Posted on 01/17/2005 11:03:12 AM PST by mrustow
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.
Wow. This is all news to me. Certainly Hollywood won't be making a movie about this story any time soon.
My apologies for this garbled sentence. It's late and I'm tired. Let's try it again.
Ultimately, King was a false messiah, a "messiah" whose death was supposed to redeem all, but whose death in fact only redeemed some and actually marked others as accursed and beyond redemption.
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 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.
bttt
MLK's dream of being judged by character instead of skin color would be a disaster for black people today.I only know one way to judge people who wear their pants around their knees and speak like complete morons.Could todays blacks be MLK's dream or are they his nightmare? I also had a dream.In my dream blacks valued education and took responsibility for their actions.In my dream they also took pride in raising their children to be productive members of society.Too bad it's only a dream that appears as likely to come true as the one where I'm being chased by aliens.
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