Every January,America honors the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.\u00a0 Perhaps because it has now been decades since this occasion has been declared a federal holiday, most Americans today\u2014especially the young\u2014have no recollection of just how much resistance its proponents faced.\u00a0 More specifically, the lion\u2019s share of this resistance came from just that party whose media apologists now regularly join with their leftist counterparts in paying the obligatory praise to this iconic reverend.<\/p>\n
The self-sworn guardians of Republican \u201cconservative\u201d orthodoxy, those anti-leftists who spend several hours each day at least five days a week (correctly) drawing attention to the socialistic agenda of Barack Obama and his party, invariably pay homage to Dr. King.\u00a0 This is, at the very least, ironic, for far from being the conservative hero of popular Republican lore, King was not only a leftist, <\/em>but a radical <\/em>leftist\u2014whether measured by the standards of our generation or those of his own.<\/p>\n The Martin Luther King, Jr. upon whom Republicans routinely lavish praise is a fiction.\u00a0 More precisely, it is a fiction spawned from the union of ideological convenience and intellectual laziness.\u00a0 This <\/em>King, a virtual saint who tirelessly promoted and died for the sake of a vision of color-blindness, is a prophet who offered to America its one and only chance at redemption.\u00a0 For this legendary figure, race or color is as morally relevant a characteristic as a wart or a pimple.<\/p>\n But, as black leftist and King admirer Michael Eric Dyson insists, only by focusing on a single <\/em>line from a single speech\u2014King\u2019s \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech\u2014can Republicans justify this reading of King.\u00a0 By now, it is with the greatest of ease that most Americans can recite this famous line: \u201cI 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.\u201d\u00a0 In his I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr., <\/em>Dyson laments \u201cthe conservative misappropriation<\/em>\u201d of King\u2019s words and insists that King is not <\/em>the \u201cadvocate of a color-blind society\u201d that Republicans and \u201cconservatives\u201d make him out to be (emphasis mine).<\/p>\n Dyson argues compellingly for his contention that King was a radical. \u00a0To begin with, let us look at King\u2019s position on what we today call \u201caffirmative action.\u201d<\/p>\n Republicans routinely assume that since King was a staunch champion of \u201cequal opportunity,\u201d he would never have countenanced \u201caffirmative action\u201d policies.\u00a0 But as Dyson is quick to show, this assumption couldn\u2019t be further from the truth.<\/p>\n According to King, \u201cthe struggle for rights is, at bottom, a struggle for opportunities,\u201d\u00a0 it is true, yet he was equally insistent upon his belief that \u201cwith equal opportunity must come the practical, realistic aid which will equip\u201d blacks to \u201cseize\u201d this opportunity.\u00a0 King declared that \u201cthe nation must not only radically readjust its attitude toward the Negro in the compelling present, but must incorporate in its planning some compensatory<\/em> consideration<\/em> for the handicaps he has inherited from the past\u201d (emphasis mine).<\/p>\n King, then, rejected the dichotomous terms in which the Republican relates \u201cequality of opportunity\u201d with \u201cequality of results.\u201d\u00a0 To put the point more bluntly, King very much favored a system\u2014a \u201cmassive<\/em>\u201d system, as he described it\u2014of mostly race-based policies providing blacks with preferential treatment.\u00a0 \u201cI am proposing,\u201d King wrote, \u201cthat, just as we granted a GI Bill of Rights to war veterans, America launch a broad-based and gigantic<\/em> Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial\u201d (emphases mine).<\/p>\n King admitted that \u201cthe idea of reforming <\/em>the existing institutions of\u201d American society that he once held was a mistake. He came to believe that nothing less than \u201ca reconstruction of the entire society<\/em>, a revolution<\/em> of values,\u201d is needed (emphasis mine).\u00a0 \u00a0Such a \u201cfundamental transformation,\u201d as Barack Obama would put it some forty years later, is necessary, for it became King\u2019s considered judgment that \u201cAmerica is a racist country.\u201d\u00a0 Most whites, King asserted, \u201care unconscious racists\u201d who, as such, must be compelled <\/em>to insure blacks their just desserts.<\/p>\n America, according to King, \u201cwas born in genocide,\u201d \u201cracial hatred,\u201d and \u201cracial supremacy.\u201d\u00a0 Insofar as it was founded by slave holders\u2014particularly those slave holders who authored the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence\u2014it \u201chas a lot of repenting to do.\u201d\u00a0 Blacks had good reason to be distrustful ofAmerica, King proclaimed, because its creed as it is embodied in the Declaration \u201chas never had any real meaning in terms of implementation\u201d in the lives of blacks.\u00a0 Furthermore, \u201ca nation that put as many Japanese in a concentration camp as\u201dAmericadid during World War II \u201cwill put black people in a concentration camp,\u201d King assured his followers.<\/p>\n This \u201creconstruction of the entire society,\u201d this \u201crevolution of values\u201d for which King called has a name, and it is a name that he<\/em> ascribed to it.\u00a0 It is called \u201cdemocratic socialism.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n Many people today tend to look upon the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as being the civil rights movement\u2019s two signature achievements.\u00a0 This, though, is not a view that King shared.\u00a0 Such laws and the changes that they attended \u201cwere at best surface changes,\u201d he said, \u201cnot really substantive changes\u201d at all.\u00a0 Moreover, since these bills had become law, \u201cthe plight of the Negro poor\u201d had actually \u201cworsened [.]\u201d\u00a0 King was convinced that \u201cthe roots\u201d of the problem lie in \u201cthe system rather than in men or faulty operations.\u201d\u00a0 Hence, he concluded, the antidote lies in \u201ca redistribution of economic power.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, King confesses that what he is \u201csaying\u201d is \u201cthat something is wrong\u2026with capitalism<\/em> [.]\u201d\u00a0 This is \u201cthe system\u201d that is the root of the great injustices on which King sets his sights.\u00a0 In order, then, to address injustice, this system must be abolished in favor of another.\u00a0 With what system does King seek to replace \u201ccapitalism?\u201d\u00a0 His answer is to the point.\u00a0 Since \u201cthere must be a better distribution of wealth,\u201d \u201cmaybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism<\/em>\u201d (emphases mine).<\/p>\n Not only did King charge America with being a \u201cracist\u201d country founded in racial \u201cgenocide\u201d and \u201chatred.\u201d\u00a0 Not only did he demand the abolition of economic liberty as Americans had traditionally conceived it\u2014\u201ccapitalism\u201d\u2014in favor of \u201cDemocratic Socialism.\u201d\u00a0 King accused America of being \u201cthe greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,\u201d characterized the Vietnam War as \u201csenseless\u201d and \u201cunjust,\u201d and declared thatAmerica\u2019s prosecution of the Vietnam War was \u201cracist.\u201d<\/p>\n There is one final consideration that accentuates the irony of self-sworn \u201cconservatives\u201d\u2014\u201cReagan conservatives,\u201d as many of them like to regard themselves\u2014heaping praise upon King: King disdained Ronald Wilson Reagan.\u00a0 That he held Reagan in contempt becomes obvious when we remember that King very rarely disparaged those public figures with whom he disagreed.\u00a0 Yet in Reagan\u2019s case, he was ready to make an exception.\u00a0 Of Reagan King stated: \u201cWhen a Hollywood performer, lacking distinction even as an actor, can become a leading war hawk candidate for the presidency only the irrationalities induced by a war psychosis can explain such a melancholy turn of events.\u201d<\/p>\n The civil rights movement of which King was at the vanguard began as a revolt against Southern-style Jim Crow segregation.\u00a0 Under this system, not only did government directly practice racial discrimination but it as well compelled private property owners to engage in this activity.\u00a0 There is no mystery as to why any self-styled disciple of liberty would commend King for the courage and conviction that he displayed resisting this great injustice.<\/p>\n However, it is either ignorance or intellectual dishonesty that accounts for why they would heap praise upon him for the incalculable contributions he made toward the advancement of a leftist agenda that is supposed to be against everything for which they stand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every January,America honors the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.\u00a0 Perhaps because it has now been decades since this occasion has been declared a federal holiday, most Americans today\u2014especially the young\u2014have no recollection of just how much resistance its proponents faced.\u00a0 More specifically, the lion\u2019s share of this resistance came from just that party whose…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n