January 18, 2004

MLK Day: The Martin Luther King Cult

By “Southern Sympathizer”

Martin Luther King Day is only the tip of the iceberg. The Educational Establishment has turned the whole month of January into a period of heavy Martin Luther King indoctrination. 

Typical K-12 lesson plans suggest brainwashing by setting the students to revile one particular segment of the class. Blue-eyed children recur as popular targets—scroll down to (“More Activities To Celebrate Martin Luther King Day Citizenship/ Role-Playing”). There are a great many similar sites on the web.

The effect is to whip up hatred against white southerners and therefore the Founding Peoples generally; and to trigger anxiety, stress and guilt amongst such groups.

Of course no argument is allowed.

However, what the internet takes, it can also give back. The paradoxical result of the pervasive political correctness on King is to provide the extreme right with a propaganda opportunity, effective because its element of truth, ably exploited here. Somewhat less controversially, some of Senator Jesse Helms' courageous Congressional Record insertions in opposition to the MLK Holiday can now be found here. Another effective but sadly unfinished internet project deals with King's astonishingly extensive plagiarism, which, apart from his brutality to women, is probably the failing most likely to distress his liberal admirers.  This issue was of course brilliantly opened by Theodore Pappas' book Plagiarism and The Culture War: The Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Other Prominent Americans.

Sam Francis, who deserves much of the credit for the Jesse Helms Congressional Record statement, has documented definitively the hypocrisy and cynicism characterizing the passage of the MLK Holiday Bill in 1983, in spite of what was then already widely known about him. Francis has since added a postscript.

(Francis recalls that Senator Helms’ heroic opposition to the holiday stunned his enemies because it energized and motivated his core constituencies in North Carolina enough to rescue his faltering ’84 re-election bid. This is a lesson Karl Rove appears determined not to learn.)

And last year, by publishing Marcus Epstein’s remarkable attack, the paleolibertarian website Lew Rockwell.com achieved the status of being the most powerful opinion channel to criticize King in many years.

Epstein’s essay opens a crucial new subject: why have the neoconservatives adopted  MLK worship with such enthusiasm, leading them to publish absurd pieces claiming King as  against racial preferences, and even as a conservative, standing history on its head in the process?

As it happens, last year’s lynching of Trent Lott, which had just occurred when Epstein published, provides the answer in microcosm. By anathematizing Southern history and declaring its heirs taboo, competition for the fruits of the great realignment of white, and particularly Southern white voting patterns, is sharply reduced. Segregation is to be replaced by a new serfdom—for whites.

Happily, the managers of the Great Martin Luther King Scam have another problem to supplement the hostility of the extreme Right—the indignation of the radical Left.

The Left’s position is that King was so a Marxist socialist (good) and enemy of the US Cold War effort (fine), whose womanizing merely proves his vitality (who cares—it’s private). A good statement of this view, with the added ingredient of black supremacism, is Michael Eric Dyson's remarkable 2000 biography I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.

For two other examples of the genre, more concerned with leftist rather than racial objectives, click here and here.

These contributions are extremely valuable to the debate. Of course, the Left has better Big Media access than critics from the right. But, just as important, they have the facts: King was a man of the Left, an opponent of his country in its most threatened hour, a man whose personal lifestyle matched more closely that of the bohemian fringe than that of the country as a whole. 

Michael Eric Dyson is quite justified in his angry protests that the over-publicized key passage of the Dream speech, about a color-blind society, in no way represented King's strategic objectives. He provides a valuable antidote to the opportunism of the neoconservative nomenclatura.

The simple fact is that our schools are terrorizing and intimidating our children with a set of assertions based on a lie. The objective is not, and is not intended to be, in the interests of what the authors of the Constitution described in their opening sentence as "ourselves and our posterity.”

Obviously it is absurd to worship a man who needs his FBI tapes banned from public view. (A brief insight.)

Perhaps our grandchildren will laugh at us in years to come – if the record is ever unsealed.

More likely they will despise us.

There remains the question of King's religious role, which furnished him such credentials.

Churchgoers, dubious about King's apparently imminent canonization, should tax their ministers with this most remarkable contribution by an African American woman. She asks: Was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A Christian?