MLK Day, 2005

Men's News Daily ^ | 17 January 2005 | Nicholas Stix

[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."

Nicholas Stix

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New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix has written for Toogood Reports, Middle American News, the New York Post, Daily News, American Enterprise, Insight, Chronicles, Newsday and many other publications. His recent work is collected at www.geocities.com/nstix and http://www.thecriticalcritic.blogspot.com.

[Innisfree]

All great men have feet of clay. MLK himself said as much and never wished to be idealized. Whatever his personal and professional failings, he had the willingness to lay down his life for his principles----a true Christian. I do not have that kind of courage, but I pay homage to it when I see it.

Courage is the cardinal virtue from which all other virtues flow. If MLK took great risks, made huge blunders and terrible mistakes, remember that he also took on much greater burdens than his fellow men. He made much greater sacrifices. His sins should be forgiven and not spoken of lightly.

[Innisfree]

When you use others' materials and attribute the material to them, it's not plagiarism. I doubt very seriously you could find much plagiarism at all, at Harvard or anywhere. It's easy to spot, and the penalties are severe.

On that, you are simply misinformed. As countless recent articles have noted, plagiarism is rife at every level of academia, and widespread among the ranks of PhD's, including Harvard PhD's. Run a Google search and see.

I think it takes a great deal of courage to tell the truth about a cultural hero like MLK...

It takes no courage whatsoever to criticize the shortcomings of another: it takes resentment.

[A Jovial Cad]

I agree--Malcom X was the real deal when it came to fighting for the injustices he saw all around him. Didn't agree much with him on a good many things, but there's no doubting that he was honest, forthright, brave, and moral. And he didn't indulge in that silky talk meant to soothe the guilt of white liberal ears: when Malcom X had something to say, no one had any trouble understanding it.

A Malcom X National Holiday would be much preferable, hands down.

[amosmoses]

MLK is like an optical illusion. To conservatives its the "I Have a dream" speech that is used in discussing affirmative action. To liberals, its the anti-war MLK who was planning a Poor Peoples march on Washington before he was assasinated. I think MLK would have been considered far left by todays standard. IMHO.

[dfwgator]

I wasn't a big fan of the Spike Lee movie, but I loved the scene where the lily-white liberal coed goes up to Malcolm and gushingly asks, "Is there anything I can do to help the cause." And Malcolm flat out tells her, "No."

[Altamira]

I did the search that you suggested. Of the sites that came up on Google, only one out of many even claimed that plagiarism is a problem on university campuses; the vast majority of sites were about how to avoid plagiarism or how to detect plagiarism, which is now easy to do with software and online resources.

You seem to be making excuses for MLK, of the "everybody does it" variety. Everybody *doesn't* do it, and those who are caught doing it are punished by being expelled or having their degrees rescinded. MLK seems to have escaped that because...well, because he's MLK.

I don't detect any resentment in the author's post criticizing MLK; he's just telling the truth about a venerable American with more than a few faults. These deserve to be pointed out and discussed, your feelings about the matter notwithstanding.

[Irene Adler]

I don't think Tweaker is the one who is bitter or has a chip on the shoulder. To Cyborg and especially Javelina I stronglhy suggest you drop the tiresome, kneejerk, leftwing sanctimony. I remember the civil rights period well, having been born in 1950. King was not all he has been cracked up to be. Celebrating his birthday is a bit of a joke except that I get it off from work. I remember how people slobbered all over the Kennedys for years, too. King has been given the same treatment.

[Irene Adler]

I don't think Tweaker is the one who is bitter or has a chip on the shoulder. To Cyborg and especially Javelina I strongly suggest you drop the tiresome, kneejerk, ultra-touchy, leftwing sanctimony. I remember the civil rights period well, having been born in 1950. King was not all he has been cracked up to be. Celebrating his birthday is a bit of a joke except that I get it off from work. I remember how people slobbered all over the Kennedys for years, too. King largely gets the same treatment.

[wardaddy]

lol.....you are too brave.

I have not even looked downthread yet.

I love this forum.

[SeaBiscuit]

"That's precisely why I celebrate Ben Franklin's birthday on Jan 17th, instead of the King fraud. He's as phony as Kwanzaa is."

My sentiments exactly.

[bencarter]

I'm glad I'm here too.

Columbus was recognized as a murderer in his own time. He wrote that the Taino are some of the greatest people in the world, and would make slaves. When they failed to collect the required amount of gold, he'd have their hands cut off. He'd go raiding for slaves. He brutally administered Hayti. Before you say we should judge him by the standards of his time (moral relativism, if you ask me) remember he was brought back to Spain in chains because of this kind of stuff and the Dominican Republic is so-named because a Dominican Friar spoke-out against the Spanish slaughter. All there in the original documents. His rosey image is the revisionism

[K1W1 Patriot]

> This thread is pathetic. Sickening.

And tiresome. And turgid.

[wardaddy]

What's unfortunate is that 90% of the people only know what the diversity crusaders teach

Amen.

I think that there are many other African Americans that are far more deserving of a National Holiday. Carver and Douglass come immediately to mind

A hesitant double Amen...two fine fellows but I hate to think we should pick holidays oevr race...though we did on this one.

Whatever happened to colorblind? I don't even see many here espousing that.

In the end, it's all about the imposition of political power...always has been.

[Red Phillips]

I knew that my little caveat would bring allegations of moral relativism. I almost put in a clarification, but I didn't just to see who would be the first to take the bait. "You are a moral relativist." Well, for the record, I am not. I generally subscribe to the casuistic ethics of Thomas Fleming in his book "The Morality of Everyday Life" with some reservations. It is a great book and I suggest you read it. I agree that the great moral teachings of the Bible are universal, but beyond that it is not so simple as some would like to believe. It is the liberalism of the Enlightenment that insisted on universal principles of universal applicability. It is the more organic, the more natural, the more ancient, and hence I would suggest more conservative approach to pay great respect for the folk ways and folk ethics of various places and times. It springs from the realization that things are the way they are for a reason, that they arose as the result of multiple factors, and that they are generally protective of the society they arose in. That some societies are superior and more worthy of protecting, I have no problem with. Since this is a little off topic, I will send you an example of what I'm talking about, if you are interested.

However, this is not entirely off subject because it helps us understand the whole civil rights issue. The issue is often characterized as a simple morality play of good vs. evil. That is certainly the way you are portraying it, but it is not that simple. To understand Jim Crow, you have to go back to Reconstruction and the brutal oppression of the South by the Yankees and the Republicans. An oppression in which Blacks were used as pawns. That resentment would rise up from that is understandable. So you ask, has "civil rights" been a good thing? On the whole no. While I do not believe the government should be able to discriminate, issues such as schooling were State issues, not Federal. Brown was wrongly decided, Constitutionally. I also do not believe people have an inherent right to do what is wrong. Some of my libertarian friends would argue that prohibitions against discrimination in the private sector, such as housing or employment, are wrong because it is peoples' right to discriminate if they want to. I would not necessarily agree with that, but I think anti-discrimination laws when it comes to public things are unenforceable without greatly tilting the matter in favor of the State as has happened with civil rights. Opponents of civil rights legislation said they would inevitably lead to quotas. Civil rights proponents said they would not. Well guess who was right. Unless someone is dumb enough to say I'm not hiring you because you are black, then it is virtually impossible to determine motivation. Therefore, they quickly resorted to numbers. 25% of your area is Black. So therefore, 25% of your work force must be Black. If not you are obviously a racist. But of course, that is ridiculous on the face of it. There could be hundreds of reasons why the work force is composed the way it is. If you don't think this mindset is prevalent just look at some of the threads here. At least one person (bencarter) has already denounced every one who has posted anti MLK statements as racist, as if he has some magic crystal ball and can look inside all of our hearts. Quit being brow beaten by political correctness. It takes as much courage now to stand up and say that Brown was wrongly Constitutionally decided as it did to stand up for civil rights in MLK's day.

[cyborg]

Spare me your advice. Just as the victicrats cry racism, people like you accuse left wing sanctimony. Have a nice day.

[Riverman94610]

"wherever he went,riots broke out"
Right,almost always started by hard core white segregationist hoodlums who rampaged against largely peaceful demonstrators who were marching for the same BASIC AMERICAN rights you and I have always taken for granted.
Gee,to some on this board you would think if it wasn't for this King ogre then we could all go back to the wonderful world of separate drinking fountains and colored folks riding the back of the bus!

[A Jovial Cad]

"bencarter: since 2004-11-06"

Uh-huh...

[bencarter]

The only reason I see for character assassination, which is what this is (you could have a perfectly normal conversation about MLK's bad personal habits without it becoming character assassination), is to discredit what that person accomplished. And seeing what MLK accomplished (and it is an accomplishment. The extremes the civil rights movement's legacy is taken to today does not change the fact that is not longer OK to view blacks as second class citizens), the only reason to rail against it is if you feel that blacks should be second class citizens. Ben Franklin said that what makes us rational is our ability to rationalize anything. The rationalization of these attacks only serves to cover their real feelings, and not cover very well.

[Riverman94610]

Please,sir,get real.Yes,the black family is in pretty pathetic shape.But white families are no model of virtue either.I will BET you the vast majority of"swingers",wife swappers and pedophiles are white,not black.
MLK didn't invent adultery.Thats been going on since Biblical times.