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."
Indeed, the truth is tacky. Lies are so much prettier.
Indeed, the truth is tacky. Lies are so much prettier.
Civil rights meant one thing back then. Today, its become a cover for pushing socialism upon the American people. We've corrected the abuses of the past but rest assured today's civil right leaders see King's legacy as a means of promoting racial extortion, expansion of big government, and beefing up entitlement programs. If you don't believe me, all you need to do is observe the behavior of the mainstream civil rights leadership. They've tied themselves into the Democratic Party. So as much I'm proud of what happened in the country half a century ago, today civil rights is not about extending rights to Americans but stealing from them in the name of rights - like say, "equality." Please go ahead and tell me that's fair. If that's what MLK Day means in our time, you're damned right I want no part of it.
The True Poverty Pimps who hate capitalism, freedom and the American Dream. If they liked it, they wouldn't have the power they have over others. No one would need them. Which is why they're Leftist to the core.
King didn't bring equality to anyone. He helped the black middle class get easy, well-paying government jobs keeping poor blacks in their place. If you studied history, you'd know that the greatest movemtn for black equality started in 1940 and ended in 1960 -- before any of King's "works."
How tacky is it to criticize him on his birthday?
The truth is always welcome. And if it were one of the other 364 days of the year, you'd say that was tacky, too.
It's crap like this that gets Republicans branded as racists all the time.
By dishonest pc police like you!
Just give the guy his due, and get over it.
The author gave him his due. Get over it.
It's really not a big deal.
BWAHAHAHA! You can't even keep your lies straight! You're race-baiting up and down this thread. It's a gigantic deal to you. You need to take your irony supplement.
I'll be 65 to the day when my youngest of 4 children turns 20.
I will be happy and grateful.
Exactly right. Todays paper here in St. Louis (Post-Disgrace) has an editorial chiding us about how little is being done to help equalize American society. The left hasn't learned a thing from the last election.
By the same token, you could hardly find a scholar at Harvard whose works weren't plagiarized to some degree. Why is Mr. King to be singled out and pilloried?
Nonsense! First of all you and the English language apparently are not on speaking terms. I'm guessing you meant, "who didn't plagiarize other people's works to some degree." Because otherwise, your statement doesn't make any sense. And even being so liberal in trying to help you, you still don't make a lot of sense. How many Harvard scholars can you even name? And then, name me the ones that have been caught engaging in plagiarism.
Time's up! You don't know a single Harvard scholar who was caught engaging in plagiarism. Why did you single out and pillory Harvard, when you had no idea what the heck you were talking about? With King, you posted the answer to your own question at the top of your post.
There's something about a man with great physical courage and thus great integrity that inspires the enmity of lesser men: the green-eyed monster, I suppose. Mr. Stix doesn't have as much courage in his entire body as MLK had in one fingertip.
A Christian doesn't cast the first stone. Jesus said, there is no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for a friend. Until you have MLK's courage, you haven't the right to criticize his petty failings.
You must have graduated from the Vicious Circle School of Logic: No one lacking King's courage may criticize him, and anyone criticizing him ipso facto lacks his courage. Why, you're infallible!
BTW, Hitler hads every bit as much physical courage as King did. According to your "logic," that means Hitler "thus [had] great integrity."
Oh, I get it. You mean what your words say. You mean some other, secret language.
And why do you bring up integrity? King had none. And how does criticizing King on his holiday make someone a "coward"? 99.9% of the population is praising him, and you could get fired from your job, beaten to death, and your children persecuted for criticizing the man. That "integrity" thing must be yet another lesson you learned at Vicious Circle.
BTW, you must not be a Christian; you demand that others tolerate wickedness, and attack them when they don't. Or you're just a hypocrite.
You pathetic excuse for a human being.
You pathetic excuse for a human being.
MLK day should be called what it really is: "Pacifying the Black Lobby Day" instead of placing a race-baiting, white-hating, criminal on a pedestal
"Civil Riot leader" -- I love it! My only memory of him from my choildhood was from either the day he was murdered, or the day before. The radio news announced that he had just given a speech, was driven away in his car, and the riot started immediately.
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 callouses on my dome from butting heads with those in my community who refuse to relinquish big government statist solutions for the problems plaquing 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.
King himself expresses a communist 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 G-d 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.
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 assesment 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 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 ideaology (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.
But not as important as Barack Obama Day is going to be 50 years from now.
LOL! The other day, Ted kennedy called him, "Osama bin Laden"! I heard it with me own two ears.
My pleasure!
The irony works on so many levels, and is so far over the head of the self-annointed thread enforcers, that I'm just sitting here, marveling.
Javelina: Maybe so. But attacking a dead man who was a leader in the fight to bring democracy and equality to a substantial portion of our population on a day dedicated to him doesn't help much, does it? Obviously it's easy for folks on the internet to lack any sense of shame, but they ought to be a little less tacky about it.
Javelina: If you're so concerned about getting a federal holiday for George Washington, then go lobby for one.
Wow, Javelina, your arrogance is matched by your ignorance. There already IS a federal holiday for George Washington. It's called Washington's Birthday. But some time after MLK Day was proclaimed, the pc powers that be quashed the observance of Washington's Birthday.
Why should I be surprised that someone who knows nothing about King would also know nothing about Washington?
I most assuredly do not.
What alternative to the civil rights movement was there?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.