MLK Day, 2005

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 ...")

"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."

Republicans are branded as "racists" simply as a ploy to cut off further discussions of such subjects as immigration, culture, language, and anything else that liberals want to avoid.

I am not a civilizationist but a Fundamentalist. The whole point of the King debate turning on whether or not one is to celebrate "European culture" is bunk. G-d exists outside all cultures and He judges them all.

Civilizationism is a red herring. Heterosexuality isn't a quaint creation of "European man" but the command of the Universal G-d. It is the duty of all mankind to uphold the True Religion and reject false ones.

Palaeocon "civilizationism" is another dodge that helps to hide Black Fundamentalism and promote its unequal treatment by liberals.

Amazing post. It deserves its own thread, is worth repeated readings, and is superior to the essay that I posted to start this one.

Wow. I'm flattered. And I thought I phrased my words so clumsily.

If I hadn't been so tired at the time I might have thought of other ironies: for example, that the ultimate in "progressive" and "leftist" dreams for Black Americans is for all of them to move to the Southeast, secede from the Union, and form an all Black Confederacy (doubtless with Dixie as its national anthem).

Another irony is that both poor Blacks and poor whites, while being powerless, each resent the other as some sort of powerful, almost omnipotent oppressor. The Black resentment of poor whites in trailer courts (to the exclusion of wealthy whites, many of whom are liberal) is well known. However, the almost totalitarian demands of political correctness (for example, that no ethnic slur must ever be directed at Blacks while poor whites may be insulted with impunity) are associated in the minds of many poor whites with the "political power" of poor Blacks (whose "power" doesn't seem to go far enough to improve their own lives). I am suggesting here that the resentment of poor whites for the "powerful" poor Blacks is identical to the older misplaced hatred. And of course while wealthier Blacks encourage poor Black hatred of the trailer park, there are plenty of rich whites who encourage deflecting all poor white resentment toward poor Blacks.

I am not among those who believe that King entered a world that was slowly but surely becoming better (though I admit I may be wrong here; I was very young at the time). However, ninety years after the Civil War many were still advocating caution and slowness in correcting the situation that existed at the time (as one wag observed, that was pretty darn slow). There is a great Ronald Reagan movie called Storm Warning in which the future president portrays a lawman fighting the Ku-Klux Klan. His character points out that every time the racial situation is brought up the response is that outsiders should not interfere and that the locals should be left to solve the problem themselves. Reagan's character observes that eventually the locals will have to stop talking and actually solve the problem. Unfortunately for us, they didn't, and the ending of centuries of injustice is now a feather in the cap of atheists who have no grounds for believing that anything is immoral or unjust. And when they boast of their illogical moral crusade conservatives an only stutter and admit that they were indeed the ones who ended it.

I am grateful that you did not misinterpret my post. There is enough blame to go around to everyone for our racial problems. And I certainly regard palaeocon "civilizationists," who subordinate religious identity completely to ethnic identity and who often sound like Third World liberationists in their attacks on critiques of their culture in the name of an external and universal morality, are not only part of the problem but a very sinister part as well. After all, any "palaeo" who can sympathize with the ultra-Left Socialist International member Parti Quebecois has no business shouting "socialism" at American Black activists. And like their Leftist counterparts, they have some very strange heroes, at least from a religious perspective (Thomas Jefferson, H. L. Mencken).

Again, thank you for the kind words.

Your post 192 makes a lot of sense. My own confusion in this whole business is why, after living together for four centuries, Anglo- and Black Americans still see each other as "the other." That's an awful lot of time to get used to one another, isn't it? And when you throw into the mix the facts that the two groups have the same language, the same accent (Southern), the same religion, by and large the same economic status . . . it's just absolutely astounding. I don't know of a similar sociological phenomenon anywhere else.

Your point that nations are by definitions ethnic is spot on (though Anglo-Celts in America are every bit as far from their "homelands" as are American Blacks), but for me The Thing That Should Not Be is the fact that ethnicity and race completely swallow up religious identity. Isn't religious identity one's ultimate identity? Aren't co-religionists supposed to be closer than one's ethnic kin? Yet Black chr*stians refuse to take part in the fight for traditional morality just as many white "palaeo" types seem to consider chr*stianity as a creation or hallmark of European culture (which explains why they look upon Catholic Mexican peasants as agents of "Zionist" chr*stophobia).

You know, I actually have a theory about this. Just as nations were originally ethnic identities, so were religions. Each nation/village/tribe/whatever had its "gxd" whose children they all were. Even though most people today belong to multi-ethnic religious bodies or subscribe to abstract universal religious beliefs the old ethnic nature of religion seems to keep coming through. This is one reason I believe that the True Universal Religion had to be permanently (rather than temporarily) identified with a specific nation in order to mark its identity before the whole world.

Just a couple more points. Though a poor rural white Southerner, I find myself a bit of an odd duck because I seem to be 100% English (Anglo-Saxon-Norman) with no Celtic blood whatsoever, and I identify not only with Puritanism rather than Cavalierism, but with the Federalist/Whig/Republican American political tradition rather than the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian/Democratic one. But the most important thing to me is the facticity of Religious Truth (which much palaeocon "civilizationist" rhetoric seems to undercut by implying that religions are created by peoples as their own peculiar expressions) and that all men without exception are descended from Adam and Eve. Unfortunately, it isn't just leftist anti-racist evolutionists who seem to be living contradictions. There are still plenty of racist creationists around, though it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

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