The Stopped Clock

The proverbial stopped clock is right twice a day. I am using the expression metaphorically to refer to the person who through the ignorance which decades of academic decline and progressive media brainwashing have induced in our electorate now occupies the office of Prime Minister of Her Majesty’s government in the Dominion of Canada. I don’t think his actual track record is quite as good as a stopped clock. Indeed, twice a year might be pushing the boundaries of what is credible. Nevertheless, he was right on Monday. Or as close to being right as I have seen from him in a long time. 

He was in Montreal for some purpose or another related to the bat flu and the upcoming rape – thank you Dr. Paul Craig Roberts for pointing out the analogy – of the populace with injections of some noxious and satanic witch’s brew, when somebody asked him about the violent, Canada-hating, thuggish mob that tore down the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald on Saturday. His response was to say:

Those kind of acts of vandalism are not advancing the path towards greater justice and equality in this country. 

Now, this was a poor way of saying “it was wrong.” Justice and equality should never be linked because equality is often the exact opposite of justice. Justice is doing right by everybody. Equality is treating everybody the same. The image of equality is that of treating a stranger as well as you would treat your own brother. This is how it sells itself. The reality of equality, however, is that of treating your own brother as if he were a stranger. This is the opposite of justice, which demands not that we treat everybody as if they were the same, but that we treat everybody right, which is much more difficult. Equality is the easy, lazy, substitute for justice.

Furthermore, even if he had not added equality to justice in this way and had simply said “greater justice”, this wording suggests that the vandals were striving towards a worthy and admirable cause, they just went about it the wrong way. In reality, however, those who tore down Sir John’s statue were, like past zealots who have sought to erase history – and for those who think otherwise, while the past cannot be erased, it is entirely possible to erase history, for history is not just the past but, in the words of John Lukacs, “the remembered past” – are not admirable but misguided seekers after justice. They are the mob, the easily enflamed masses, stirred up by those who have incited hatred against our country, its history, its institutions, and its traditions.

I will return to that momentarily. Allow me to first conclude my reflection upon the Prime Minister’s words by saying that while it was a poor way of saying that the vandals were wrong, it was indeed a way of saying it, a condemnation of their actions. Erin O’Toole the new Conservative leader, Maxime Bernier the leader of the People’s Party of Canada, François Legault the Premier of Quebec, and Jason Kenney the Premier of Alberta each and all said it much better, but he did say it. It is right to give credit where credit is due, even if I am thinking of Sawyer Brown’s linking that proverb with thanking “the devil for the trouble that I get into” as I write this, and so kudos to the Captain, Canada’s stopped clock, for finally getting something right, in a way. 

Now, having gotten that out of the way, let us turn our attention back to the mob and the diabolical minds that have stirred up their passions and misdirected their energy. 

There are those who have tried to justify the actions of the mob by slinging mud at our first Prime Minister. Rather than re-invent the wheel, for those seeking answers to such people I refer you to Stephen K. Roney’s rebuttal of Bruce Katz, which can hardly be improved upon. To those looking for a fuller defence of Sir John I refer to my essay from two years ago entitled “Speaking Out For Old Tomorrow.” For those wanting a comprehensive rebuttal of the anti-Canada, Critical Race Theory, narrative as found in the Truth and Reconciliation Committee Report and the more recent report of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Committee, I refer you to the aforementioned Stephen Roney’s excellent book Playing the Indian Card: Everything You Know About Canada’s “First Nations” is Wrong.

The toppling of the statue, however, was an act of violence, directed not against Sir John A. Macdonald as an individual, but the country of which he is a symbol. Sir John A. Macdonald was the leading figure in Confederation, the discussion in which the provinces of British North America agreed to join into a federal union with our own Parliament under the Crown. He was the first Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada and the man who saw her through the period in which she was most vulnerable to the various powerful commercial and political interests from the republic south of the border who wished the Confederation Project to fail that they might swallow up the pieces. He was the one who spearheaded the construction of the railroad which effectively thwarted the designs of Manifest Destiny and saw it through to its completion. It is no coincidence, that the Critical Race Theorists’ attempts to blacken his reputation take the form of a spurious and anachronistic deliberate misreading of everything he did in order to meet the obligations of the Dominion government under the treaties signed with the Indian tribes, and that those treaties just happened to have been negotiated as part of the process of building the railroad, settling the prairies and uniting the east with the west. The Critical Race Theorists know what they are doing and it is the Dominion of Canada the country, not Sir John A. Macdonald the man that is really under attack here. 

On a larger scale, of course, the attacks of this nature that we have seen occurring across Western Civilization are attacks upon that very civilization as well as the countries within it.

Neither the Dominion of Canada nor Western Civilization is beyond scrutiny and criticism, of course. Both are made up of fallible and deeply flawed human beings since other than the Son of God these are the only kind that can be found on this earth this side of Eden and prior to the Second Coming. The universal failings of human nature are a perpetual and unanswerable argument against those who would point to the inevitable shortcomings of human leaders, institutions, countries, and civilizations as grounds for razing them to the ground. Revolutionaries, no matter how lofty the ideals they preach, are fundamentally incapable of replacing an old order with a perfect and pristine new one, for they cannot escape participating in the same flawed nature as those who built the old one. In the end, all that revolutionaries can ever accomplish is to destroy all those things which meliorate the human condition and allow for the possibility of a good life for fallen human beings. We ought never to forget the words of the late Sir Roger Scruton that “good things are more easily destroyed than created.” 

The Dominion of Canada, established on a foundation of loyalty, honour, and continuity, has been blessed with an abundance of those good things. To list our constitution of parliamentary monarchy, and the civil rights, prescriptive liberties and judicial principles of the Common Law tradition, is to speak only of the most obvious civil or political examples of these. The way our political leaders and mass media commentators, from all sides of the political spectrum, feel constantly compelled to reduce all of these to “our democracy” has trivialized them, but that is a topic for another time. It is these good things that are under attack, when mobs stirred up by demon-inspired Critical Theory intellectuals, wage war on our country and civilization, by attacking its symbols and historic figures. 

If only the Prime Minister had included all of that in his answer.

Refusing to Worship a False God

*Notice*  Ordinarily it is my policy, once an essay has been published here, not to edit it other than to correct typos - mistakes, in spelling, punctuation, etc.  In this case, however, I had pre-written this essay and scheduled it to be posted at a certain time, then, upon re-reading it, realized that there were three places where further words would improve the essay.  I edited the essay as a Word document, the edits consisting of three new paragraphs.  I intended to insert these into the essay here before the post-time but was prevented to do so by technical difficulties.  I have now edited the essay to include them.   They are the paragraph between the last paragraph in the general history of white/black relations in the United States and the first paragraph in the specific history of MLK Jr., the paragraph which begins with "While civil disobedience may start non-violently", and the paragraph that is the penultimate paragraph in the edited version of the essay.  - GTN, January 22, 2013 *End Notice*

Dorothy Sayers, in The Mind of the Maker, explains the reasonableness of orthodox Christian doctrine by drawing analogies between God as Creator and the artist, especially the creative writer. In her last chapter she applies what she had written in her previous chapters by arguing against “the purely analytical approach to phenomena” which she maintains is something that “has gone seriously wrong with our conception of humanity and of humanity’s proper attitude to the universe”. In this purely analytical approach, the difficulties that we experience are regarded as a series of problems to solve. Drawing upon her own experience as a mystery writer she argues that the detective story formula of problem-solution should not be regarded as a model for dealing with things that arise in real life because such stories are written to make the problem fit the solution. It is not only the writer of detective stories, that includes and excludes details to fit a solution, however. Sayers writes:


Somewhat similarly, the popular game of debunking great men usually proceeds by excluding their insoluble greatness from the terms of the roblem and presenting a watery solution of the remainder; but this is, by definition, no solution of the man or of his greatness. (1)

In other words, the virtues, strengths, and achievements for which the man is considered to be great are ignored by the debunker who instead focuses his efforts on debunking other, lesser, aspects of the man’s life and character.

The game of debunking great men has not gotten any less popular since The Mind of the Maker was first published. If anything it has gotten more popular. It is not a game to everyone, however. In the classroom and in the media progressive intellectuals frequently attempt to debunk the founders and leaders of their countries and of the Christian religion, and the writers, poets, artists, and thinkers who have contributed to Western civilization for the last three millennia. For whatever reason the progressive enjoys doing this – Robert Frost’s famous quip about a liberal being someone “who is too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel” comes to mind – he takes his self-appointed task as the debunker of a civilization and culture built on injustice very seriously indeed. His arguments, however, read like they were written to illustrate what Dorothy Sayers had written about debunking great men seventy two years ago.

It would be a very simple matter to debunk the subject of this essay in this way. Martin Luther King Jr. was ordained in a church whose doctrines he no longer believed in (2), was awarded a doctorate for a plagiarized dissertation (3), was a life-long womanizer and adulterer and had ties to subversive organizations allied with the power that was his country’s biggest enemy at the time. (4) By concentrating on these things one can attack his reputation without ever having to address the ideas, actions, and accomplishments that reputation is built upon.

That will not be the method of this essay. Instead, we will criticize the very things King's reputation is built upon. Whether this will be a more successful method of debunking remains to be seen.

There are three overlapping but distinct levels of admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. He is admired by black Americans as a leader of their people who fought for their equality, justice, and rights against racial segregation and discrimination. The American federal government by making the third Monday in January to be a holiday in his honour declared him to be a national hero of the United States to be revered by all Americans. Progressive liberals have declared him to be worthy of universal admiration and have essentially made an idol out of him.

This third level of admiration – or rather adoration – is the reason for this essay. The question of whom they choose to honour as heroes is one to be decided by blacks and Americans for themselves. The rest of us have no say in the matter although we are free, of course, to comment on the decisions they make. When, however, progressives trot out the images they have erected in the United States before the rest of the world and, like Nebuchadnezzar, demand that we all bow down and worship them it then becomes our business.

The same ideas, words, acts, and accomplishments are the foundation of King’s reputation at all three levels. If that foundation is strong enough to support the edifice that has been erected upon it at one level that does not mean it is capable of supporting the structure the next level up. If King’s actions on their behalf justify the esteem in which black Americans hold him that does not necessarily mean that they warrant his being considered a national hero by all Americans, and even if it could be argued that his actions benefited the country as a whole justifying his status at that level it does not follow that he is worthy of universal adoration.

Our examination of the life and achievements of King must begin by placing him within his historical context.

European settlers began to establish colonies in the Americas in the late fifteenth century and in the sixteenth century they began to import slaves. Most of these slaves were Africans, purchased by the Europeans from African tribes who had captured them in war or raids. In the eighteenth century, several British colonies in North America broke away Great Britain to form the American republic. These colonies – now states – disagreed among themselves as to what kind of country they wanted to build. Some, based primarily in the south, wanted a traditional, rural, agrarian country. Others, based primarily in the northeast, wanted a modern, urban, industrial country. The African slaves were caught in the middle of the conflict between these two sides. The plantations in the south were the primary destination of slaves brought into the United States, but northern merchants were the primary importers.

In the early nineteenth century Britain and the other European powers abolished the Atlantic slave trade. Realizing that they were about to be put out of business for good the northern slave merchants decided that the south should be made to bear the burden of their costs, sold all their remaining slaves to the south, then became abolitionists overnight. The conflict between the northern, urban, merchant-industrialists and the southern, rural, agrarians continued to escalate until, a little under a century after the Americans declared their independence from Britain, it grew into an outright war in which the south sought to break away from the American republic and the north went to war to impose its vision of industrial modernity upon the entire country. The north won and one of the first things they did after securing their victory was to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery in the United States.

The question then, for north and south alike, was what to do about the fact that they now had a large population of newly freed ex-slaves on their hands. Initially the south could not do anything about it because they were under martial law, disenfranchised, and forced to watch while the northern opportunists they called carpetbaggers, aided by turncoats whom the other southerners contemptuously called scalawags, looted them. Once they regained control of their states they passed the Jim Crow laws establishing racial segregation. Under these laws blacks and whites would go to separate schools, drink from separate water fountains, use separate washrooms, etc. The north opted for a different approach. Initially, they banned free blacks from settling in their states altogether, then, when they realized they could use a supply of cheap labour, they invited blacks to move to northern factory cities like Detroit and Chicago. Needless to say these were not optimal circumstances for establishing good relations between the blacks who moved north and the northern white industrial working classes.

There is no way this history can be honestly interpreted so that blacks can be said to have been treated justly in all of this.  The popular narrative, however, in which slavery and segregation are blamed for all of the problems black people currently face in the United States, is not a valid reading of this history either, and a case can be made that in fact the post-emancipation actions of the north has contributed far more to the present problems affecting American blacks than either slavery or segregation.

Thus was the setting of the historical stage when Martin Luther King Jr. made his appearance upon it. King was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1929. His maternal grandfather was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, a position that would be taken over by King’s father when he was very young. Eventually, in 1960, King himself would join his father as co-pastor of this church. By that time he was already a leader in the Civil Rights Movement.

King grew up in Atlanta and graduated from his father’s alma mater Morehead College. Deciding to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, he pursued graduate degrees in theology at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and Boston University. The latter conferred upon him his doctorate in the spring of 1955. In December of that same year the incident took place that was to launch his career in the public eye. Rosa Parks was arrested and fined in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat on a bus. King, who had become pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery the year before, led a boycott of the public transit system in protest. This brought King into the spotlight and during the next twelve years, with the help of the media, he built up his reputation as a civil rights activist who used non-violent civil disobedience to achieve his goals. Before discussing that career, however, we should take note of something that occurred the year prior to the Rosa Parks arrest because the timing of the two events is of some importance to how we interpret King and his career. The event in question is the Supreme Court of America’s final ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Brown v. Board is not a textbook example of how a court is supposed to arrive at a decision. Indeed, it could be used to illustrate what a court is not supposed to do. Rather than making its ruling on the basis of the constitution, the law, and past precedent, the Warren Court based its decision to overturn the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson and to rule segregation in schools to be unconstitutional, on a United Nations fatwa against racism and the arguments of sociologists and psychologists. (5) Regardless, it is the significance of the decision that is relevant to our discussion. That significance is this – Brown v. Board meant that the end of de jure racial segregation in the United States was inevitable. The decision met with resistance, of course, and the American federal government ended up sending in troops to enforce it. Some interesting things could be said about how all of this contributed to the triumph of an empire centred in Washington D. C. over local and regional cultures in the United States but this too is not the point here. If segregation’s death knoll had sounded with the Supreme Court’s decision in 1954, what does this say about the arguments King gave in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” justifying the civil disobedience of a career which began in 1955?

There is a lot of confusion about civil disobedience due to a subtle distinction that is easy to miss. Of actions that are against the law, some we say, are mala prohibita. This means that it is wrong to commit these acts only because the law tells you not to. Other actions are mala in se, which means that they are wrong in and of themselves regardless of whether there is a law against them or not. Now, if there are acts which are wrong in themselves, apart from any law, that means that there is a higher law than the laws made by human societies, by which the laws made by human societies are to be judged. It is on this basis that we speak of just and unjust laws. A just law is a law which conforms to the higher law not made by man whereas an unjust law is a law which violates the higher law. One way in which a law can be unjust is if it imposes upon people a requirement to do something which is malum in se, which is wrong in itself. Think of, for example, a law requiring you to sacrifice your first-born son to an idol. There is a moral obligation to disobey such laws. This, despite the fact that it is the sort of thing those who believe in civil disobedience will point to in order to justify their theory, is not what is meant by civil disobedience.

Civil disobedience is not merely a matter of refusing to obey laws which order you to do something horrible. It is a deliberate disobeying of the law, perhaps a law that is itself unjust but not necessarily a law that requires you to do something unjust – note the distinction, as a form of activism. There are different kinds of civil disobedience. There is the ‘non-violent resistance” variety, in which the person breaking a law he considers to be unjust, does so with the expectation that he will receive punishment in order to make a statement about the law and the government, with the idea that in doing so he will gain popular sympathy and support wherewith to convince or compel the government to change the law. This is the kind of civil disobedience we ordinarily associate with Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.. The nineteenth century American crackpot who dreamed up the idea of civil disobedience in the first place, however, Henry David Thoreau, did not limit the concept to such acts. A revolutionary and anarchist, he believed in violent civil disobedience both in theory, and in the practice of violent would-be reformers like John Brown.

In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, King attempted to give a prestigious pedigree to civil disobedience, by citing Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego from the Biblical book of Daniel, the early Christians under Roman persecution, Greek philosopher Socrates, and the Boston Tea Party as examples. Only the last of these is a true example of civil disobedience. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to break the law of their God by obeying Nebuchadnezzar’s decree that they bow down and worship his golden statue. They did not do so as a protest against the injustice of the king, whose authority they respected. Civil disobedience is against both the teachings and example of Jesus and His Apostles and the response of the early Christian apologists, to the unjust persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire, was to write defences of the Christian faith which included the argument that Christianity made people better, more law-abiding, citizens. Of all the examples King gave, Socrates is the most hilarious. King may have been thinking of Socrates’ refusal to take part in the arrest and execution of Leon of Salamis but this was a matter of not carrying out an order that commanded him to do something unjust. In Plato’s Crito, which is set three days before Socrates’ death, Socrates is visited by his lifelong friend Crito, a wealthy Athenian farmer, who informs him that his death is imminent and urges him to escape, offering his assistance. Socrates’ response is that while the Athenian judgement against him was unjust, it would be wrong for him to commit an injustice against Athens and its laws in return, which he would be doing so if he rejected their authority and made his escape.

We have a moral obligation to obey the law and we are only excused from this obligation when the law itself tells us to do something that morally wrong. Civil disobedience, the breaking of laws one disagrees with even if they do not require one to do something wrong, as a means of effecting social change is morally wrong. It is all the more inexcusable when the desired change is already in the process of happening which, as we have seen, was the case with Martin Luther King, whose career in civil disobedience began after the Supreme Court had made the end of segregation inevitable.

While civil disobedience may start out non-violently it does not stay that way.  It goes beyond both lawful dissent and the refusal to commit a morally wrong act that is required by an unjust law.   The deliberate breaking of the law in order to achieve one's ends, however noble those ends, and however restrained and conscientious one might be in choosing the laws one breaks encourages others to follow one's example and to go further than one would oneself.  One of the problems afflicting the black community in the United Stated today is crime.  While most blacks are law-abiding citizens, a disproportionately large percentage of blacks compared to the general population, commit and are victims of crime.  Progressives, when they acknowledge this problem at all, rather than denying it and blaming black overrepresentation among the arrested and convicted on police racism, say that it is the result of slavery, segregation and white racism in general.   Surely, however, any reasonable person would agree that a significant contributing factor must be the establishment and glorification of King, a man who used defiance of the law as a means to achieve his ends, as a hero of their people.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was in a number of ways a-typical of King’s activism. It was just a boycott, for one thing, which under most circumstances would be perfectly legal and therefore not be considered an act of civil disobedience. In this case he was charged with breaking an obscure law, but the point remains that it was far more reasonable and less deliberately provocative than would be typical of his subsequent actions. For another thing, it took place within the city where he lived and pastored at the time. Far more typical of King was the Birmingham incident of 1963.

In Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. did what he had been doing throughout the southern United States in the previous seven years and what he had established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to do. He came into a community where he was an outsider, bringing with him media agents who were even further removed from the community than he was, and stirred up trouble between local blacks and the authorities, so that his media friends could take pictures and write stories that placed the authorities in the worst possible light and made him out to be a saint. (6)

Although King continued to be an activist until an assassin ended his life in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968, he reached the peak of his career in 1963. Later that year, in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, he delivered the speech which contains his most famous words. The Civil Rights Act which the American Congress passed the following year was largely in response to the demands made in this march. In terms of its impact, this Civil Rights Act is King’s greatest achievement.

But what kind of achievement is it?

The Civil Rights Act did not just make de jure racial discrimination, i.e., racial discrimination enshrined in law, illegal in the United States. It forbade racial discrimination on the part of private individuals and businesses as well. This was the reason Republican Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona voted against the Act. It had a number of consequences.

It created, for example, the kind of situation in which a civil rights organization approaches an employer and says “you are located in a city where x percentage of the population is black, but only y percentage of your employees are black, you are guilty of racial discrimination and we are going to sue you.” How does the employer prove that racial discrimination was not a factor in his hiring decisions? It is virtually impossible to do so and in a sane legal system no one would ever be called upon to prove such a thing. Anti-discrimination legislation like the American Civil Rights Act, however, place employers accused of racial discrimination in the situation of having to try and prove their innocence.

To avoid being at the mercy of the civil rights shakedown employers had to set aside a certain number of jobs for blacks. The fact that this too was a form of racial discrimination did not matter – for the courts and civil rights organizations, discrimination only flowed in one direction.

Then the courts ruled that employers could not use competency tests in hiring if those tests had a “disparate impact” upon blacks or other racial minorities. In other words, if one of the results of the test was that less than the required percentage of blacks or other racial minorities, even if this was not intentional on the part of the employer or the person who made the test, the test was discriminatory and could not be used. (7)

None of this would have been possible without the Civil Rights Act the effects of which extend beyond the borders of the United States as imitation bills began to pop up in other Western countries – the Race Relations Bill of 1968 in the United Kingdom, for example, or the 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act. The American bill paved the way for these other bills which often went even further than the American bill.

The raising of King from a hero of American blacks, to an American national hero, to a universal figure to be revered by all, is based on the idea that in fighting for the rights of his own people, which earned him their esteem, he combated racism which is an evil that hurt the United States as a whole and indeed the entire world, therefore his fight against it deserves the respect of the entire world. At first glance that seems quite reasonable.

What is racism however? The word is of recent origins, however old the phenomenon it is supposed to denote may be, being no older than the 1930s, and there was a time in living memory when there was a consensus as to its meaning. It could be defined either positively or negatively. If defined positively, it meant the belief in the superiority of one’s own race. If defined negatively, it meant the dislike of and/or mistreatment of people of other races, whether this meant a general dislike of everyone who is not of your own race or a specific dislike of members of a certain race. Today, however, it is used in ways that seem to have no relationship with these definitions.

Take, for example, a rapper who fills his lyrics with hatred towards white people, expressed in violent and even genocidal terms. The term racist is far less likely to be applied to him than it is to a white person, who with no conscious belief in the superiority of his own race or dislike towards other races, gets an education, finds a job, builds a career, marries and has kids, and basically goes through life trusting the system to work for him. Progressive liberals, whose thought is pervasive throughout academia, the news and entertainment media, most churches, and, at least on this subject, all political parties, insist that the former is merely expressing his legitimate anger due to his disenfranchisement, whereas the latter’s refusal to acknowledge that he benefits from “white privilege” generated by “institutional racism” is itself a form of racism. Clearly, whatever these people think the word racism means, if they even know themselves, has little if anything to do with what everyone used to think the word meant. It is also clear, at least to those who are fortunate enough not to be trapped in this kind of Orwellian doublethink, that this kind of thought is itself racist against white people because it establishes a way of thinking in which white people are always racist, even if they have no conscious belief in their own superiority or conscious dislike of other people, whereas other people are never racist even if they consciously hate white people.

There are many that would claim that this is no part of the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Such people insist that King was a classical liberal, whose vision was of a society where everyone was evaluated as an individual, and who would be as opposed to reverse discrimination and anti-white attitudes as he was to discrimination against his own people. For evidence of their claim they point to his “I have a dream” speech. Others, however, believe that King’s vision was much more radical than this, that he believed that racism pervaded the very structure of American society, which would need to be torn down and rebuilt to eliminate the injustice created by slavery and segregation. While this debate has to be regarded as the inevitable result of King’s apotheosis – those who accept the new deity but hold opposing visions of society each try to claim the deity for their own side - it is quite clear from his words and actions which side he, a self-avowed Marxist, leaned towards.

As for King's dream of a day when his children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin, consider what happened in the United States five years ago and again last year.  "Race is only skin deep", progressives insist confusing the outward indicators of race, such as skin colour, with its essential meaning, which is lineage, ancestry, and descent.  In 2008 a man was elected President of the United States, whose skin colour was all that he really shared with the American black community.  Barack Obama's father was a Kenyan - his ancestors were not brought to America as slaves, nor did they live through segregation.   His mother was a white liberal.   When he was elected he received a huge percentage of the black vote and much of the white vote as well and his skin colour was a significant contributing factor to his receiving both the black and the white liberal vote.   His victory was declared by many to be the triumph of King's dream.   The largest irony in all of this is that they were absolutely right.  Obama's election was  the ultimate triumph of Martin Luther King, over logic and common sense, if not over racism.

For this reason, we must, in obedience to the higher law, refuse to prostrate ourselves before this new idol the progressives have commanded us to worship.







(1) Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1970), p. 211. The book was first published by Harcourt, Brace in 1941.

(2) http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/king.htm

(3) See Theodore Pappas, The Martin Luther King Jr. Plagiarism Story (Rockford, Illinois: The Rockford Institute, 1994).

(4) Samuel T. Francis, “The King Holiday and Its Meaning”, American Renaissance, February, 1998.

(5) See the discussion of this in Paul Craig Roberts & Lawrence M. Stratton, The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing Inc., 1995), pp. 21-50.

(6) See Gail Jarvis, “Birmingham: The Rest of the Story”, LewRockwell.com, November 23, 2003.

(7) The ruling in which this took place was Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1970). See the discussion of this case in Roberts and Stratton, op. cit., pp. 95-102.

Justice and Vengeance

Justice was a favorite topic of the ancient Greeks.

The question of “what is justice” was a question which the Athenian philosophers of the 5th and 4th centuries BC grappled with. It is the subject of Plato’s most famous dialogue The Republic where he deals with it at much greater length than he does discussions of the nature of temperance, courage, friendship, and love in the Charmides, Laches, Lysis, and Symposium respectively. Aristotle introduces it as one of a series of virtues in his Nicomachean Ethics, but gives it a far more extensive analysis in Book V than he does courage, temperance, generosity and the other virtues introduced in earlier books.

The philosophers were not the first Greeks to talk about justice, however. Aeschylus, the first of the famous 5th Century BC trio of tragedians, who was born roughly a century before Plato and died when Socrates was in his teens, addressed the topic of justice in his great trilogy of plays the Oresteia.

The first play of the trilogy is Agamemnon. The title character is the king who led the expedition against Troy to recover Helen, the wife of his brother Menelaus king of Sparta, after she had been abducted by Paris. The plays tells the story of his return to Argos where he was murdered by his Queen Clytemnestra and her lover a cousin of the king named Aegisthus.

In the second play, The Libation Bearers, Agamemnon’s son Orestes, upon the orders of the god Apollo, returns to Argos with his friend Pylades and, upon the urging of both the god and his sister Electra, avenged his father by killing his mother. His vengeance, however, does not close the matter. The blood of his mother, spilled in matricide, summon the Furies, the spirits of vengeance, who drive Orestes mad..

Finally, in the third play, The Euminides, the situation is resolved when Orestes arrives at Athens, with the Furies hot on his trail. He cries out to Athena for help, and she responds by holding a jury trial. Apollo speaks for the defence and the Furies for the prosecution. The trial ends with a tie which is broken by Pallas’ own vote in Orestes’ favour.

The theme of the Oresteia is justice, specifically the difference between justice and vengeance. Vengeance is a cycle which perpetuates itself. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus murdered Agamemnon for revenge. Clytemnestra hated her husband for the loss of their daughter Iphigenia. Aegisthus believed that his father Thyestes had been wronged by his brother, Agamemnon’s father Atreus, and so sought to avenge his father by killing Agamemnon. This did not end the cycle however. Orestes and Electra, the children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, avenged their father by killing his murderers.

The cycle of vengeance and blood-shed only ended when the matter was brought before Athena’s court of justice and there resolved once and for all. The title of the last play is significant. “Eumenides” means “Kindly Ones” and this is the name which Athena gives the Furies at the end of the play when they agree to abide by the verdict and release Orestes from their claim. The spirits of vengeance had been transformed into the spirits of kindness by the intervention of justice into the cycle of vengeance bringing closure and resolution.

The justice that Plato and Aristotle sought to define was an attribute of people, a character trait, a virtue. Justice would also be considered a character trait in Christian theology where it was identified as one of the four cardinal virtues. The justice which is the theme of Aeschylus’ trilogy, however, is a social good that society and its members receive from laws and the government which administers the law. Indeed, this kind of justice, is the primary social good for which government exists.

Today we would tend to consider those meanings of justice as being distinct from each other, and we would expect to find them as separate definitions under the heading “justice” in a dictionary. This would not necessarily have been the case in ancient Athens.

Take Plato’s Republic for example. Early in the dialogue, Socrates enters into a debate with a 5th Century BC precursor to Nietzsche named Thrasymachus. Thrasymachus maintains that justice is the invention of the strong to rule the weak, that the strong do not practice it themselves, and are all the happier for not doing so. Socrates rebuts this claim but is challenged by Plato’s brothers Adeimantus and Glaucon to himself provide a definition of justice and to prove his claim that the just man is happier than the unjust. The remainder of the dialogue is his attempt to do so which involves the exercise of creating a hypothetical city in which ideal justice is to be found.

Thus, to Plato, the attempt to define justice the character trait must involve a description of justice the social good provided by government.

I will examine justice the virtue more fully in a later essay. For now, let us briefly define it by saying that justice presupposes the existence of right and wrong and is the virtue of thinking, judging, and acting rightly. For this reason Aristotle was right to say that justice in a sense, encompasses all of virtue, in addition to being a particular virtue in its own right.

How is this virtue related to the justice which people seek from their laws and government?

The justice which we seek from law and government can be defined simply as “right and fair judgment”. When we have serious disagreements with our neighbors which we cannot settle ourselves we go to a court of law to get the matter judged rightly. If someone is criminally wronged we expect the police to find and arrest the person who committed the wrong, a prosecutor to establish the culprit’s guilt in a court of law, and a judge to determine what penalty the culprit owes his victims including first and foremost society whose laws he has broken, and finally, we expect that the guilty culprit will be forced to pay that penalty.

Right judgment, in civil and criminal cases, is the justice we expect our laws and government to provide us. Thinking, judging, and behaving rightly is justice the virtue. Clearly the two are intimately connected and the cultivation of the virtue of justice on the part of a society’s rulers is necessary for obtaining justice from government. This was understood by Plato and Aristotle. It was also understood by the Hebrew prophets. The messages they brought to the kings of ancient Israel and Judah from the Lord contained threats of divine justice that would come because of unjust practices (idolatry, adultery, bloodshed foremost among them) and because Israel’s governors were not providing the people with justice.

Having established the relationship between justice the virtue and justice the social good, let us now turn to the relationship and difference between justice and vengeance which was the theme of Aeschylus’ famous trilogy.

Aeschylus, writing from the perspective of a poet and a playwright, illustrated the difference between justice and revenge with the purpose of establishing that the former is superior to the latter. Justice is superior to revenge because it provides people with that for which they are seeking when they pursue revenge without establishing a cycle that perpetuates itself. It limits and contains wrongdoing. This is one of the key differences between civilization and barbarism.

There is a subtle implication of that, however, which is often overlooked. As we shall see, overlooking that implication has had serious consequences for us as a society. For justice to be superior to revenge it must do a better job of achieving the end for which vengeance was a means. This means that justice, while different from vengeance, must also be similar to it.

What is the similarity between justice and vengeance?

Justice and vengeance are both responses to wrongdoing. Vengeance is when the person wronged personally attempts to extract retribution from the person who has wronged him. Justice is when the authorities within a society judge the wrongdoer and extract retribution from him. Both are ways of providing satisfaction for the party that has been wronged. Justice, however recognizes society’s law as the first victim of criminal wrongdoing, and therefore the right of going after the wrongdoer and demanding retribution and restitution belongs to society.

For this reason, in a civilized society under law, we are not to seek restitution and retribution on our own. That is to take the law into our own hands, usurp its authority, and undermine that very thing which makes our society civilized. (1)

Why is it important that we recognize the similarity between justice and revenge?

The justice system can fail in two different ways. The first way is by committing a positive injustice against someone. The obvious examples of this include the conviction and punishment of a man for a crime he did not commit, imposing a penalty which is too severe to fit the crime, and punishing someone for something which should not be criminalized in the first place.

The second way is when the justice system fails to provide justice. The obvious examples of this is when a guilty person is acquitted or given a sentence that trivializes the law and his crime by being too light.

In the English-speaking world, we have long considered the first form of injustice to be far worse than the second. This is an application of a principle Socrates’ expressed millennia ago in Plato’s Gorgias where he says that doing injustice is the greatest of all evils, and that he would therefore rather suffer an injustice than to commit one. As Sir William Blackstone, the eighteenth century English jurist put it in his Commentaries on the Laws of England it is “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”.

This is as it should be and this principle finds its concrete expression in the long-established prescriptive rights of English common law which exist to guard against this kind of injustice. Among these are the right to be informed of whatever charges you are arrested for, the right to have a magistrate quickly hear your case after you have been arrested to determine whether you were lawfully detained, the right to a speedy trial before a jury of your peers, and a right to appeal to a higher court if you are convicted. (2)

The second kind of injustice may be the lesser injustice, but that does not mean that it should be treated lightly. If the justice system fails to provide people who have been criminally wronged with satisfaction often enough, they will turn to vigilante justice, which is a form of revenge. The problem with revenge is that it is not self-limiting the way justice is. The standards of justice place a limit on the payment that can be demanded from a person who has wronged someone. A person seeking revenge is not so limited and is likely to demand and take too much from the person he is avenging himself on. That person, or his relatives, will then seek revenge in turn. The violence escalates and cannot be contained. This threatens the survival of society itself.

How do we know when the failure of the justice system is reaching the critical point where vigilantism will break out?

When a man, cuts off another man’s head in front of a busload of witnesses, is arrested, and then placed in a mental hospital where he will walk free the moment his doctor decides he is cured, and the media berate the public who are appalled at this breakdown in justice for their insensitivity towards the sufferings of the mentally ill, this is a pretty good clue that we are rapidly approaching that point.

How did we come to the point where such an occurrence was possible?

We have arrived where we are, by allowing progressives to convince us, that traditional ideas of justice, in which the lawbreaker is regarded as owing a debt to society which must be paid, are archaic, cruel and barbaric and must be replaced with more enlightened, modern views of justice which are about rehabilitating the lawbreaker, making him whole, and reintegrating him into society. Progressives, in their theories of justice, are not content to distinguish between justice and vengeance. They seek to eliminate from justice any and all resemblance to vengeance.

When all resemblance between justice and vengeance has been eliminated, however, justice no longer provides people who have been wronged with the sense of satisfaction that can only come from justice or revenge. If they are not getting that satisfaction from the justice system they will turn to revenge.

One of the most ancient concepts of justice is the notion that the punishment must fit the crime. This is the lex talionis – most commonly expressed as “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” This principle is as old as Hammurabi’s Code in the 18th Century BC. It was the standard of justice in ancient Israel, recorded in the Torah itself in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy.

Some regard the lex talionis as being a harsh and cruel standard. Such people overlook the fact that the “eye for an eye” principle is the very definition of fairness. They also overlook the fact that it’s primary purpose is to limit what penalties are considered just to those which are reasonable. If the standard of justice is that you cannot demand retribution in excess of that which you have lost through the wrongdoing of another then it would be unjust to demand more.

Others object to this principle on the grounds that Jesus was supposedly against it. That conclusion can only be reached by taking Jesus words’ in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, chapter 5 verses 38 to 42, out of context, and then ignoring most of what is actually said. These verses, form one of six parallel passages in that chapter, in which Jesus’ introduces a quotation from the Torah with “ye have heard that it was said”, then gives His own instructions beginning with “but I say unto you” While He might appear at first glance to be contradicting the Torah, He warned against that conclusion in His words immediately prior to these passages where He says “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” The common theme of all of these passages is that in each Jesus’ requires more righteousness of people than the Torah required.

In the first two, He quotes the commandments against murder and adultery, and tells His disciples that it is not enough to obey these commandments outwardly – they must not be violated internally by anger or lust either. In the second two He quotes civil law provisions from the Torah for divorce and taking oaths. He tells His disciples that they should be so righteous and truthful as to have no need for these provisions. The quotation of the lex talionis is found in the first of the final two passages which have the common theme that true righteousness involves selfless love. In this context, it is absolutely clear, that Jesus is not seeking to replace “an eye for an eye” as the standard of justice, but is rather forbidding personal vengeance.

Which brings us right back to Aeschylus. How are justice and vengeance alike? In both, the person who has been wronged by another, seeks satisfaction. True justice, provides that satisfaction in a way which brings the matter to a close. Vengeance invites retaliation from the other side and cannot be contained by the limits which are inherent in law and justice. Laws and justice are essential for a civilized society but they break down when they fail to provide satisfaction. People will then turn again to vengeance and it will consume a society.

(1) A careful distinction must be made here between “taking the law into one’s own hands” and action taken in defense of one’s person, family, and property. The phrase “taking the law into one’s own hands” properly applies only to vengeance. Defensive action against criminal aggression is right and laws which would seek to prohibit such action are inherently unjust. This is a distinction, which some judges and policemen have unfortunately lost sight of, in our Canadian society today.

(2) These safeguards are not foolproof, of course. Here in Canada there have been a number of famous cases of wrongful conviction, that of David Milgaard being probably the most noted. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence Stratton in their The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Law Enforcement Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice discuss how the traditional safeguards against wrongful conviction and punishment are being deliberately undermined in the United States in the name of being “tough on crime”. The second, paperback edition of this book was published in 2008 by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of Crown Publishing in New York.