Observances

Here's a screen shot from yesterday's National Review Online. Not even a token actual remembrance of Martin Luther King, JR. or a nod in the direction of the civil rights movement. Nope, to the editors of NRO MLK Day stands purely as a good opportunity to discuss the thesis that one important source of injustice in the United States is that black people have things too easy thanks to "preferences." Of course, I suppose it is a step forward from Will Herberg's September 7, 1965 National Review article, "'Civil Rights' and Violence: Who Are the Guilty Ones?" (note the scare quotes around civil rights):

For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the “cake of custom” that holds us together. With their doctrine of “civil disobedience,” they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes — particularly the adolescents and the children — that it is perfectly alright to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice. And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted “school strikes,” sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit defiance of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed — and, no doubt, with the best of intentions — and they have found apt pupils everywhere, with intentions not of the best. Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.

The lawlessness of "massive resistance" to court-ordered desegregation didn't , of course, much bother National Review. Nor did the lawlessness of widespread efforts throughout the South to deny African-Americans their rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. But civil disobedience? Affirmative action? That stuff stirs the heart to protest -- something must be done!

Comments

You mean to say they're racists? Of course they are - they were, they are, and they shall be.

Posted by Bat of Moon | January 22, 2008 11:58 AM

My fondest memory of William F. Buckley is his Firing Line show when the movie Gandhi became a hit sometime around the eighties. The purpose of the show was to prove that Gandhi was a pedophile and generally an evil third world brown person unworthy of the respect he was getting.

What a great magazine.

Posted by gregor | January 22, 2008 12:04 PM

One of my main "talking points" for many years has been the conservatives' almost perfect record of predicting dire consequences that never come true. From abolishing child labor to the recent rise in the minimum wage, they have predicted the most troubling and certain consequences of the poor ignorant voters are dumb enough to permit more progressive lunacy. This NR from the mid-sixties is a fine example.

I wish someone would start "The Accountability Project," an effort to track these (and other predictions) and see who tends to get these things right and who doesn't. I'd like to see it focus on politicians and media, since they too are full of wrong-headed ideas on what consequences are likely to follow.

Any takers? Anyone want to spend time on this?

Posted by Jim Pharo | January 22, 2008 12:07 PM

This is great Matt. During the next anniversary of Spain entering the EU or Democracy returning (any excuse you can find really), you might dredge up some NR pro-Franco quotes.

Posted by David | January 22, 2008 12:07 PM

I looked at some stupid post at the Heritage Foundation blog yesterday, and there was no comments. I wondered if it was because they took MLK Day off, and speculated on all the nasty things they probably said when the push was on to make a holiday in his name.

Posted by flounder | January 22, 2008 12:08 PM

Speaking of observances, isn't it worth observing that Martin Luther King III - MLK's son - endorsed Edwards yesterday?

Posted by Petey | January 22, 2008 12:09 PM

As a liberal and promoter of civil rights, MLK was clearly a fascist. So why would they celebrate him? I'm more surprised that they aren't celebrating his assassination.

I used to try to read the Corner out of a kind of morbid curiosity, but I always left feeling like I needed a shower.

Posted by jim | January 22, 2008 12:16 PM

Another thing that the 1965 piece shows is the evolution in NR/Conservative rhetoric from explicit White supremacy in the 1950s to coded statements about the Rule of Law.

Posted by njc | January 22, 2008 12:17 PM

Nice quote.

Here's my favorite quote from National Review's glory days:

On September 15, 1963 a bomb went off at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing 4 black girls and injuring many more children. (Those killed were Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair; McNair had been a classmate of the young Condoleezza Rice). The bomb was set by members of the Klu Klux Klan, as part of a wave of terror designed to intimidate the civil rights movement. Here is how National Review commented on the bombing in the October 1, 1963 issue of their biweekly Bulletin: “The fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur - of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro. Some circumstantial evidence lends a hint of plausibility to that notion, especially the ten-minute fuse (surely a white man walking away form the church basement ten minutes earlier would have been noticed?). And let it be said that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court’s manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice.”

So there you have: barely a whit of sympathy for the murdered and a quick desire to exonerate “the cause of the white people” and to shift the blame elsewhere, to a suppositious “communist”, to an imaginary “crazed Negro” and to the Supreme Court (guilty of ruling that segregation was unconstitutional).

Posted by Jeet Heer | January 22, 2008 12:21 PM

in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur - of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro.

Just like Hitler, actually.

He set back the cause of Right-wing politics so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact he was really a Liberal.

It seems like someone wrote a whole book on that premise over at NRO.

Posted by jim | January 22, 2008 12:26 PM

The National Review is just reflecting the views of its constituents. You'd be shocked the number of people who think the only "racism" in the United States emanates from black leaders like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, as well as race-based affirmative action programs.

That said, our usual bete noir Jonah Goldberg, it must be said, is pretty good on this. He has acknowledged, numerous times, that the left got this issue right and the right, including his own magazine, got this issue horribly wrong, and also that this fact is important.

Posted by Dilan Esper | January 22, 2008 12:33 PM

That said, our usual bete noir Jonah Goldberg, it must be said, is pretty good on this. He has acknowledged, numerous times, that the left got this issue right and the right, including his own magazine, got this issue horribly wrong, and also that this fact is important.

You mean, like this?

And that was much, much more recent than [Even the Liberal] New Republic's endorsement of Mussolini, which ushered in the Modern [if secret] Liberal Fascism Era.

It's really difficult to find examples of Jonah Goldberg not being a smirking, wank-a-rific douche-bag.

Posted by ed | January 22, 2008 12:46 PM

All the major opinion journals have pretty nasty stuff in their past. I was at the AHA convention a couple weeks ago and there was a booth sponsored by The Nation advertising the posting online of their complete archives going back to 1865. They had sample old articles printed up from the website lying about, and I was startled to see that one was a laudatory - not merely complimentary, but laudatory - article from the mid-1930s praising Joseph Stalin (a.k.a., the second worst man who ever lived).

Posted by James Kabala | January 22, 2008 1:03 PM

What surprises me isn't so much the racism as the horribly mangled diction. Did the National Review really print the word "alright"???

Posted by Slippery Pete | January 22, 2008 2:34 PM

Slippery Pete: Good catch. How did WFB let that one get by?

Posted by James Kabala | January 22, 2008 2:52 PM

I know Matt doesn't remember much that happened before Monical Lewinsky, but Herberg's piece from September 1965 proved rather prescient. He was no doubt writing in the wake of the August 1965 Watts riot. And the murder rate had begun rising in 1964 and would reach double its rate of 1950-1963 by the mid-1970s and remain at that level into the mid-1990s, generating an enormous death toll.

The linkages between the success of the Civil Rights movement and the immediately subsequent rise in rioting and crime is covered in historian Allen Matusow's work on liberalism in the 1960s, "The Unraveling of America."

Posted by Steve Sailer | January 22, 2008 3:25 PM

ed:

"One last point I tried to get in our conversation, but couldn't. Conservatives were, broadly speaking and with more exceptions than the conventional narrative allows, on the wrong side of the civil rights movement. That goes for National Review, too, by the way."

That's Jonah Goldberg, on the Civil Rights Act.

He said it again in his recent diavlog on bloggingheads.tv.

There's a lot wrong with the guy, but he is one of the few movement conservatives who is aware that the conservative movement blew it on civil rights and that this fact matters.

Posted by Dilan Esper | January 22, 2008 3:44 PM

The linkages between the success of the Civil Rights movement and the immediately subsequent rise in rioting and crime is covered in historian Allen Matusow's work on liberalism in the 1960s, "The Unraveling of America."

Steve, there's about 30 things wrong with that statement, but let's focus on the fact that we are discussing MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY. Whatever you want to say about the "Civil Rights movement" generally, which included some people who advocated violent resistance to white supremacism, there's no way in the world you can blame DR. KING for the rioting and crime that you are referencing. There was no greater advocate of nonviolence in our country's history.

Blaming Martin Luther King for the violence of the 1960's is like blaming Jesus for the crusades.

Posted by Dilan Esper | January 22, 2008 3:49 PM

Dilan,

I do think that Jesus approved of the intent of the Crusades (to reclaim Syria and Palestine for Christendom) if not with the way they were carried out. The Crusaders were fighting dirty for a good cause, while the Muslims were fighting (relatively) cleanly for a bad one.

Mr. Sailer,

The reason that some Black Nationalists advocated violence is because they believed the iron fist is the only way to deal with racist like you. Given your crude disrespect to a national hero on the day of his death, I can't say that I blame them. the fact that our American 'democracy' allows people like you to have an equal voice to Dr. King is one of the basic reasons why 'liberal democracy' is a fatally flawed system.

Mr. Kabala,

Stalin was monstrously evil, surely. But I would suspect that most partisans of the Soviet Union were partisans of the communist ideal, not partisans of Stalin as a leader.

Posted by Hector | January 22, 2008 5:38 PM

Lest anyone think this is in the past. From yesterday:

"I hope (Jena) will be better because the people here said, 'No to the Jena Six' and 'No to MLK' and, 'Yes to the USA' and 'Yes to Jena,'" Barrett said during a Sunday afternoon press conference at the LaSalle Parish Courthouse where he plans to rally today.

"... You wouldn't have had the Jena Six if you didn't have MLK," he said. "You see his doctrine was, 'Don't obey laws you don't like.'"

Posted by nolaboyd | January 22, 2008 5:47 PM

If I recall correctly, the article specifically praised Stalin's economic plan and heralded the approaching arrival of "real democracy."

Posted by James Kabala | January 22, 2008 6:26 PM

The second comment mentions Gandhi, and mocks William F. Buckley's disparagement of him.
Is this the same Gandhi who said that the Jews should withstand Hitler by nonviolent noncooperation?

Posted by anon conservative | January 22, 2008 7:46 PM

Yes, Gandhi said that, which shows that if you want to know about European politics you shouldn't go to Gandhi. On the other hand, Gandhi stood for freedom and helped liberate India from imperial rule. What does your friend Buckley stand for? From National Review editorial of 1957 (which Buckley probably wrote): “The central question that emerges … is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race."

Posted by Jeet Heer | January 22, 2008 9:03 PM

Kabala,
If I recall correctly it was 1930's, not the 1940's, 50, 60s, 70s, 80's, 90s, 00s, unlike the NRO were the bad judgment just keeps coming.

Posted by blindjoedeath | January 22, 2008 9:52 PM

Hector, how on earth do we know what Jesus thought about the Crusades? And why do you assume that the Crusaders were fighting for a good cause and the Muslims for a bad cause?

Posted by Rebecca Lesses | January 23, 2008 1:03 AM

To address the point James Kabala raised: it's unquestionably true that the Nation (and The New Republic) both had a Stalinist phase in the 1930s and 1940s which reflects badly on both magazines. But there's an instructive difference: The New Repubic has gone out of its way to make amends and has seriously confronted its past by publishing anti-communist articles for the last half century. The same is less true, alas, of The Nation, a magazine I otherwise admire. The Nation has yet to really have an accounting with its past.

In this regard, National Review is closer to The Nation than to the New Republic. National Review has apologized for some of what they wrote on the civil rights issue but they haven't really examined in a systematic way the set of racial assumptions that guided the magazine in the 1950s and continue to have an afterlife today.

I'd also question the statement: "All the major opinion journals have pretty nasty stuff in their past." I don't know what you mean by "major" but I can think of magazines that have been free from racism, Stalinism and comparable follies: New Politics, The New York Review of Books, Dissent. I suppose if you wanted to streach a point you could find stuff in those journals. The NYRB famously ran a molotov cocktail on their cover; and Dissent was tardy in opposing the Vietnam war. But still, nothing comparable to the National Review, The Nation, or the New Republic.

Posted by Jeet Heer | January 23, 2008 9:25 AM

Jeet Heer: You're right; I did exaggerate. I should have said "many."

Posted by James Kabala | January 23, 2008 12:47 PM