January 30, 2021

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

The End of History and Christian Hope

Friends,

Actions and events in history do not just happen. Men make decisions, and those decisions—or, at times, the lack of a decision—can and do have momentous results.  Not only that, to see ourselves and just where we “are” in history we must take, as it were, the “long view.” By that we must understand that history—our history, the history of our Western civilization—is more than a succession of actions and events. History is not only a string of particular happenings, dates and important figures we learn about or memorize in grammar and high school. As the late Southern writer Richard Weaver once wrote (and the title of one of his memorable books), “ideas have consequences.”

For the orthodox Christian steeped in the beliefs, traditions, and inheritance of his faith, since the Resurrection and the foundation of Christ’s Church on earth, subsequent history takes on a particular significance. It is the epoch of human existence following Our Lord’s completion and fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament and the establishment of the New, a new dispensation that will continue until the Final Judgment and end of the world.

During this “historical age” those baptized in His Name--the Mystical Body of Christ--undergo tremendous challenges, testing, and persecution. Opposing it are arrayed the forces of Evil, the vast panoply of temptations both secular and (pseudo-)“spiritual,” made to seem very attractive, even apparently partaking of that very Christian inheritance often disguised with a false face: in reality the visage of Revolution against God and man.

For the traditional Christian viewing the history of humankind for the past centuries, the various events, revolutions, economic and political transformations, and religious upheavals—all those pieces fit into an overall puzzle. That puzzle viewed in its totality is often horrifying in its meaning and magnitude; it mirrors the progressive inversion and destruction of our civilization which had been established through the implementation of the Gospel message and the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great (337 A.D.). But given the supreme promises made by Our Lord to the Church and to the faithful orthodox Christian, that awful spectre, although frightening and terrifying, will in the end be defeated and routed.  Indeed, those promises offer reassurance and extend to each of us the theological Virtue of Hope, inspiring in us in the very worst of circumstances a defiance against the demonic forces of Hell itself.

But, as we also know, the severe testing and the incredibly horrendous persecutions and destruction are extremely painful…painful as we watch those institutions, that culture, that glorious civilization which was built and constructed originally upon the teachings of Our Lord, falter and almost disappear before us.

Certainly, for the past five centuries defenders of our inherited civilization have been engaged in a mammoth and multi-faceted rear-guard action. Those institutions and that culture--that music, art, literature and architecture--which grew up organically in the soil watered by the Christian faith have suffered incalculable damage. For to pervert and destroy the Faith, as the diabolical forces of Revolution now understand, attacking it frontally was far less successful. For much of post-Apostolic history that tactic was tried but fended off by the Church Militant.  Rather, now for the past few centuries the tactic has been to infiltrate and poison Christian culture and the environment it has created, that social fabric and ambience that give added character and public expression to the faith, but also, more importantly, help to support the weak at heart.

Thus, every facet of Western Christian culture—that environment that surrounds us and clothes and buoys us up in the inheritance of faith—is under severe stress and in danger of disappearing before our eyes. And the weakest among us suffer the worst, succumbing to the tawdry enticements of Revolutionary Man, and ultimately to the managerial, globalist Deep State.

Just as the French Revolution inserted firmly into the public consciousness the mirage of a new “democratic” man free from Divine rule and the abolition of “old” Europe and those natural orders and bonds that gave life and hope to the Faith even to the lowest peasant, subsequent revolutions, not just political and social, unleashed the untamed advances of (pseudo-)“science”: evolutionism, Freudianism, climate hysteria, critical race theory, and more.

That campaign—that unleased war—encompasses everything; not to realize this fact is fatal. And it is one of the major reasons that the Neoconservatives and most establishment conservatives, who have accepted many of those “advances” (and tell us that they are consistent with defending our civilization), are incapable of real resistance to what is happening.

Historically, consider what has occurred since the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man” (1789) and then the dictatorship of Napoleon, which naturally flowed from that supposed triumph of democracy. At the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), what remained of traditional and Christian Europe attempted to put the evil genie of Revolution back into the lamp. And for approximately a century Europe and the West enjoyed relative peace. Yet, despite the best efforts of Prince von Metternich and Tsar Alexander of Russia, the contagion continued to fester, oft times subterraneously or in brief, regionalized conflicts.

Perhaps most importantly for Americans was the War Between the States through which a grasping Federal government essentially declared war on (the Southern) half the American nation…that half which observed the very rules and understandings that had originally created (as Ben Franklin warned) a fragile United States. By eliminating that counterweight, the continuing revolution in America was fully unleashed and given nearly unstoppable tailwinds—the results of which we see today.

The First World War undid Metternich’s “concert of Europe,” that stasis which had permitted Europe and most of the world to enjoy relative peace and stability for one-hundred years. Three great, essentially conservative empires were in one foul action overturned, and like a disturbed anthill, millions were dispossessed of the traditions, social bonds, and faith which had supported and sustained them for centuries. Soviet Communism triumphed on the bones of Romanov Russia and soon spread its infection throughout the world.

World War II—that so-called “good war”—only saw one real victor: Stalin’s and eventually, Mao’s, legions and subsequent conquests. The historic West in its conceit and propagated lie that “democracy had triumphed” continued its spiral into oblivion, the ultimate dream of the anti-Christian Revolution and the triumph of the transgendered whore of Babylon who offers us her favors in return for eternal slavery and subservience.

That’s where we find ourselves in the first month of the Biden-Harris presidency and the worldwide proclaimed “great reset” enunciated recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by the globalist elites who aspire for total power over the nations of the world and over our lives.

Only two countries presently stand in any way against this globalism: Hungary (under its President Orban) and Russia (under Vladimir Putin), and even in those two cases they must pay obligatory lip service to the objectives of those who work to purge our world of the real message that came from that Cradle in Bethlehem two millennia ago.

I return to William Butler Yeats’ apocalyptic poem, “The Second Coming,” written in the wake of the disastrous conclusion of World War I (1919). Its message is prophetic in that it presages not only what would happen in the interwar years, 1920s and ‘30s, but what has happened since 1945. In part it reads:

      Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The “rough beast” is unleashed as Saint Peter the Apostle tells us in I Peter 5:8: “Be sober and watch: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour” (the First Lesson in the ancient Office of Compline). But then in verses 9 and 10 we are comforted by the promise that “Whom resist ye, strong in faith: knowing that the same affliction befalls your brethren who are in the world. But the God of all grace, who hath called us into his eternal glory in Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a little, will himself perfect you, and confirm you, and establish you.”

This, then, is our promise in the midst of the virtual triumph of Evil, of the Rough Beast.

Despite the odds, we continue to stoutly defend our faith and our culture…what remains of the inheritance vouchsafed to us by our Christian ancestors.

And on our lips are songs of praise to the Creator, our Hope and our salvation.

                                                January 22, 2021

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

Comparing Dixie and Post-Communist Russia

Friends,

Every now and then I pass on a column written by someone I respect and whose perspective I value—an article or essay that I believe adds to and brings out points that I have tried to make, and that the writer sharply highlights and focusses with even more clarity and detail.

In the past I’ve featured pieces by Pat Buchanan, Ilana Mercer, Jack Kerwick, Clyde Wilson, Paul Gottfried, Brion McClanahan, and others. In our decaying American society, with its traditional culture under severe attack and disappearing before our eyes, these writers have significant contributions to make…and should be widely read and their views digested.

One author whom I count as a dear friend is “The Dissident Mama.” Her columns are like sleek rapier jabs at the seemingly all-powerful managerial state now ensconced in Washington. Profoundly grounded in her native Southern soil she is an intrepid defender of Southern heritage. But almost alone among those columnists and writers defending the South these days, she understands the larger context—how the American South historically as an expression and outpost of Christian civilization also fits into the immense global conflict between the retreating and beleaguered forces of that tradition and inheritance, and the “new barbarians” who relentlessly seek its—and our—destruction and elimination.

“The Dissident Mama” has also been a fearless commentator on and observer of the religious transformation taking place in Russia since the fall of Communism in August 1991, and the fascinating and ironic contrast between that evolution and what has been happening to the American nation. Like her I have in the past commented on the rebirth of traditional Christianity in Russia during the past three decades. Indeed, the world has been turned upside down, with Russia now defending Christianity, while the American and Western political and media elites viciously attack it. As Patrick Buchanan now rightly asks: “On whose side is God NOW on?”

Back in 2019 “The Dissident Mama” honored me by reviewing my little book on Southern heritage, The Land We Love, in one of her columns. Her understanding of what I was attempting to do and achieve was remarkable.

Now, in the pages of Russian Faith online journal she returns to the similarities and contrasts between the traditional South and post-Communist Russia, and once more employs The Land We Love as a benchmark. With appreciation I pass that essay on today.

Dixie & Russia: What Do They Have in Common?

https://russian-faith.com/dixie-russia-what-do-they-have-in-common-n4211

Both Russia and the South are hated by the oligarchs in D.C., NATO, the EU, and the UN, they are condemned by Wall Street and the Pentagon, and they are ceaselessly mocked and ridiculed by self-loathing Westerners. Why?

Dixie, like Russia, is an enclave of civilization itself. Both cling to the bedrocks of faith and family, in spite of government-coerced progress. But Dixie is quickly losing its grip, whereas Russians are holding on tight. What’s the difference? . . .

Dissident Mama(Dissident Mama) Dec 30, 2020 

I began reading “The Land We Love” on the long flight back to the U.S. from Helsinki.

My family and I had been on a three-week vacation in Russia, and our experiences gave me such a keen insight into the dramatic history and resilience of the Russian people, especially among the rekindled and growing Orthodox faithful.

As I turned the pages in Dr. Boyd D. Cathey’s book, I was overwhelmed by the similarities of the Russian and Eastern bloc peoples who suffered under the foreign influence of Bolshevism, and that of Southerners tormented by the nonindigenous ideology of central authoritarianism.

Two agrarian societies remade industrial through blood and fire. I was awash with the knowledge “that you can’t extinguish truth if good men and women stand boldly for it,” as Cathey says.

We in Dixie have experienced hardship and destruction, perhaps not on par with Soviet Communism’s tens of millions killed, but a deadly religiosity nonetheless. And one that is born of the same rotten fruit. Godlessness. Egalitarianism. Collectivism. Coercion. Consumerism. Covetousness. “Progress.” Under these totalitarian edicts, conformity by force is called “unity,” while “shared community and kinship,” as Cathey describes localized loyalties, are seen as “treason.”

I was also struck by the modern parallels. Both Russia and the South are absolutely hated by the oligarchs in D.C., NATO, the EU, and the UN; they’re condemned by Wall Street and the Pentagon; they’re targeted for propaganda campaigns by the corporate media, Hollywood, K-12, and academia; and they’re ceaselessly mocked and ridiculed by uninformed and/or subversive urbanites, elitists, wards of the political class, and self-loathing Westerners. Why?

Because all right-thinking people know that Dixie and its white supremacists need(ed) to be conquered, colonized, and remade, just as Russia and its backwards nationalists must be reformed by any means necessary. Robert E. Lee was a traitorous slave-owner and Vladimir Putin is a thug who was in the KGB, so bombs away!

It’s what’s known in geopolitical terms as “humanitarian warfare.” The globalists will save the planet (or “the Union,” as was the propaganda of the 1860s) and offer salvation to the Christofascists from Montgomery to Moscow. They are “the antithesis to their Leftist nostrums” after all. This is precisely why Cathey proudly displays a “Putin For President” bumper sticker on his car.

This bogeymen narrative serves two purposes: to crush traditionalist opposition to the PC status quo and to set up the scapegoats who, with all their backwards notions of faith, family, and roots, are just standing in the way of enlightenment and evolution. The road to establishing the new-world order is paved with bricks of the archetype, upon whom the revolutionary masses trample on their sprint straight to hell.

Lulled into complacency by the false gods of consumerism and creature comforts, the South’s heritage and identity are on the decline, while Russia’s are on the march. Therefore, to ensure globalist domination, the oligarchs must finally extinguish the South’s flickering fire while trying everything within their deep-state power to stamp out Russia’s newly lit flame.

Just check out the stark contrast of Putin’s New Year’s address, framed by images of the many stunning Orthodox churches which fill Red Square and the Kremlin, with that of globohomo deep-stater Anderson Cooper, talking smut while flanked by Times Square’s oppressive Yankee commercialism and event attendees even wearing ad-sponsored hats. It seems so strange that the former outpost of Stalin is more beautiful than is America’s supposed premiere city, the Big Apple, but it’s obvious to me which one is rotten to the core.

“Our Southern society is an outpost of Western Christian civilization,” Cathey wrote, but I would argue, that Dixie (like Russia) is an enclave of civilization itself. Both cling to the bedrocks of faith and family, in spite of government-coerced progress. But we are quickly losing our grip, whereas Russians are holding on tight. What’s the difference?

After 155 years of nonstop Reconstruction, the South is a “Christ–haunted society,” as Flannery O’Connor once noted. All that Yankee re-education has taken a toll; yet, “Southerners were – and still are – self-consciously ‘traditionalists,'” explains Cathey.

“In both slavery and post-slavery times, it was not so much race, but rather a desire to preserve the social order – hierarchy and balance in society – which motivated most thinking Southerners.” Such a worldview is like kryptonite to the perpetual meddlers of puritanical-progressivism.

When Puritan descendants “began to veer into Unitarianism, transcendentalism, and heretical millenarian cults” and eventually the “social gospel and secularist movements,” the South and its “orthodox Trinitarian and Incarnational Christianity … inhibited deviations and heterodoxy.” Southerners have always had a thick armor to repelling the wiles of invaders and reformers.

“Above all other Americans, Southerners have maintained a unique sense of community and rootedness in time and place – and in the land they love.” So, it is “Southerners’ lived traditionalism” that leftists aim to destroy. They see it as competition. As too dissident. As too rebellious “to the lunacy of an ideology that promises utopia on earth, but ends in enslaving its inhabitants.” Dixie has been and still is “most resistant to such Siren calls.”

The principles of the “Confederate Southerner … oppose not just the Leviathan and managerial ‘big government’ state that has been thrust upon us,” but they’re also defined by “how we differentiate ourselves from folks in the rest of the Federal union.” This “Southern philosophy” has always made us “Other,” even before the War of Northern Aggression, and most certainly since leftists co-opted the term for their aggrieved-minority schemes.

Our ancestors didn’t really worry about it because, honestly, most Southern folk didn’t sit around caring two hoots about what Yankees thought of them. Similarly, the average Russian doesn’t spend much time pondering the machinations of the Russophobes in the West. What should rouse the ire of traditionalists is when the globalists want us either in bondage or dead.

“The current American political system has been largely a charade, parading as a ‘democracy,’ but in reality an insatiable and ruthless oligarchic Behemoth … a caste system more severe, more self-aggrandizing, and more domineering than anything traditional aristocracies ever envisaged or dreamed of.” But as Cathey reminds us, God is the author of history, not man.

Cathey notes, “Who would have dreamed in 1916 that Vladimir Lenin, in lonely exile in Switzerland, would in one short year become dictator of the world’s largest nation? And then, who would have thought the Communist system he created would suddenly expire ignominiously in a few short months in 1991,” to quote T.S. Eliot, “not with a bang, but with a whimper.”

“I see incredible lessons – and reasons for hope – in the experience and rebirth of a Christian Russia,” Cathey told me. He is right. Our enemies are (and have always been) the same. But through their ancestral faith, the Russians have a revitalized unity and determination. Christian folkways are at the heart of their people and their 1,000-year Orthodox history (illustrated at top with the Baptism of the Rus’ in 988), and it will be the key to their future. Southerners should take note.

“We must stand for – we must dwell within – our Citadel, our inheritance and culture, our very identity and being as a people representing 2,000 years of Western Christian heritage, or we shall disappear into the abyss of history.” It’s time to cast off the yoke of nation-statism and its technocratic idols, and cherish our roots.

“Those who keep high the standard of faith and conviction … with God’s good help and His grace, they do succeed,” Cathey sums up in the final chapter of his book. And that is exactly what Southerners need to remember.

As the Apostle Matthew preached, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” We must not be “Christ-haunted,” but rather “Christ-centered.” This is how we prevail.

                                                January 18, 2021

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

Martin Luther King Day and Its Meaning

Friends,

[For the past several years I have been publishing—and then republishing—an essay on Martin Luther King on this day which I originally put out five years ago. Each time I slightly edit it (but not much), but almost always it remains essentially what I wrote back in 2016. Like the disastrous Civil Rights and Voting Rights bills of the 1960s, the establishment of the King Holiday is a watershed event in American history, symbolic of what had happened to this country and a predictor of what was to happen… and is occurring now. And so, once again, I offer this longish essay for consideration. The history that is recounted has not changed, but perhaps we can see now, understand better where it has led us. –BDC]

 

For the past thirty-five years (officially since 1986) the third Monday in January has been celebrated as a federal holiday, Martin Luther King Day. Federal and state offices and many businesses either close or go on limited schedules. We are awash with public observances, parades, prayer breakfasts, stepped-up school projects for our unwary and intellectually-abused children, and gobs and gobs of over-the-top television “specials” and movies, all geared to tell us—to shout it in our faces, if we don’t pay strict attention—that King was some sort of superhuman, semi-divine civil rights leader who brought the promise of equality to millions of Americans, a kind of modern St. John the Baptist ushering in the Millennium. And that he stands just below Jesus Christ in the pantheon of revered and adored historical personages…and in some ways, perhaps above Jesus Christ in the minds of many of his present-day devotees and epigones.

 

It seems to do no good to issue a demurrer to this veritable religious “cult of Dr. King.” There are, indeed, numerous “Christian” churches that now “celebrate” this day just as if it were a major feast in the Christian calendar. In short, Martin Luther King has received de facto canonization religiously and in the public mind as no other person in American history.

Mention the fact that King may have plagiarized as much as 40 % of his Boston University Ph.D. dissertation [cf. Theodore Pappas, Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Other Prominent Americans, 1998 and Martin Luther King Jr Plagiarism Story, 1994], or that he worked closely with known Communists throughout his life, or that he advocated American defeat in Vietnam while praising Ho Chi Minh, or that he implicitly countenanced violence and Marxism, especially later in his life [cf., Congressional Record, 129, no. 130 (October 3, 1983): S13452-S13461]—mention any of these accusations confirmed begrudgingly by his establishment biographers David Garrow and Taylor Branch, or mention his even-by-current-standards violent “rough sex” escapades (which apparently involved even under-agers) [cf., Cooper Sterling, January 13, 2018, at: http://www.vdare.com/articles/fake-news-washington-post-evades-martin-luther-kings-communist-links?content=for%20Church%20Ministers.%E2%80%9D ]—and you immediately get labeled a “racist” and condemned by not just the zealous King flame-keepers on the Left, but by such “racially acceptable” Neoconservatives like James Kirchick and Dinesh D’Souza who supposedly are on the Right.

Indeed, in some ways Establishment “conservatives” such as Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry (National Review), D’Souza, Glenn Beck, the talking heads on Fox…and many others, not only eagerly buy into this narrative, they now have converted King into a full-fledged, card-carrying member of “Conservatism Inc.”—the (contemporary) “conservative movement,” a “plaster saint” iconized as literally no one else in our history.

 

Celebrating King becomes a means for these ersatz conservatives to demonstrate their “civil rights” and “egalitarian” bona fides. The Neocons, with their philosophical and ideological origins over on the Trotskyite Left of the 1930s and 1940s, when they made their pilgrimage towards conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s brought with them a fervent believe in a globalist New World Order egalitarianism that characterized Trotskyite Marxist ideology, and the determination to redefine and re-orient the traditional American Rightwing, and to re-write, as well, American history.

Thus, the purges of the old conservative movement in the 1980s and 1990s—there was no room for Southern conservatives like Mel Bradford, no room for traditionalist Catholics like Frederick Wilhelmsen or Brent Bozell Sr., no room for paleo-libertarians like Murray Rothbard, no room for Old Right anti-egalitarians like Paul Gottfried, and no room for “America Firsters” like Pat Buchanan…And those traditional conservatives who were too significant in the “pantheon of greats,” like a Russell Kirk, they attempted to simply whitewash and give them new, cleaned up images and identities (part and parcel of their “rewriting” of conservatism). Thus, Kirk’s opposition to the civil rights bills of the 1960s and 1970s, his staunch arguments against egalitarianism, his willingness to debate cognitive disparities between the races (publishing, for example, reviews of Dr. Audrey M. Shuey’s study, The Testing of Negro Intelligence, in his publication, The University Bookman—I know, as I was there in Mecosta when it happened) are all swept under the carpet or carefully ignored.

In this, in fact, the dominant Neocons have joined with their cousins on the “farther Left,” to the point that Bush consultant guru and Fox pundit, Karl Rove, could boast that hardcore Marxist/Communist historian Eric Foner (who lamented the collapse of Soviet Communism) was his favorite historian (when examining Reconstruction) [See Dr. Paul Gottfried’s incisive critique of Foner and those “conservatives” who have praised him, “Guilt Trip,” The American Conservative,” May 4, 2009, pp. 21-23].

King Day has become, then, for the Conservative Movement an opportunity for it to beat its chest, brag about its commitment to civil rights and the American “dream”, the unrealized idea of equality (that is, to distort and re-write the history of the American Founding), and to protect its left flank against the ever increasing charges that it could be, just might be, maybe is—“racist.”

And for the “farther Left,” that catapulting cultural Marxist juggernaut that continues to move the societal and political goalposts to the Left, King Day becomes as a major ideological blitzkrieg, a weaponized cudgel used to strike down and silence anyone, anywhere, who might offer the slightest dissent to the latest barbarity and latest “advance” in civil rights, now expanded to include not just everything “racial,” but also same sex marriage, transgenderism and abortion on demand. Martin Luther King–that deeply and irredeemably flawed and fraudulent figure imposed upon us and our consciousness—has become an icon, a totem, who serves in martyred death the purposes of continuing Revolution.

The heavily-documented literature detailing the real Martin Luther King is abundant and remains uncontroverted and basically uncontested. During the debates over establishing a national “King Day” in the mid-1980s, Senators Jesse Helms and John East (both North Carolinians) led the opposition, supplying the Congress and the nation, and anyone with eyes to read, full accounts of the “King legacy,” from his close association and collaboration with the Communist Party USA to his advocacy of violence and support for the Communists in North Vietnam, to implicit support for Marxist revolution domestically. Ironically, it was Robert Woodson, a noted black Republican, who highlighted in a lecture given to honor the “conservative virtues of Dr. Martin Luther King” at the Heritage Foundation on November 5, 1993, the difficulties in getting black advocates of the older generation to respect King’s role as a Civil Rights leader. According to Woodson, as quoted in an excellent essay by Paul Gottfried,

“when Dr. King tried to bring the Civil Rights movement together with the [Marxist] peace movement, it was Carl Rowan who characterized King as a Communist, not Ronald Reagan. I remember being on the dais of the NAACP banquet in Darby, Pennsylvania when Roy Wilkins soundly castigated King for this position.” [Paul Gottfried, “The Cult of St. Martin Luther King – A Loyalty Test for Careerist Conservatives?” January 16, 2012, at: http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-cult-of-st-martin-luther-king-a-loyalty-test-for-careerist-conservatives ]

But not only that, behind the scenes there were voluminous secretly-made FBI recordings and accounts of King’s violent sexual escapades, often times with more than two or three others involved in such “rough sex” trysts; and of his near total hypocrisy when discussing civil rights and other prominent civil rights leaders. It is, to put it mildly, a sorry record, scandalous even by today’s standards…Indeed, King makes Harvey Weinstein look like a meek choirboy in comparison.

But you won’t hear any of that mentioned by the falling-all-over-itself Mainstream Media or the media mavens on Fox. In fact, such comments will get you exiled to the far reaches of the Gobi Desert and labeled a “racist,” quicker that my cocker spaniel gobbles down his kibble.

Rather than rehash and restate all the various accusations, backed up with substantial and overwhelming documentation, let me offer something of an annotated bibliography and history of MLK Day. Almost all the material is now available and accessible online, including material from the Congressional Record.

First, essential to understanding the background of just how we got King Day, the late Dr. Samuel Francis’s account is critical. Originally written to preface the publication of voluminous testimony and documentation placed in the Congressional Record by Senator Helms, Francis’s essay and the Helms’ dossier were eventually published in book form (I have a published copy, but I’m unsure if you can still find it on Amazon). A few years back Dr. Francis’s introduction and his detailed background essay and the lengthy Congressional Record material (which he prepared for Helms) were put online. For a complete understanding of King’s association and cooperation with American Communists and his endorsement of Vietnamese Communism, as well as his putative endorsement of Marxism here in the United States while condemning the free enterprise system, these two items are essential reading:

Dr. Samuel Francis, “The King Holiday and Its Meaning,” February 26, 2015, at: http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-king-holiday-and-its-meaning-0

Dr. Samuel Francis, “Remarks of Senator Jesse Helms. Congressional Quarterly,” February 26, 2005, at: http://www.vdare.com/articles/helms-jesse-remarks-of-senator-jesse-helms-congressional-quarterly-0

 

To fully understand the serious plagiarism charges leveled against King and the academic and politically-correct skullduggery that surrounded Boston University’s decision not to rescind his doctoral degree, Theodore Pappas’s two detailed studies, cited above, offer fascinating and scandalously revealing details. But other writers, also, upon cursory examination, have found numerous other instances of his plagiarism.

Remember the “I Have a Dream” speech? Well, as Jim Goad wrote in Takimag back in 2012:

“…the immortalized in MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech in the part where he beseeches God…to “Let freedom ring from the Stone Mountain of Georgia.” King stole that passage about Stone Mountain from a 1952 oratory delivered by another black preacher at the Republican National Convention. He also allegedly plagiarized parts of the first public sermon he ever delivered back in 1947.” [Jim Goad, “I’m So Bored with MLK,” Takimag, January 16, 2012, at: http://takimag.com/article/im_so_bored_with_mlk#axzz54AHOhapO]

But, say the Neocon scribblers at National Review and the pundits on Fox, wasn’t King really a conservative at heart, an old-fashioned black Baptist who believed in the tenets of traditional Christianity? Shouldn’t we simply overlook these all-too-human foibles?

To answer that Dr. Jack Kerwick penned an essay several years ago that addresses these futile attempts to sanitize and “conservatize” King on the part of “conservatism inc.,” in its efforts to shore up its leftward flank and, through sanctifying him, to defend the template of egalitarianism as central to the American Founding.

I take the liberty of quoting Kerwick at length:

“In honor of African-American History month, let’s take a quiz. In each of the following statements, a famous African-American is quoted. Identify that person among these answer choices: (a) Jesse Jackson; (b) Jeremiah Wright; (c) Al Sharpton; (d) Louis Farrakhan; (e)Barack Hussein Obama; and (f) Martin Luther King, Jr.

(1)George Washington was undoubtedly valorous. “But to the end of his days he maintained a posture of exclusionism toward the slave,” and he “was a fourth-generation slaveholder.” Washington “only allowed” blacks “to enter the Continental Army because His Majesty’s Crown was attempting to recruit” blacks “to the British Cause.”

(2)The black American is “the child of two cultures—Africa and America. The problem is that in the search for wholeness all too many” blacks “seek to embrace only one side of their natures.” Blacks in America are “Afro-American [.]”

(3) “Colonialism could not have been perpetuated if the Christian Church had really taken a stand against it.” For example, “the vicious system of apartheid in South Africa” had among “its chief defenders…the Dutch Reformed Protestant Church.”

(4) “If the Church does not participate actively in the struggle for peace and for economic and racial justice” future generations will look back upon it as “one of the greatest bulwarks of white supremacy.”

(5) President Lyndon Baines Johnson had a “comprehensive grasp” of the problems of poverty and civil rights that he faced. He had “sincerity,” “realism,” and “wisdom” in how he approached them.

(6) Blacks, like everyone else, have “a right to expect the resources of the American trade union movement to be used in assuring” them “of a proper place in American society.” Young blacks especially “need to think of union careers as earnestly as they do of business careers and professions.”

(7) America maintains “a continued alliance…with racism and exploitation throughout the world.”

(8) Both Marxism and “traditional capitalism” are partially true and partially false. The former may fail to “see the truth in individual enterprise,” but the latter fails to “see the truth in collective enterprise.”

(9) Communism was “a judgment on” the “failure” of “Western nations…to make democracy real and to follow through on the revolutions that we initiated.”

(10) The “potential explosiveness of our world situation is much more attributable [than anything else] to disillusionment with promises of Christianity and technology.”

(11) America “is still behind European nations in all forms of social legislation.”

(12) “Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people [the American Indian] of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.”

(13) “The misery of the poor in Africa and Asia” is the “result of years of [Western] exploitation and underdevelopment.”

(14) “We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern economic imperialism.”

(15) If there is to be “peace on earth,” people’s “loyalties must transcend” not only “race,” “tribe,” and “class,” but “nation.” This “means [that] we must develop a world perspective.”

(16) “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we now have the resources to get rid of it.” What this implies is that the time is now “for an all-out world war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed.”

(17) The United Nations is to be applauded, for it is the product of “the fear of war.”

(18) Since “the destructive power of modern weapons eliminates even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good,” those “who sincerely feel that disarmament is an evil and international negotiation is an abominable waste of time” are sorely mistaken.

(19) “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

(20) America “must not only radically readjust its attitude toward” blacks; it “must incorporate in its planning some compensatory compensation [“Affirmative Action”] from the handicaps [blacks] inherited from the past.”

(21) What’s necessary for combating poverty is “a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial.”

(22) Because America was “born in genocide,” “racial hatred,” and “racial supremacy,” nothing less than “a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values” is demanded. After all, “a nation that put as many Japanese in a concentration camp as” America did during World War II will think nothing of putting “black people in a concentration camp” as well.

(23) America needs a “revolution of values”—i.e. “socialism.”

(24) The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were “at best surface changes.” Only a “redistribution of economic power” could rectify the injustices inherent in “the system” of “capitalism.”

(25) The Vietnam War was “senseless,” “unjust,” and “racist [.]” In truth, it is America that is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [.]”

*Bonus Question: Which of the foregoing famous African-Americans said this about Ronald Reagan?

“That a one-time “Hollywood performer” who lacked “distinction even as an actor” could “become a leading war hawk candidate for the presidency” had to have been due to a most “melancholy turn of events [.]” In fact, “only the irrationalities induced by a war psychosis” could explain it.

If you selected “(f),” Martin Luther King, Jr., as your answer to ALL these questions, then you achieved a perfect score! That’s right: Though some word tenses were changed so as not to date the quotation in question and give away the answer, the hard truth of the matter is that, contrary to what contemporary “conservative” commentators [in the GOP and on Fox News] would have you believe, King was obviously about as much of a conservative, to say nothing of a “Reagan conservative,” as any of the other famous black Americans mentioned at the beginning of this article. His statements, in fact, reveal a man of the hard left, and certainly to the left of Barack Obama. “The truth,” as Friedrich Nietzsche so simply, yet powerfully, put it, “is hard.”

[Dr. Jack Kerwick, February 2015, http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/attheintersectionoffaithandculture/2015/02/a-pop-quiz-for-african-american-history-month.html]

Finally, I should also mention Peter Brimelow’s superb essay that offers additional insight on the King Day holiday and which summarizes much of the information, ideological uses, and controversy surrounding the day. It was originally published in 2015, but he has republished it each year to coincide with this annual national paroxysm: “ ‘Time To Rethink Martin Luther King Day’–The 2017 Edition,” at: http://www.vdare.com/articles/time-to-rethink-martin-luther-king-day-the-2017-edition]

I can think of no better summation of the real meaning of King Day and its bare-knuckled ideological use to deconstruct, dissolve and obliterate American traditions and heritage than to cite, again, Sam Francis:

“[T]he true meaning of the holiday is that it serves to legitimize the radical social and political agenda that King himself favored and to delegitimize traditional American social and cultural institutions—not simply those that supported racial segregation but also those that support a free market economy, an anti-communist foreign policy, and a constitutional system that restrains the power of the state rather than one that centralizes and expands power for the reconstruction of society and the redistribution of wealth. In this sense, the campaign to enact the legal public holiday in honor of Martin Luther King was a small first step on the long march to revolution, a charter by which that revolution is justified as the true and ultimate meaning of the American identity. In this sense, and also in King’s own sense, as he defined it in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the Declaration of Independence becomes a “promissory note” by which the state is authorized to pursue social and economic egalitarianism as its mission, and all institutions and values that fail to reflect the dominance of equality—racial, cultural, national, economic, political, and social—must be overcome and discarded.

“By placing King—and therefore his own radical ideology of social transformation and reconstruction—into the central pantheon of American history, the King holiday provides a green light by which the revolutionary process of transformation and reconstruction can charge full speed ahead. Moreover, by placing King at the center of the American national pantheon, the holiday also serves to undermine any argument against the revolutionary political agenda that it has come to symbolize. Having promoted or accepted the symbol of the new dogma as a defining—perhaps the defining—icon of the American political order, those who oppose the revolutionary agenda the symbol represents have little ground to resist that agenda.” [January 16, 2006, at: https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/samuel_francis_on_martin_luther_king_jr_day]

I will not be celebrating this day; rather, it is for me a mournful reminder of what has happened and is happening to this country.