private affairs without limit.
Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest orator I have ever heard. But that too is a cautionary tale: Beware of silver-tongued serpents.
The real meaning of MLK Day is "Black Day." It is a federal holy day celebrating blackness. But if we are going to eliminate all holy days celebrating white men and instead have a holiday celebrating a black, why not at least celebrate someone worthy? Pre-civil rights America had many black heroes worthy of celebration. Off the top of my head, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and my choice, Booker T. Washington, come to mind. Even A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the first successful black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, would be preferable to King, in spite of Randolph's socialism. Those five were real giants, rather than the products of propaganda.
As always, when discussing King, I leave the last word to George S. Schuyler, who, had he had the tuition money, could have buried King's fraudulent Ph.D. dissertation in a pile of real dissertations.
In 1964, when King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Schuyler wrote "King: No Help to Peace":
"Neither directly nor indirectly has Dr. King made any contribution to world (or even domestic) peace. Methinks the Lenin Prize would have been more appropriate, since it is no mean feat for one so young to acquire 60 communist front citations.... Dr. King's principle contribution to world peace has been to roam the country like some sable Typhoid Mary, infecting the mentally disturbed with perversions of Christian doctrine, and grabbing fat lecture fees from the shallow-pated."
and...?
I agree. Just because immorality is widespread, we should not reward it.
Wherever there are great men, there are lesser men lined up to take him down. On the one hand, James Earl Ray. On the other, yourself.
I loathe this topic, every year.
We cannot undo the past, and I think MLK Day is here to stay. Why can't we use it as a day to remember how far we have come and leave it at that?
Without MLK and Rosa Parks, we may not have learned the lessons of the Civil Rights Movement. What is wrong with acknowledging the past and looking forward to the future?
What's with the divisiveness? Where does that get us?
True,lets not reward bad behavior but lets judge King by his entire life,not focus on a personal failing.
To many people who hated King,he could have been the epitome of moral virtue and still fallen short because he was the prime mover in challenging a blatantly unjust social system,Jim Crow.
Black Monday??
The revisionists consider white people evil and all other ethnicities good.
Don't know but I'm done posting on MLK threads.
Lying, stealing, cheating on his wife and commiserating with the enemy is enough for me. Other than that he seemed to organize lots of marches. Jesse Jackson does the same thing.
All families are in bad shape. Regardless of race. Just some families manage in this insanity to keep it going. We are being taxed out of existance by a government that wants to help people becomes slaves to our system, by accepting welfare benefits.
We are losing our way of life. It is a shame when there is bigger pride in accepting a check from the government rather than going out and making the income yourself. It is becoming shameful to work for a living, because all we do is pay the bills for those who do not.
MLK openly supported Eisenhower in 1956. Now....if you are arguing that Ike was a commie too, I'd like to hear your reasons.
Who're you trying to kid?
nobody. Yourself?
The report also found that illegitimate-birth rates "vary considerably by race and Hispanic origin." The percentage of out-of-wedlock births for non-Hispanic whites is 21.9 percent, but for non-Hispanic blacks it's 69.3 percent. For Hispanics it's 41.6 percent, and for American Indians 59.3 percent. For Asians and Pacific Islanders overall the number is 15.6 percent, but this varies from 51.1 percent for Hawaiians to 6.4 percent and 9.7 percent for Chinese and Japanese Americans, respectively.
All of this is consistent with other recent data. Forty-five percent of black women managers or professionals have had an illegitimate child, compared to 3 percent of managerial or professional whites. Half of all births in New York City are illegitimate, and in some neighborhoods the proportion reaches 80 percent. A 1997 survey by the federal government found that the percentage of black high-school students who said they have had sex was 73 percent, versus 44 percent for whites and 52 percent for Hispanics.
But it hasn't always been this way. In 1940, the black illegitimacy rate was 19 percent, less than what it is for whites now.
Interesting I thought...from National Review
http://www.nyx.net/~jkalb/rants/illegitimacy.html
Lord Have Mercy....and this what a supposedly Conservative forum has come to.
White guilt will be the end of all of us. Weakness beyond comprehension.
I think we both know that that's a load of laughable hooey.
"Yourself?"
I'm not the one trolling under false pretenses through a forum that specifically says at the front door that it's run by AND for conservatives, now am I?
So, my original question still pertains: who're you trying to kid?
Why? Because I don't think we should wish for a reverse of civil rights? You're right, what a whack job I am!
"White guilt will be the end of all of us"
It's not "white guilt": it's liberal white guilt. And I'm happy to report that I don't have a speck of it.
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