"Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled Atahualpa," wrote Lord Macaulay 168 years ago.
Well, they don’t anymore, if they ever did, (it was Cortez and Pizarro, respectively) but, boy, do they know a lot about Martin Luther King, Jr.
Of course, there are many things about him that they don’t know. The NEA has a massive set of Curriculum Resources on Dr. King here—see if you can find the words plagiarism or Communism in there, let alone adultery.
It’s not only what they don’t know, it’s the things they know that aren’t so—when I read this, ten years ago, I could kind of tell that the author decided he didn’t care if he went to cocktail parties with liberals:
"To take just one example, I gnash my teeth when conservatives argue that ‘affirmative action’ violates ‘the spirit of Dr. King’—’color-blind justice,’ and all that. Nonsense. If King were alive today, he’d certain support state-imposed racial preferences. He was a Marxist, always moving leftward. Liberals are right to claim him as their own; conservatives who appeal to his ‘spirit’ only make fools of themselves."[Media and Mythology, By Joe Sobran, SOBRAN’S, November–December 1998]
This is true. A new article by Benjamin J. Ryan in American Renaissance points out that Dr. King was calling for hard quotas:
"King has been praised, even by conservatives, as the great advocate of color-blindness. They focus too narrowly on one sentence in his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, in which he said he wanted to live in a nation ‘where [my children] will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’ The truth is that King wanted quotas for blacks. ‘[I]f a city has a 30 percent Negro population,’ King reasoned, ‘then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30 percent of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas.’" [The Unknown Martin Luther King, Jr., January 2008]
At VDARE.COM, we’ve featured a lot of coverage of undercovered issues in the Martin Luther King saga. For example, we’ve featured Jesse Helms’s speech on the proposed MLK Day in 1983, which was read on the Senate Floor. ["Remarks of Senator Jesse Helms." Congressional Quarterly 129, no. 130 (October 3, 1983): S13452-S13461.]
Part of that speech was based on research by the late Sam Francis, who reported that his research was not only read on the Senate floor, it was thrown on the Senate floor and stomped on by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who characterized it as "a packet of filth."[The King Holiday and Its Meaning |The origins of our national celebration of multiracialism and political correctness]
Much of the hatred for anyone who criticizes Dr. King comes from the fact that some of the criticism concentrates on his sex life, which resembled Bill Clinton’s. People seem to feel that an investigation that uncovers that kind of detail must be evil. And there may be something in that.
Of course, the only reason Barack Obama got elected Senator was because, as Ann Coulter points out in her new book, Guilty "his media and campaign surrogates ripped open the court-sealed divorce records of his two principal opponents in his Senate race in Illinois."
First there was Blair Hull, who was Obama’s Democratic primary opponent, and then there was Republican Senate candidate Jack Ryan. Both were attacked by Democrats in the mainstream media who managed to get a judge to release the sealed records of their divorces. The records of Ryan’s divorce from Jeri Ryan, (Star Trek’s Seven of Nine) contained accusations of sexual impropriety against Ryan. I won’t detail them, but they lack credibility, and as Ms. Coulter says "there’s a reason you never hear the expression ‘As true as claims made by an ex-spouse in divorce papers.’"
But my point is that Obama became a Senator because of the same kind of investigation that J. Edgar Hoover conducted on Martin Luther King—the difference being that the Democrats in the media (possibly with the help of David Axelrod) went public with the details, unlike Hoover.
Oh, and unlike Hoover, they didn’t have a lot of embarrassing facts on tape—just a lot of accusations. But it was enough to get Obama in the Senate.
And from there to the Presidency was just a short step—one that a freshman white Senator with his record couldn’t possibly have made.
And so, when you hear that Obama’s Presidency represents the triumph of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., you now have a different perspective on what that means.
If you’re one of the 29 percent of Americans who gets off work on MLK Day, enjoy it! In the words of Chris Rock, "You gotta be pretty racist to not want a day off from work."
If you are stuck at a computer, take some time to look at these.
