Martin Luther King Day

I urge you to buy and to read my friend Jack Ross’s Rabbi Outcast, which “places liberal Jewish anti-Zionism (as opposed to that of Orthodox or revolutionary socialist Jews) in historical perspective”. And I urge you to attend to these wise words of his:

Today, of course, is Martin Luther King Day. Even as a kid I can remember finding something very disturbing about the fact that in America we observed something called “King’s Birthday” (that I first heard it referred to as such by a teacher with a very thick southern accent surely didn’t help). Chris Rock undoubtedly had the best attitude in reassuring us white folks way back when he was still on Saturday Night Live: “It’s just one more Monday off. What do you do on Columbus Day, put three ships in the yard?”

I mentioned in one of my more recent blogs the discovery that Straussianism explains perfectly how the American right has come to believe such bizarre things about Martin Luther King. No sooner do we have so perfect an illustration of this as a meditation by Straussian mainstay Peter Wehner on how King was inspired by the classics.

But now comes the spectacle of MLK becoming a symbol of American militarism, via Nathan. In recent days I had seen a number of references to antiwar protesters confronting the heavily military MLK Day Parade in LA, but this really misses the point. So too does the righteous rant by Cornel West I saw the other day on C-SPAN that “the election of Obama is not by itself the fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream.” Much more on point was a black friend in college, who when I asked what they thought of Condoleezza Rice’s infamous statement to a black journalists’ convention that they of all people should oppose the notion that Iraqis were incapable of democracy replied “that she learned to bullshit from the master.”

The problem is not that “the dream” is being betrayed by those who would employ it for the cause of national greatness, it is that the myth of Martin Luther King only exists for the purpose of including African-Americans in the march of progress toward the millennium that can either be called Whig history, court history, Straussian mythmaking, or the NBC school or national greatness liberalism. In years past I have seen shocking reverence displayed toward King at my lefty shul, but I can live with that since, whatever his failings, King was genuine agent of social protest, making his exaltation a far cry from the era when the often-righteous rabbis portrayed in my forthcoming book would typically so exalt the emperors Lincoln and Roosevelt.

There is an interview, which has only ever been published in this rather rare book, with King’s colleague Bayard Rustin in which he is quite frank about King and in my estimation perfectly accounts for all the various conservative bugaboos about him. In short, that King was shallow and not exceptionally bright, that he developed a messiah complex, and this, rather than ideology, was responsible for King’s move into the north and to the left generally. Rustin, to be sure, had his own pathologies, but we’ll leave that for another day.

King’s famous antiwar speech is certainly an admirable one, but it can just as easily be spun into mythmaking as anything claimed by the Straussians or, to take another example, the Jewish establishment. It is simply impossible to know whether King would have become, had he lived, a Nation lefty or a Eustonite, a Democratic Party hack like Jesse Jackson or a Christian conservative notwithstanding his economic agenda. Probably the best way to honor his legacy is to make some undoubtedly vain attempt to take him down from the pedestal.

The unseemly squabble over the corpse of Martin Luther King mirrors that over the corpse of George Orwell. Both are overrated, but that is not for today. Rather, just as the patriotic, socially conservative, anti-Communist British Left is the tradition in which Orwell, at his best, genuinely stood, so at his best, King stood in the same tradition as those black and Hispanic votes reaffirmed traditional marriage in California and Florida on the same days that those states gave their Electoral College votes to Obama, with the black churches playing a pivotal role. The tradition of the late C. Dolores Tucker and of Father Michael Pfleger on decency in the media.

To stand in that tradition would be to make common cause with the Congressional Black Caucus, and with anyone who had a black base, on halting and reversing the national emergency of unrestricted and illegal immigration, and on making English the only official language of the United States. To make common cause with various other people around the fact that the black male is the victim of a triple genocide in the womb, on the streets, and on the battlefield. To make common cause with the regular readers of Philip Giraldi, uniting their vigorous patriotic hostility to Israeli espionage against America with the righteous anger of the victims of the Israel Lobby's sustained campaign against black candidates as such.

More broadly, to stand in that tradition would be to make common cause with the unions on the protection of American jobs. To make common cause with the Congressional Progressive Caucus on fair trade agreements, on repealing much or all of the USA Patriot Act, on ending completely the neoconservative war agenda, on strict campaign finance reform, on a crackdown against corporate influence in general and corporate welfare in particular, and on tax cuts for the poor and the middle class. To make common cause based on practical proposals for energy independence, proposals that would or should appeal to unions and others whose fight is primarily for jobs. To make common cause based on the importance of government action in bringing about and then conserving pro-life, pro-family and patriotic measures against poverty, in defence of traditional marriage, and in support of agriculture, manufacturing, coal, oil, and nuclear energy.

And, yes, to make common cause with the Congressional Asian and Pacific Islander Caucus against the unfair consequences, and therefore the unfair principle, of the “affirmative action” that Colorado voted to end on the same day as it voted for Obama, and against the Ivy League’s and other top universities’ systematic exclusion of whites from poor and middle-income backgrounds, and from small towns and rural areas.

Martin Luther King was a registered Republican, just as Richard Nixon was far more sympathetic towards Civil Rights than was the deeply ambivalent John F. Kennedy. King’s traditional Christian moral values, even if he did not always live up to them, were precisely what made him an opponent of unbridled capitalism and of wars such as that in Vietnam, that double opposition on that basis being the historically conservative position in America, whatever the old Trots of the neoconservative movement may have been astonishingly successful in putting about. But that movement has turned most of his followers into Democrats. Either party could therefore make itself worthy of the best of his legacy. Or both of them could. But as things stand, neither of them is.

Yes, King signed the letter to Paul VI asking him to reconsider Humanae Vitae. But so did the future Father Ricard John Neuhaus. And, as Ronald J. Rychlak writes:

On April 12,1963 -- Good Friday -- Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led a group of about 50 anti-segregation protesters into downtown Birmingham, Alabama. It was a peaceful protest, but they were not naïve: They knew that their message would offend and cause problems. King was not surprised when they were all arrested.

Eight white clergymen from Birmingham, including a Catholic bishop and a rabbi, wrote a letter appealing to the black population to stop such demonstrations. These clergymen were not bigots; they just did not want the kind of confrontations that King had provoked. They wanted to let the courts work toward integration. Their letter was published in the local newspaper under the title, “A Call for Unity.”

King’s response to the clergymen, his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” was one of the finest modern appeals to natural law. In it, he wrote: “I would agree with St. Augustine that, an unjust law is no law at all.” Moreover, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” As such, “One has . . . a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

King’s analysis, of course, raises the question of how to determine whether a law is just. Here, King turned to natural law. He explained: “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” He then looked to St. Thomas Aquinas: “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.” Applying that to the case at hand, King explained: “All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”

Directly responding to the clergymen, King wrote: “In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion?” After providing some examples, he explained his problem with the suggestion that they should wait for the courts to act: "It is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.”

King explained that “oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained.”

King said that a change had come in his way of thinking: “I have tried [in the past] to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.” Thus, the legal system, while “moral” in and of itself, was at that time in history protecting the immoral system of segregation. At the very least, it was moving too slowly to satisfy the yearning for freedom. As King explained: “Past promises have been broken by the politicians and merchants of Birmingham and now is the time to fulfill the natural right of all people to be treated equal.”

King expressed frustration with the inability of many church leaders to grasp these truths while they were hiding behind the “anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.” Even in his frustration, however, he expressed his love: “In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.”

King’s letter certainly struck a chord. Some have called it the turning point of the civil rights movement. It seems also to have had an impact on the Catholic bishop who signed the letter to which King responded. That bishop, Joseph Aloysius Durick, ultimately became known as a strong voice for civil rights. Over local opposition, he put in place the decrees of Vatican II that were intended to eliminate racial divisions and show compassion for the poor and socially marginalized.

These actions drew national attention. Bishop Durick was sometimes boycotted when he made personal appearances, but with support from Pope Paul VI and the truth of natural law, he stood firm and reshaped the hearts of many Catholics in the Deep South. Of course, Martin Luther King Jr., writing from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, played a huge role in that process.