Posted on 02/26/2005 9:19:28 AM PST by Chi-townChief
Forty years ago today, Malcolm X was shot down in front of his family and an audience of followers at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. When he died, Malcolm X had been estranged from the Nation of Islam for about a year and had begun to call Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the cult, a liar, a fraud and a womanizer. Those were mighty hot words to direct at the Nation of Islam, which was feared throughout the black community as a known gathering place for violent criminals of all sorts who had been converted in prison, the way Malcolm himself had. Before his ascent in the cult world of homemade Islam, Malcolm Little had been known as "Big Red," a street hustler with a big mouth, a cocaine habit and a willingness to get rowdy and wild if the occasion called for it.
Sent to prison for a series of burglaries, Malcolm turned to Islam, or a version of it, promoted as the "black man's true religion" which held the secrets to liberation from white domination and black self-hatred. A convert, he began the liberation by replacing his "slave name" with an Islamic name or an X.
Malcolm X appeared on the national scene in 1959, presented by the media as the face of what white racism had done to black people. He was a minister of hate who used fiery rhetoric to teach that the white man was a devil invented 6,000 years ago by a mad black scientist. White audiences were appalled or darkly amused by this cartoon version of Islam, but more than a few black Americans were influenced by the Nation of Islam and by its dominant mouthpiece - light-skinned, freckle-faced, red-haired Malcolm X, the voice of black rage incarnate.
Some Negroes left the Christian church, others changed their names. A number stopped eating pork and demanded beef barbecue, and a good many eventually stopped frying their hair and became more nationalistic and hostile to whites, in their own rhetoric and in the rhetoric they liked to hear.
Malcolm X proved how vulnerable Negroes were to hearing another Negro put some hard talk on the white man. The long heritage of silence, both in slavery and the redneck South, was so strong that speech became a much more important act than many realized. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized this, observing that many of those who went to hear Malcolm X were less impressed with his ideas than they were with the contemptuous way he spoke to white power.
Since his death, Malcolm X has been elevated from a heckler of the civil rights moment to a civil rights leader - which he never was - and many people now think that he was as important to his moment as King. He was not, and Malcolm X was well aware of this. But in our country, where liberal contempt for black people is boundless, we should not be surprised to see a minor figure lacquered with media "respect" and thrown in the lap of the black community, where he is passed off as a great hero.
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Yep, looks like some particularly nasty weather...
And it was the intervention of the federal government that made his [MLK's] strategy correct. Without it a NOI/Malcolm X strategy would have been the correct one.
I'm not surprised that you take a consequentialist, almost military view of the civil rights movement. Perhaps your your warlike approach to domestic social conflicts is the reason you shower praise on groups like like the NOI and IRA, who also preach a violent form of nationalism?
King, however, took a very different view of the civil rights movement. He pursued nonviolence and eschewed reverse racism not because of the favorable outcomes associated with his strategy but because he believed it was the morally correct thing to do. And, yes, he thought it was the correct thing to do, even if it proved to be a losing strategy.
If that makes him a weenie in your eyes, so be it. I wish you'd just come out and admit it.
BTW, I'm curious to know how you feel about Yasser Arafat? Is he one of your personal heroes too?
BTW, is there a reason that you signed up on FR on April Fools' Day or is that just a coincidence?
hmmm....I've seen Sam around before heating up race threads.
his style reminds me of a banned freeper.
Lord knows...that is a common occurence around here....could be Mortin Sult...maybe.
Just a bump for Sam the Sham. I would attempt to argue on his side, but he seems to have it well under control (and seems to be much more knowledgable and eloquent than I would be.)
Only thing worse than snow is slush. And all snow eventually turns to slush.
If you were oppressed would you for one second question your right to fight to free yourself by any means necessary ? Would you feel any moral imperative to confine your actions to nonviolence whether they were successful or not ? Frankly, I don't believe for a second that you would.
Darn, I hoped you'd recognize the punchline...
STS would not be welcome at our house...and we are quite a mix.
I thought you may find this interesting.
I think the Trots gave Malcolm a forum and a publishing contract. That relationship with the SWP was too short to see how it would play out, since Malcolm was killed weeks after he began that association.
I've a better opinion of X than Stanley, who I have a great deal of admiration and respect for. However, we would never know.
The thing about X was he woke up during his Haj. I think he was still shaking off the sleep of hate when he died, but again, to quote Fats Waller--one never knows, do one?
As an aside, The Autobiography of Malcom X is one of the best books that I've ever read. As written by Alex Halley, it's one of the best stories of the rise and fall of a great American personality.
This may surprise you, but I wouldn't, especially if peaceful means were both available and efficacious. Violence ought to be a last resort.
With reference to the civil rights movement, peaceful means were a viable and morally preferable alternative. King's deliberate choice of these means was a powerful witness which won many converts to his cause.
And yet you denigrate his name in favor of a radical who proposed violence as the first option! For the life of me, I cannot understand that.
Btw, I asked you earlier if you were a Christian, and you responded with silence. Why not say, "yes", as you have said before?
Would saying "yes" have made it difficult to defend your preferences for a Muslim militant over a Christian leader like MLK? Or would it have made your "by any means necessary" ethic that much harder to defend?
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, Para. 2264:
Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one's own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow: If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful. . . . Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one's own life than of another's.
Para. 2308:
All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war.
However, "as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed."
Back to this comment of yours once again.
Let's see what MLK had to say about that:
Theres another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You cant see straight when you hate. You cant walk straight when you hate. You cant stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate. He comes to the point that he becomes a pathological case. For the person who hates, you can stand up and see a person and that person can be beautiful, and you will call them ugly. For the person who hates, the beautiful becomes ugly and the ugly becomes beautiful. For the person who hates, the good becomes bad and the bad becomes good. For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. Thats what hate does. You cant see right. The symbol of objectivity is lost. Hate destroys the very structure of the personality of the hater. And this is why Jesus says hate [recording interrupted]. . . that you want to be integrated with yourself, and the way to be integrated with yourself is be sure that you meet every situation of life with an abounding love. Never hate, because it ends up in tragic, neurotic responses.
So much for the alleged rationality of hatred.
"Detroit Red" - crazy, nasty, and stupid.
I did recognize the punchline -- but I'm not into that feather thing and all...
First of all,the word "kaffir", is NOT really the equivalent of "nigger" at all;though both words should never be used.
Secondly,the Zulus have been,until the ANC thugs finally got enough of a foothold to cause internecine and bloody war fare inside of the Zulu nation,an ally of the Afrikaners.Other black tribes were as well. And the Afrikaners were not and are not "WHITE SUPREMICISTS";though some were...as were/are some American whites,German whites,French whites, and so on.
You know less than nothing at all about South African history,nor American history,for that matter. Instead,you take snippets of things and mold/bend /twist them to suit your poisonous agenda.
The NOI,which you seem to be so enamored of,was never going to rise up against the white man,nor the American government. They are more rabidly anit-Semitic than anti-white.The NOI leadership has always been been a BLACK SEPRATIST organization,but mostly,it's no more than a cult and a Mafia like organizations filled with shakedown artists,con-men,thieves,and lunatics who are more like Hitlers Brown Shirt rabble.
Throughout history,there hasn't be a people who weren't slaves at one point or another,or subjugated to a point that was far worse than anything American blacks suffered after Reconstruction. There is no excuse for any of it;none! But to separate blacks out,make them some sort of special totem,and then make unsupportable claims and spurious accusations,as you have done,is not only deplorable,but ridiculous.
I feel somehow vindicated....
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