Remembering a Philosopher-King

It has long been recognized that there are two ways in which civilization can break down into barbaric conditions. The rule of law can collapse altogether leaving ordinary citizens powerless against the criminal elements that now call the shots. This is called anarchy. Or the state can become intrusive and controlling, curtailing its people’s freedoms, dictating their everyday decisions, and ruling by sheer force in an atmosphere of fear. This is called tyranny. It has also long been recognized that there is a cyclical pattern to the rise and fall of civilizations in which after civilization breaks down into one of these conditions for a period, the other emerges in response, and eventually a new civilization is born out of the rubble.

What if, however, civilization were to break down in both ways simultaneously and the same state was to fail in providing the basic protection of the law on the one hand, while tyrannically harassing and abusing its people on the other? Twenty years ago one of the greatest American political thinkers of the last half of the twentieth century saw this happening in the United States and all around the Western world and coined a term to describe it – anarchotyranny, the synthesis of anarchy and tyranny. On February 15th, ten years ago, he passed away due to complications following heart surgery at the age of 57. His name was Sam Francis.

Sam Francis was far more than just the man who thought up a clever name for this phenomenon – he was also its chief chronicler, analyst, and critic. In his twice-weekly column, syndicated by Creators but carried by far fewer newspapers than it ought to have been for reasons we will shortly get into, he provided a bold, uncompromising, commentary, expressed in a dry, sardonic wit that was perfectly complemented by the way he seemed to look out at you with amused disdain through his heavy glasses in the publicity photo attached to his column, on the news and issues of the day and the narrative beneath the news and issues – the ongoing war being waged by those presently in power in the West and particularly in the United States on the traditions, cultures, symbols, and ways of life of Western peoples. Nor did he shy away from addressing the taboo aspect of this subject, the racial element.

Dr. Samuel Todd Francis was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee on April 29, 1947, and it was in Chattanooga that he was raised and where as a young prodigy his literary talents and brilliant mind first gained attention. It was also in the Scenic City, under the Appalachian mountains, that he was finally laid to rest in 2005. He studied English literature at John Hopkins University in Baltimore before taking his Ph.D in history from the University of North Carolina.

It was at Chapel Hill that he became acquainted with two of his fellow students, the classicist Thomas Fleming and the historian Clyde Wilson. These men would become his lifelong colleagues. They worked together on the Southern Partisan, a conservative quarterly that was started up in the late 1970s in the spirit of the Vanderbilt Agrarians. Each contributed to The New Right Papers, a 1982 anthology put together by Robert W. Whitaker. Their most significant collaboration however was in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, founded by Leopold Tyrmand in 1976 and published by the Rockford Institute of Rockford, Illinois. Thomas Fleming became the editor of Chronicles following Tyrmand’s death in 1985. Clyde Wilson is an associate editor, and until his passing Sam Francis was the magazine’s Washington or political editor. Under the direction of these men Chronicles became the flagship publication of paleoconservatism which, in opposition to the neoconservatives who were calling for a Pax Americana, a new world order in which the United States would use its military might to export liberal, capitalist, democracy to the farthest parts of the globe, called American conservatism back to its roots in the Burkean traditionalism of Russell Kirk and the small-r republicanism of the American Old Right that had opposed the New Deal, American entanglement in foreign conflicts, and the development of the “welfare-warfare state”. This was very much bucking the trend in the larger American conservative movement. As the neoconservative viewpoint came to increasingly dominate the movement, conservative writers who having opposed mass, demographics-altering, immigration, both legal and illegal, criticized Israel and objected to America’s being drawn into wars in the Middle East on her behalf, called for a rollback of the American federal government to its constitutional limits, refused to concede the victories of liberalism in the culture wars, and otherwise offended the neoconservatives, found themselves exiled from the pages of National Review and other mainstream conservative publications. Chronicles became a place of sanctuary for these writers. By the middle of the 1990s it was a sanctuary Dr. Francis was himself in need of.

Up to that point his career as a thinker within the American conservative movement had been quite successful. It had three basic stages. In 1977 he joined the Heritage Foundation, a Washington D. C. think tank that had been founded four years earlier by New Right activist Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner with money put up by beer baron Joseph Coors. Dr. Francis was hired as a policy analyst in the fields of intelligence and security, particularly with regards to the threat of terrorism as a strategy employed by the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

In 1981, following the publication of his The Soviet Strategy of Terror, he left the Heritage Foundation to take a position as legislative assistant to Senator John P. East, R-North Carolina. It was as an expert on national security matters that he was hired to this position but, interestingly, in the course of his work for East he was called upon to write a document that both required this expertise yet also had to do with the cultural and racial concerns on which his later, and lasting, fame rests. In 1983, US President Ronald Reagan signed into law a bill that made the third Monday in January into an American national holiday in honour of Martin Luther King Jr. The bill had been hotly debated, and leading the opposition to the holiday was the other Republican Senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms. Senator East worked closely with his colleague and mentor in the campaign against this ridiculous holiday and on October 3, 1983, Helms read out in Congress a paper written by Dr. Francis that documented King’s collaboration with Soviet agents and Communist fronts.

Dr. Francis worked for Senator East until the latter’s death in 1986 at which point he joined the staff of the Washington Times. He served the newspaper as an editorial writer, opinion columnist, and editor and it was here that his career started to really take off. His column was nationally syndicated, and his articles won him the Distinguished Writing Award in 1989 and 1990. He was runner up for another award both those years as well. Then, in 1995 all of that came to an end.

It started with his column for June 27, 1995, entitled “All Those Things to Apologize For”. Written one week after the Southern Baptist Convention issued a grovelling apology for the stance they had taken 150 years previously in the controversy over slavery that divided them from the Northern Baptists, this column pointed out that the Baptists were making a big deal about repenting for something never condemned as a sin by the Bible. “Neither Jesus nor the apostles nor the early church condemned slavery,” he wrote, “despite countless opportunities to do so, and there is no indication that slavery is contrary to Christian ethics or that any serious theologian before modern times ever thought it was”. All of this is true. Unfortunately, it is the kind of truth that people in this era cannot bear to hear.

Dr. Francis was not arguing for slavery. He was arguing against what he called a “bastardized version of Christian ethics”, that had appeared in the 18th Century and had so permeated the churches that they “now spend more time preaching against apartheid and colonialism than they do against real sins such as pinching secretaries and pilfering from the office coffee-pool.” He observed, correctly, that to read the abolitionist message into the New Testament and dismiss the passages that tell bond-servants to obey their masters as irrelevant is to undermine the authority of passages that “enjoin other social responsibilities.” These truths were especially embarrassing to the kind of Christians who, on the one hand pride themselves on the Christian roots of abolitionism, while on the other hand trying to defend what remains of traditional authority and order against the modernizing influences of those who see the abolitionist movement as the first stage in their perpetual revolution against the “slavery” of marriage, family, and traditional morality.

This embarrassment proved too much for Wesley Pruden, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief. He rebuked and demoted Dr. Francis, cut his salary, and began censoring his columns. In September of that same year, he fired Dr. Francis outright. This time it was not over something he had written in a column but something he had said in a speech the year previously.

In May of 1994, American Renaissance, a monthly periodical devoted to matters of race, intelligence, and immigration hosted its first conference and Dr. Francis was invited to speak. He gave a message entitled “Why Race Matters”, the text of which was later published as an article in the September 1994 issue of American Renaissance. In this speech, he talked about how the culture of Western countries, especially the United States and in particular the South had come under attack, with traditional symbols being attacked, demonized, and replaced, how anti-racism was an effective strategy in a campaign being waged against the white race, how whites themselves were digging “their own racial and civilization grave” through liberalism and leftism, and that a merely cultural strategy in defence of Western civilization would not be sufficient – there needs to be conscious racial element to Western identity as well. He said:

The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.

This is so obviously true that one wonders that it needs to be stated. Nevertheless, it was the last straw for Wesley Pruden. The way in which Pruden learned of the remark did not help matters. Dinesh D’Souza, who had attended the conference, wrote a book, The End of Racism, which was published in 1995. D’Souza’s book discussed many of the same issues American Renaissance specializes in, and often took positions similar to theirs. D’Souza was, however, a firm believer in propositional nationalism and the ideal of the United States as a “universal nation”, who objected very much to the idea of defending Western civilization in explicitly racial terms. The chapter in which he talked about the conference contained many distortions – even after D’Souza was force to rewrite the chapter when Jared Taylor and Lawrence Auster, along with Dr. Francis, wrote to the publisher to complain of the many ways in which D’Souza had twisted their words. In September of 1995, at the time the book finally saw print and reviews were beginning to appear, an article by D’Souza about the American Renaissance conference appeared in the Washington Post. D’Souza selectively quoted from Dr. Francis’ speech and presented the quotes in a very unfavourable light. And so, Dr. Francis lost his job at the Washington Times.

He remained on the editorial staff of Chronicles, of course, to which he contributed each month, either his “Principalities and Powers” column or a book review or feature article. The Creators Syndicate continued to distribute his column. In the latter he offered his commentary on the news of the day and, while immigration was the issue that he most frequently addressed, he covered a broad gamut of topics, including free trade and globalization, gun control, and the erosion of civil liberties. He supported the presidential candidacies of his friend Patrick Buchanan and kept a watchful eye on the doings of those who actually made it to the White House. Scathing as his criticism of the Clinton administration was, he was no less severe in his assessment of George W. Bush. He contrasted the way in which the Bush administration had expanded its policing powers, undermining the civil liberties of Americans in the process, by means of antiterrorist legislation like the USA PATRIOT Act, with the way in which it refused to use its existing, lawful, powers to control immigration, this contrast being a classic example of anarchotyranny. In 2002 he wrote several columns against the Bush administration’s plans to invade Iraq and when that invasion took place saw his arguments more than justified. His arguments against the war were far more sane, sensible, and interesting than either the neocon arguments for the war or the blithering banalities uttered against it by the left-wing peaceniks. His final column was about George W. Bush’s second inaugural speech and it concluded by saying that Bush had “confirmed once and for all that the neo-conservatism to which he has delivered his administration and the country is fundamentally indistinguishable from the liberalism many conservatives imagine he has renounced and defeated.”

In his Chronicles column, where he had more space to work with, he discussed the same topics at a deeper level. From James Burnham, about whose ideas he had written a book, he had learned much about the nature of power and the elites who inevitably hold it, including the present elite of technocratic managers who preside over the dismantling of the traditions, culture, and civilization of Western societies and rationalize their actions with the universalistic ideology of liberalism. From liberal sociologist Donald Warren he had gleaned insights into how the alliance of the uppermost and lowermost classes in the welfare state was putting the squeeze on the middle class, radicalizing what is ordinarily the most stable of classes, and thus generating a support base that a populist movement could use against the elites. From these insights, Dr. Francis framed his argument for such a populist “revolt from the middle”, bending the cold, hard, theory of Machiavellian power politics to serve ends that were anything but cold and hard – those of the cause of white, middle class Americans, who were seeing everything they held dear, their culture and religion, traditions and way of life, on every level from the regional to the national, including the constitution of their republic and their habits and institutions of freedom, being mercilessly swept away by elites they seemed powerless to stop. First in the New Right that brought Ronald Reagan into power, and later in the movement that failed to deliver the presidency to Pat Buchanan, he had found movements that could potentially achieve his ends. The dilemma for which he was seeking a solution to the very end of his life, as can be seen in his last “Principalities and Powers” article entitled “Towards a Hard Right”, was how such a movement could gain success without being sidetracked from its goals by corporate globalists dangling the carrot of the free market before its eyes.

Kings and Constitutions

Plato and Aristotle, philosophers of fourth century BC democratic Athens who envied Sparta her kings and aristocrats, observed that there are three simple forms of government – the rule of the one, the rule of the few, and the rule of the many – which observation has been a fundamental of political science ever since. They also observed that governments can be good or bad and that the basic difference between the two is that bad governments use their power to benefit themselves at the expense of the larger society whereas good governments use their power for the benefit of the common good. While this is hardly an earth shattering observation it is the source of a question that has troubled political science ever since – what is the source of a government’s legitimacy, its right to govern?

The anarchist would answer that there is no such thing as government legitimacy and that all governments are illegitimate institutions that seek to monopolize coercive force by forbidding in others the actions they themselves commit. While there are some things that can be said in favour of this, anarchism is ultimately untenable because it is incompatible with human nature. Men are social beings, whose nature it is to live together in community and society rather than apart from one another in isolation. We therefore require a set of laws and an institution that will make, administer, and enforce those laws. We need government.

Having ruled out the anarchist position, we are left with basically three possible answers to the source of government legitimacy. A government that is legitimate, that has the right to govern, is either delegated that authority from above, obtains it from below, or finds it to be inherent in itself.

The last of these possibilities is as unfeasible as the anarchist answer. While a distinction can be made between the idea of a government finding the source of its authority within itself and that of a government exercising its power for its own benefit the two concepts are so close to each other as to make the technical term for a government that derives its authority from itself, autocracy, a virtual synonym for bad government. It is not surprising, therefore, that most political theorists have held to one variation or another of the other two options.

The second possibility, that government obtains its authority from below, from those it governs, is the prevalent theory of the modern age. It is the foundation of the modern theory of democracy (1) and proclaimed to be a self-evident truth in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence. Even Communist governments professed a belief in this view of government legitimacy and hence frequently renamed the countries they took over "The People’s Republic of Such-and-such". In the democratic, liberal, West this was regarded as a pretence because the states so described were one-party police states, which held phony elections for show, in which the government was not accountable and the people were tightly controlled. The Communist response was that the Communist Party was the voice of the people and therefore only in a Communist state where the Communist Party controls everything could the government truly be said to represent and derive its powers from the people. In this we see that the idea that governments derive their powers from the people has more than one interpretation and in not all of these interpretations are frequent elections, multiple parties, competition or even freedom itself absolutely essential to the idea.

Thomas Jefferson’s Lockean assertion notwithstanding the idea that governments derive their legitimate authority from those they govern is not at all self-evident. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that it is self-evident that they do not so derive their authority. If this theory were applied to any other form of authority it would undermine that authority. Imagine telling parents that the only legitimate authority they have in the home is derived from the consent of their children! To say that authority flows from the governed to the governor is to assert nonsense, to contradict the very nature of authority. If legitimate authority is something given to the possessor of that authority from those under that authority then what happens if someone under authority does not like a law passed by that authority and decides to withdraw his consent?

If those under government can withdraw their consent from the authority of that government at any time then they have not conferred any real authority on government at all and we have anarchy. If, on the other hand, the authority the governed confer upon government by their consent cannot be withdrawn the government can do whatever it wants with the authorization of “the people” and we have tyranny. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the “father of modern democracy” is also the “father of totalitarianism” who asserted that once a government was formed that expressed the “General Will” of the people no dissent from the will of that government should be tolerated. The middle solution between these two extremes is to do what most liberal, Western, democracies do which is to schedule regular elections and to treat these as a binding contract conferring authority which must be obeyed on the government until the next election. Whatever might be said in favour of this solution, years ago American conservative commentator Samuel Francis noted a growing tendency in modern mass societies governed by modern bureaucratic democracies to combine the lawlessness of anarchism with the oppression of tyranny in a synthesis he dubbed anarcho-tyranny. The meeting point between two extremes can be a moderate mean that is preferable to either extreme but it can also combine their worse points into one.

Some would argue for the idea of government legitimacy based upon popular consent based upon the fact that the worse a government is the more likely the people it governs are to either leave if they can or to organize against the government and rise up and overthrow it. This argument, however, is more a description of the natural consequences of governing badly than of the source of a government’s right to govern. Ultimately, the present popularity of the idea of authority by popular consent is due not to is being self-evident nor even to its having convincing arguments in its favour, but to the fact that it flatters the people, telling them that they are the true bosses and that those in authority over them are so by their allowance and toleration.

What about the remaining possibility that the right to govern is delegated to civil authority from above?

For those of us who are Christians this possibility is not optional. It is explicitly taught by St. Paul in the thirteenth chapter of his epistle to the church in Rome:

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.

While among those who profess Christian faith there are some who would set aside the Scriptural authority of the writings of St. Paul against the explicit recognition of such by St. Peter and the orthodox tradition of the church, what the Apostle has taught here is also present in the direct words of Christ Himself Who told Pontius Pilate “Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above.” (John 19:11).

The idea that authority is delegated to civil government from a higher authority – God, in the words of Jesus and St. Paul quoted above – is in keeping with what is observable about the natural movement of all other kinds of authority, i.e., that it flows from the top down. It runs contrary, however, to the humanistic spirit of the Modern Age. That spirit is all about the emancipation of man’s will from external constraint and his freedom to re-make himself and the world around him in accordance with his own desires. The only authority recognized by the spirit of modern man is that of his own will and such authority as he chooses to set up. Against the Christian doctrine that civil government derives its authority from above, from God, the modern spirit asserts the accusation that such a teaching is a recipe for arbitrary and unaccountable government. This, however, is simply an indication of the practical, if not overt, atheism inherent in the modern worldview. For if civil government’s authority is delegated to it by God then civil authority is accountable to God for its stewardship of that authority. It is government that bases its authority upon the will of man that is truly unaccountable and arbitrary. Indeed, the teaching of the divine origin of the authority of civil government is a doctrine that limits government authority, for if God were to delegate unlimited power to civil government He would be making civil government equal to Himself. The power God delegates to civil authority must therefore be limited and it is limited by the purpose for which God has delegated that authority, identified by St. Paul in the passage quoted above.

There is another way of thinking about civil government’s authority in which it is delegated from above. That is to regard a country’s constitution as being a higher authority than its government and to regard the government’s authority as being delegated to it by the constitution. This need not be regarded as a substitute for the Christian doctrine or a theory that is in competition with it. It is completely compatible with it if we think of the constitution as being the vessel by which authority is communicated from God to government.

Today, the word constitution is often understood to mean a legal document listing and limiting the offices and powers of government. This is not the sense of the word I am using here. I mean constitution in the sense in which Aristotle used the term in his Athenian Constitution. In this older sense of the word a constitution is a system of organization. It could be defined as “the way things are set up”. In this sense of the word, the constitution of our American friends and neighbours is not the document that begins “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…” but the federal republican system of government as established by that document. Or it would be had not “the Civil War finally blew the old Republic to pieces” as H. L. Mencken put it in his foreword to James Fenimore Cooper’s The American Democrat.

The framers of the American republic believed that a charter, a document defining and delineating the powers of government, is the best safeguard of the rights and liberties of a country’s people and the security and stability of a country’s constitution against those who would subvert the constitution for their own tyrannical purposes. Hence the association of the concepts of charter and constitution to the point where the distinction was blurred. Mencken’s comment, quoted above, places this belief in a somewhat ironic light, the “civil war” to which he referred having taken place less than a century after the American charter was ratified. With all due respect to America’s founders I disagree with their position and would insist that prescription is the best safeguard of these things. Prescription is establishment by ancient use. It commands the respect that is due to age and conveys the right of presumption due to that which has stood the test of time against the unproven claims of innovation and experiment. The embodiment of a country’s constitution in institutions that have been established as “the way things are” from ages past it is a far greater guarantee of stability and security than the fact that a document “says so”.

The idea of a constitution grounded in prescription as the immediate source of government legitimacy – the ultimate source being God – finds support in an alternative theory of democracy proposed by G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton began the fourth chapter of his Orthodoxy, a chapter entitled “The Ethics of Elfland,” by saying that as he matured he had discovered that the remarks he had heard when he was a boy from old men about how the abstract idealism of youth would give way to pragmatic realism in middle age were all lies. He declared that he now, at the time he was writing, more than ever before, believed in Liberalism, and its ideal of democracy. The principle of democracy, he said, could be expressed in two propositions, “that the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men” and that “the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common.” Therefore “the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves – the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state.” He then went on to say that “It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time.” He wrote:

Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. (2)

To this I would add that tradition can also be regarded, in a sense, as extending democracy in the other direction as well, and extending the franchise to the unborn. For tradition is that which binds the generations, past, present, and yet to come, into a common unity. If tradition is regarded as true democracy, democracy that gives a voice to those who have gone before and those yet to come by uniting their voices with that of those present now into one then the biggest problems of the modern theory of democracy disappear. For these problems only arise because the theory of modern democracy, in which “the people” are those who live under the government in the present, asserts the ridiculous proposition that it is the governed govern the government. If “the people”, however, are not just the masses assembled at any one moment but the organic whole of a society through time, including past generations and future generations, and tradition is the voice of “the people” so defined, then the contradiction disappears, for the organic whole of a society through time is much larger than those under government at any given moment, and thus cannot be equated with the governed. Furthermore, whereas modern democracy, which makes the masses of the moment sovereign, threatens the stability and security of the prescriptive constitution, because the opinion of the masses changes from moment to moment and has no common unity other than that which is supplied by the demagogue who seeks to subvert the constitution, tradition, as the voice of the people through time, changes slowly, and is supportive of the prescriptive constitution.

I would further assert, again contrary to the theory of government and constitution so dear to our neighbours to the south, that if the truest and best democracy is that in which the sovereign people is the society as an organic whole of past, present, and future generations, and tradition is the voice of that people, then the institution which best serves as the focal point of the authority conveyed by the tradition-grounded, prescriptive constitution upon civil government, so as to embody the voice of the people in the present, is precisely that institution which serves that purpose in our own constitution, the office of king, presently occupied, by a queen, Her Majesty, Elizabeth II.

Aristotle believed that a constitution which mixed the rule of the one, the few, and the many was potentially the best constitution available to man. This mixture is present in both the parliamentary monarchy of the United Kingdom, Canada, and in the republican system of the United States. In the United States, the office of the president fills the place of the rule of one. It is an elected term position, and in the constitutional scheme of the United States, the president is elected as the representative of the country as a whole, whereas senators are elected to represent states, and congressmen to represent districts. The office of king in our own constitution is a hereditary, life, position. The modern democratic mind finds this objectionable. I would say, however, that it is precisely this that makes the office of king a suitable expression of the voice of the people. The office of king passes from one generation to the next through time, just as in the organic whole of the nation, one generation follows another. As Roger Scruton has put it "the monarch is so convenient a symbol of the trans-generational ties that bind us to our country." (3) The modern mind claims the office is outdated, but it is in our times, times of turbulence and dynamic and rapid change, that an institution that represents stability and steadfastness is most needed.

Those who prefer a republican system over even a parliamentary monarchy and a charter over tradition and prescription maintain that the office of king is a threat to the rights and liberties of the people. It is only bad kings that threaten those rights and liberties, however, and it is no solution to make every office an elected one, for bad elected officials are as much of a threat to the rights and liberties of the people as bad kings, and often a worse threat because, holding office only until the next election, their interest in the affairs of the public is a short-term one. (4) Indeed, a king who inherits his throne and has therefore been trained all his life for the duties of the role he is to fill is far more likely to be a good governor than an elected politician. To be an elected politician one must first run in an election, which indicated a love for power, a quality that is not exactly desirable in one who is to exercise it. There is a reason our basic word for an evil and oppressive governor, tyrant, comes from a root that originally meant "usurper", i.e., one whose love for power leads him to seize it for himself and to exercise it improperly.

There have been bad kings, of course. One bad king was King John who ruled England from 1199 until his death in 1216. He was a particularly bad king. After famously attempting unsuccessfully to usurp the throne from his brother Richard the Lionheart when the the latter was imprisoned in Germany during his return from the Crusades, (5) when John did finally accede to the throne upon Richard’s death with the support of his mother and most of the nobility it was over the claim one rival claimant did so over the claim of his nephew Arthur, son of his older brother Geoffrey. Arthur’s claim was supported by the French king Philip II and John went to war. He captured, imprisoned, and almost certainly murdered Arthur but his military adventures proved disastrous, costing the Crown much territory and earning him the nickname “Lackland.” His efforts at diplomacy fared no better, involving the kind of marrying, divorcing, and bending canon law for which Henry VIII would later become known. Between this and his conflict with Pope Innocent III over ecclesiastical appointments he managed to get himself excommunicated – and at one time the entire country interdicted. He combined incompetence in foreign policy with tyranny at home and eventually faced a revolt from the barons.

That John was forced to sign the Magna Carta Libertatum in 1215 is often cited as evidence that kings are a threat to liberty, that charters are the best safe-guards of liberty, and of the progressive view of history in which society becomes better and better as government evolves towards liberal democracy. This point of view ignores several facts. When John affixed his seal to the document at Runnymede it was a victory for aristocracy not democracy as it was the barons and not a popular uprising that forced him so to do. Furthermore, the Magna Carta was not an innovative, progressive, document. It did not force the king to recognize new restraints upon his powers so much as to acknowledge those already existing in the English law and constitution. Many of the rights and liberties identified in it go back at least as far as the ninth century reign of Alfred the Great of Wessex. Most had been recognized in the Charter of Liberties issued by Henry I upon his accession to the throne a century earlier.

Centuries later there was another revolt against an English king. This time, however, the intention was to subvert the constitution. Following the extinction of the Welsh line of Tudor, the throne of England had passed to the House of Stuart, uniting the thrones of England and Scotland. The first Stuart king to rule over England was James I (VI of Scotland) who was succeeded by his son Charles I. Charles, the first English monarch raised in the Anglican faith, inherited the legacy of the English Reformation that had taken place during the century that the Tudors had ruled. The Church of England, with Catholic bishops in Apostolic succession and a Protestant confession had become the established church. A party of Calvinists who had suffered persecution during the brief return to Roman Catholicism during the reign of Mary and many of whom had fled to Switzerland where they were infected with republicanism and Presbyterianism, had been gradually increasing in strength since the reign of Elizabeth I. Not at all pleased with the Elizabethan settlement, they increasingly demanded that the Church of England be stripped of bishops, priests, vestments, ornaments, liturgy, and anything that did not come directly out of the pages of Scripture. These demands were resisted by King Charles who wished to keep the Anglican Church the way it was. When he married a Roman Catholic and allowed her to keep and practice her religion, the Puritans saw this as a conspiracy to re-establish Roman Catholicism in England. They became paranoid and their demands became increasingly odious and personally offensive to the king. They hijacked the discussion in Parliament, in which they had become the dominant party, refusing to co-operate with the king or deal with the government business before the Parliament, turning it instead into a soapbox upon which to vent their hatred of Roman Catholicism. Eventually the king dissolved Parliament and governed without it for eleven years. This was within his constitutional right at the time, and he governed well, but it infuriated the Puritans and when he called Parliament back together they were even less willing to co-operate. It broke out into the English Civil War, the result of which was that the king was arrested and, in a kangaroo court conducted after the Puritan army forcibly removed his supporters from Parliament, condemned to die. (6)

If King John had been a bad king because he ignored the established constitution which his barons forced him to acknowledge in the Magna Carta, the Puritans who rebelled against King Charles I, illegally tried him for treason and killed him, were determined to overthrow the established constitution, both of the state and the church. While they called Charles a tyrant, he, unlike John, was a popular king. The Puritans, on the other hand, used the power they seized to oppress the people. They stripped the churches of their organs, ornaments, and other decoration. They called these idolatrous and claimed to be motivated by ideals of purity and simplicity but the effect was to rob the people of the beautiful art and music that had been universally accessible in the churches. They got rid of the festive seasons of Christmas and Easter and passed laws forbidding sports and amusements on Sundays, even outside church hours, although this was the only day of the week such were available to them.

In his final speech before his death, King Charles insisted that the liberty and freedom of the people consists of "those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own" and not in blurring the difference and distinction between subject and sovereign. He pointed out that had he submitted to the demands of the Puritans, had he "given way to an arbitrary way, for to have all laws changed according to the power of the Sword", he would not have been brought to the scaffold and so he was "the martyr of the people." The subsequent abuse of the people during the Puritan interregnum more than justified this assertion.

In the example of King Charles, rightly canonized a saint by the Anglican Church in the Restoration, we see the example of how a king can be the upholder of the constitution and defender of the people protected by that constitution, against forces in the elected assembly that seek to subvert the constitution and oppress the people in the name of liberty. This, of course, is the proper constitutional role of a king, and the reason the office of king will never be outdated, despite what progressives and modernists may say to the contrary.

(1) There have been other theories of democracy which do not rest upon this idea.

(2) G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (New York: Image Books,1990; original publisher New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1908), p. 45.

(3) Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006), p. 11.

(4) This argument was developed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe in Democracy - The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order ( Rutgers, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2001). Note that Hoppe, while arguing that monarchy is preferable to democracy, is himself an anarchist.

(5) John is remembered for this more often than for the events of his own reign, even the signing of the Magna Carta, for the simple reason that it became the background to the Robin Hood legend, in which the villainous king-to-be is depicted as the sinister mastermind behind the outlaw’s main enemy the Sheriff of Nottingham.

(6) http://www.thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-martyred-king.html

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.

Progressive Do-Gooders and Racial Realities

In The Warden, the first volume of Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire, we are given an illustration of the mischief which zealous, progressive social reformers can do when they have the support of the news media. The title character is the Reverend Septimus Harding, an elderly clergyman who is the warden of an almshouse operated by the Church of England in the fictional cathedral town of Barchester. A zealous young social reformer and the suitor of the warden’s daughter, Dr. John Bold believes that the warden receives too high of an income from the property which had been donated to establish the almshouse, and takes legal action to correct this perceived injustice. While Bold is able to keep his knowledge of the fact that the warden is a good and honest man in a separate compartment of his mind from that in which he has formed his opinion about the warden’s income, his friend Tom Towers, publisher of the powerful newspaper The Jupiter, joins his crusade by writing and publishing a couple of articles in which he paints the warden in as negative of a light as possible as a greedy hypocrite and robber of the poor. When Bold goes to Towers, tells him that he is wrong about the warden and asks him not to publish any such stories again, he is told that to do so would defraud the public.

Trollope’s novel was first published in the middle of the 19th century and the causes which inflame self-righteous social reformers have changed between then and now. One of the causes which the John Bolds and Tom Towerses of the present day are obsessed with is that of correcting racial injustices. Or rather, that of combating “racism”, which is not quite the same thing. This obsession dates back to World War II, the American Civil Rights Movement, and the international indignation over the policy of apartheid practiced by South Africa back before it became a failed state.

Many are the Septimus Hardings who have fallen victim to the self-righteousness of the pompous do-gooders and their anti-racist crusade. In 1995, award winning editorial writer Samuel Francis was fired from the Washington Times. A few years earlier, Joseph Sobran, a brilliant protégé of William F. Buckley Jr. had been fired from National Review by his old mentor. In both cases the writers were fired by supposedly conservative publications after progressives had accused them of racism – or in Sobran’s case anti-Semitism – over something they had written and said.

The latest victims are Patrick J. Buchanan and John Derbyshire.

Buchanan is a syndicated columnist, a best-selling author, a former adviser and speechwriter to three US Presidents, and a three time candidate for the US Presidency himself. He was fired from the television news network MSNBC earlier this year. Progressives had been demanding that he be fired ever since the publication, last year, of his latest book Suicide of a Superpower, which included a chapter on “The End of White America”. The network’s president announced in January that he thought what Buchanan had written was not appropriate for “the national dialogue” (1) and in February, Buchanan was fired.

John Derbyshire is the author of several books, including We are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. He is also a freelance writer who until recently was published by National Review. Late last week he committed the terrible sin of writing an article for the webzine Taki’s Mag entitled “The Talk: Non-black Version”. Several articles had been published recently which discussed conversations certain black parents had with their children warning them about the racism and prejudice they can expect at the hands of white America. Derbyshire’s article was a response to these in which he presented an alternative “talk”, which he says is derived from conversations he has had with his own mixed-race children about black people. The leftist gutter press, including such trash rags as the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Huffington Post, threw a conniption over this article and the once conservative magazine’s editor Richard Lowry (2) fired him this past weekend.

What had Francis, Sobran, Buchanan, and now Derbyshire said to warrant this outrage? Did they demand the re-establishment of de jure segregation? Did they suggest that black slavery should be reinstated? Did they say that blacks or members of any other race should be denied the civil rights and legal protections of other citizens? Did they call for the persecution or extermination of people on the basis of their skin colour?

Judging from the hysterical denunciations of these men penned by progressives and pseudoconservatives onewould think that they did all of the above, but in fact they did none of the above, nor anything remotely similar.

These men were accused of racism because they rejected the progressive narrative in which whites, and only whites, are the perpetrators of racism, and non-whites, and only non-whites, are the victims of racism. They were accused of racism because they did not accept the idea that it is “racist” for white people to think of themselves collectively as a group and to look out for their own interests and those of their children but that it is not racist for people of other races to be conscious of a racial identity and work to advance their interests. They were accused of racism because they objected to the way in which governments of Western countries were using liberal immigration policies to adversely affect the future well-being of white people. (3) They were accused of racism because they refused to abide by the liberal-imposed taboos against the discussion of facts which conflict with the idea that the best way to deal with the reality of race is to pretend it does not exist.

Samuel Francis had given a speech in which he connected the achievements of Western civilization to the character of the people who built that civilization and suggested that the survival of that culture and civilization required the survival of that people. (4)

Joseph Sobran, who wanted the United States to withdraw from global military endeavours when the Cold War ended, warned that America’s close relationship with Israel could potentially lead her into perpetual war with the Arab nations. (5)

Patrick Buchanan wrote a jeremiad about the decline of America that pointed out that the USA will be irrevocably changed once whites become a minority in America, as is scheduled to happen before this century is half over, and dared to question whether that change will be for the better.

John Derbyshire told his half-European, half-Asian children that as individuals black people are entitled to the same courtesy and respect as any other citizen, that as a group “there is great variation among blacks in every human trait (except, obviously, the trait of identifying oneself as black)”, that there are major differences between blacks and whites in terms of group averages, and that in certain specific circumstances there is reason to be afraid of blacks. (6)

These men lost their jobs because progressive liberals had determined that the expression of certain facts and truths was detrimental to their cause, that everyone who expressed those facts and truths must be branded a racist and silenced, and because the executives of the largest “conservative” publications lacked the courage to stand up to the bullying demands of the left.

One man who has been much in the news over the last month, stands to lose much more than a job, however, because of the alliance between anti-racist social reformers and the media. That man is George Zimmerman. If progressives and their media allies have their way, Mr. Zimmerman will arrested, tried, and convicted of murder, and spend the rest of his life behind bars.

George Zimmerman, for those of you have been vacationing on the moon since Christmas, is a member of the neighborhood watch in the Retreat at Twin Lakes, which is a gated community in Sanford, Florida. On the evening of February 26th, he noticed a 17-year old black youth named Trayvon Martin. Martin, it turns out, had walked from the home of his father’s fiancé to a local 7-11 to buy skittles and ice tea. He was unarmed. Zimmerman thought he looked suspicious, and called police dispatch to report “looks like he is up to no good or he is on drugs or something.” The police told him they did not need him to follow Martin and that they would send a car to investigate. When the police arrived they found Martin dead and Zimmerman standing nearby. Zimmerman told them that he had shot Martin in self-defence. The police took Zimmerman in for questioning, but they did not charge him, and eventually released him.

Progressives maintain that this was an act of racism, that Zimmerman was afraid of Martin because of his skin colour, and murdered him in cold blood.

Let me say right now that I do not know that this was not a murder. Perhaps the progressives are right for once – a stopped clock is right twice a day after all – and Zimmerman deserves to rot in jail for the rest of his life. I do not know, because I do not know what happened in the interval between Zimmerman’s phone call to the police and their arrival, other than that Zimmerman shot Martin. Neither, however, do the progressives know what happened. They were not there anymore than I was.

I do know that the media falsified evidence to support the progressive interpretation of these events.

The National Broadcasting Corporation, for example, played an excerpt from Zimmerman’s call to the police that went “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.” In fact, Zimmerman’s actual words were “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” The words “he looks black” were in response to a direct question from the police “OK, and this guy—is he black, white or Hispanic?”

When this was made public, NBC promised to investigate, and wrote the entire thing off as an “error”. (7)

It is difficult to imagine an “error” that would edit a conversation and make it into a racist statement. It is not difficult, unfortunately, to think of a plausible reason why a media company would intentionally do so.

Think about it. There are countless numbers of tragic deaths that occur in the United States every year. Why has this particular case attracted international media attention?

It has done so because the case has been depicted in the media as a classic example of racism. It has been turned into a morality tale to instruct us as to the evils that come from racial profiling. It is being offered as proof that the United States, over 140 years after abolishing slavery, over 40 years after the abolition of Jim Crow and the replacement of de jure discrimination against blacks with de jure discrimination in their favour, and 4 years since they elected their first black President, is a white racist society. The story of racist Zimmerman shooting down an innocent youth in cold blood because he was black is a story tailor-made to suit the purposes of those progressive anti-racists who seem to think that Adolf Hitler is going to break out of hell and start up anew in North America any day now.

The facts of the story, however, do not seem to fit the mold into which the progressive media has been trying to force it.

For one thing, Zimmerman, despite his German/Jewish last name, is not white. He is of mixed race, his father being white, his mother being Peruvian Hispanic. He identifies himself as Hispanic when voting. The media has taken to referring to him as a “white Hispanic”, although he is of dark complexion and it is not customary to refer to people of mixed ancestry in this way. It does not seem to have occurred to the media, that their insistence upon calling Zimmerman “white” in order to associate the shooting of Martin with “whiteness” is itself racist against whites.

For another thing there is evidence to support Zimmerman’s account. The police reported that he was bleeding from his nose and the back of his head and that he showed signs of having been on the ground himself. The surveillance video of Zimmerman entering the police station, despite claims by ABC News to the contrary, shows those injuries. A witness testified to seeing Zimmerman lying on the ground with Martin on top of him punching him.

It should go without saying that this event was a tragedy one way or another. A 17 year old, unarmed kid, was shot dead on his way home from the store. However he dressed, whatever he called himself on Twitter, he did not deserve that. Having said that, however, it does not follow that Zimmerman is the cold-blooded killer that he has been portrayed as in the media. The way the media has handled this affairs means that it will be virtually impossible for Zimmerman to receive a fair trial if he is arrested and charged. Sir William Blackstone once said that it is “better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.” Progressives appear to be willing to sacrifice this noble principle, a key element of the English concept of justice, to the cause of anti-racism.

What the progressives want us to believe is that the Martin shooting proves that white racism is a significant social problem in Obama’s “post-racial” America which justifies legislation and social programs aimed at correcting that problem. The facts are otherwise. If there is a major problem with racism in the USA today it is not the racism of whites against blacks, but of blacks against whites.

Data compiled by the American government demonstrates that the vast majority of crimes committed in the United States are intraracial, i.e., committed against someone of the same race as the person committing the crime. When whites commit crimes, it is most often against other whites, when blacks commit crimes it is most often against other blacks.

The date also shows that interracial crimes, i.e., crimes committed against someone of a different race than the perpetrator, are far more often committed by blacks against whites, than the other way around. (8)

Progressives insist that crimes should receive a greater punishment if they can be shown to be motivated by racial prejudice. They have succeeded in getting laws passed against “hate crimes” in many places. Yet black on white crimes, despite being more frequent than white on black crimes, are seldom if ever treated as hate crimes. Nor do they receive the media attention that the much rarer white on black crimes receive. Particular black on white crimes only seem to receive the kind of media attention the shooting of Trayvon Martin has received when they involve a celebrity like O. J. Simpson.

The progressive/media campaign against racism is a very selective campaign indeed. Certain statements are mercilessly condemned as “racist” when made by whites, even if they are unquestionably true, whereas violent crimes committed against whites are excused as being the expectable response to white racism, rather than racism against whites.

In Trollope’s novel the efforts of John Bold and Tom Towers do not, in the end, help the people in whose name they had appointed themselves to speak but actually make their condition worse. Towers’ accusations drive the warden from the almshouse, the bishop decides not to replace him because of the controversy surrounding the warden’s income, the institution falls into decline, and the residents are deprived of a good friend and of the allowance he had paid them out of his own pocket.

How about the progressive campaign against racism? Has it benefited those in whose name it is fought?

No, it has not. The major injustices committed against blacks in the United States, slavery and de jure segregation, have been abolished for decades. The anti-racist movement continues to blame the problems blacks face today on these injustices however. This does nothing to improve relations between the races, generating distrust on both sides. If blacks and whites both would be benefited from better race relations, then the anti-racist movement is harming both races.

Black people have far more important problems than racism to deal with. Many live in urban centres that have been turned into slums by misguided urban planning on the part of the American federal government (9). A black middle class took shape and began to grow in the decades before the Civil Rights movement began (10), but upward mobility among American blacks has actually slowed down since the Civil Rights movement many urban blacks today find themselves trapped in multi-generational poverty and dependence in part due to anti-family incentives in social programs designed ironically to combat poverty (11). A negative culture which glorifies crime and violence and preys upon black youth has developed and this culture contributes significantly to the high crime rates, both as perpetrators and victims, among American blacks (12).

Progressive and media anti-racism encourages black leaders to turn white people into scapegoats for all these problems rather than to seek real solutions to them. It also contributes to the problems, especially the violent youth culture.

Everybody, white and black alike, suffers from the actions of our contemporary anti-racist John Bolds. If anyone benefits, it is the self-righteous progressive do-gooders themselves, who are usually the first to put into practice in their personal lives the advice John Derbyshire gave his children in his brilliant article.

1. Patrick Buchanan tells the story of his firing in this column here: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/2012/02/16/blacklisted-but-not-beaten/ You can read my review of his book here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/11/fate-of-america.html

2. Lowry became editor of National Review in 1997. The editor who preceded him was John O’Sullivan, who had taken over the editorship when Buckley stepped down and semi-retired in 1988. Officially O’Sullivan announced that he was resigning the editorship. There is evidence, however, that William F. Buckley Jr. forced him to step down. O’Sullivan had approved a cover story for the magazine entitled “Time to Rethink Immigration?” in 1992, written by finance columnist Peter Brimelow, who would later write the 1995 bestseller Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster calling for immigration restriction and found the immigration restrictionist webzine VDare. Brimelow was fired from National Review at about the same time O’Sullivan “stepped down.” The new editor, Lowry, brought the magazine more in line with “neo-conservatism”, an ideology originally associated with former ‘60’s and ‘70’s radicals and liberals like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, which basically consists of support for American military crusades to spread democracy and capitalism around the globe, a strong American alliance with Israel, free trade and immigration. .

3. Sobran was a late convert to the immigration reform/restrictionist movement, following the publication of Buchanan’s State of Emergency.

4. The speech was given at the first American Renaissance conference in May 1994. It was later adapted into the article “Why Race Matters: The assault on our race and culture must be met in explicitly racial terms”, which appeared as the cover story of the September 1994 issue of American Renaissance. It can be read online here: http://www.amren.com/ar/1994/09/#cover American Renaissance is a monthly publication that deals entirely with racial issues. It was founded by Jared Taylor, a Yale University graduate, whose book Paved With Good Intentions, first published by Carroll & Graf in 1993, argues that efforts to create racial harmony in the United States following the American Civil Rights Movement through affirmative action and the dismantling of white racial identity have in fact produced the opposite of racial harmony. Politically, Taylor holds to a modified libertarianism in which the state restricts immigration, but is domestically colour blind. Taylor has pointed to studies that show that people of all races prefer to associate mostly with members of their own race, and argues that people of all races should be free to self-segregate or to mix, as they wish. His views can be taken to be the editorial position of American Renaissance, which publishes well-written articles by academics or scientists (some writing under pseudonyms for obvious reasons) which challenge the various racial taboos of progressive America.

5. Sobran expressed these opinions, not in the pages of National Review, but in his syndicated column. This was around the time of Patrick Buchanan’s first presidential campaign and Buchanan expressed similar views, as did Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel. It is noteworthy that these conservative columnists were all strong Israel supporters during the Cold War. Each of them believed that the USA should withdraw from military interventionism and adopt a position of armed neutrality after the collapse of the Soviet threat. The accusations of anti-Semitism came primarily from neo-conservatives who wanted the exact opposite of this, a Pax Americana in which liberalism, capitalism, and democracy would be spread throughout the world with the backing of the US military. Often the progressives who repeat the neo-conservatives accusations of anti-Semitism against men like the Buchanan, Reese, and the late Sobran, are the same progressives who lionize Palestianian terrorists as “freedom fighters” and demonize Israel as an “apartheid state”.

6. http://takimag.com/article/the_talk_nonblack_version_john_derbyshire While I don’t agree with his advice in 10h, the facts as he presents them are correct, and his advice based upon them is largely common sense.

7. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/post/nbc-issues-apology-on-zimmerman-tape-screw-up/2012/04/03/gIQA8m5jtS_blog.html h/t Lawrence Auster http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/022083.html

8. http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams081899.asp This column was written in 1999. In it Dr. Walter E. Williams, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, tells how he independently verified the findings of The Color of Crime, a report published by the New Century Foundation earlier that year. The New Century Foundation is the company that publishes American Renaissance, referred to in footnote 4. In 2005 a second, updated, and enlarged edition of The Colour of Crime was published. It is available to download in .pdf format here: http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.pdf The report finds that blacks commit 85% of interracial crime in the United States, and whites commit 15%. Blacks are 12% of the American population, whites are over 60%. Note carefully what these figures say and what they do not say. They do not say that the majority of black Americans commit interracial crimes. They do say that the vast majority of interracial crimes in America are committed by black Americans.


9. Kirkpatrick Sale demonstrates how slums are created on pages 117-122 of Human Scale (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980). The example he uses is the South Bronx. He traces its decline, beginning with federal government intervention in the housing market after World War II to housing projects in the 60’s and 70’s. He does so to illustrate the concept of prytaneogenesis – “damage actually generated by the state”.

10. The history of this can be read in Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

11. A strong family structure helps deter multi-generational poverty. This structure is weakened when social programs provide – unintentionally – incentives to men to desert their wives and children, for a father and mother not to marry, and for women have children outside of wedlock with multiple fathers and raise those children alone. See Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984, 1994), particularly pages 124-133.

12. If you look at the total number of crimes committed in the United States, and break it down by race, blacks do not commit the majority of crimes in the United States. They do, however, commit a very disproportionate percentage of the crimes. What that means is that for the vast majority of American crimes, the percentage committed by blacks is much higher than the roughly 12% that is their percentage of the American population. Progressives typically explain these figures away by accusing police and judges of being racist. Racial arrest and conviction figures however, correlate strongly with the racial analysis of the testimony of crime victims. The Color of Crime, referred to and linked to in footnote 8 does this correlation. The most recent edition is 7 years old but updated source data is available for at the websites of the FBI and the US Bureau of Justice. The US Bureau of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey can be found here: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=dcdetail&iid=245 The following link includes a number of reports from the survey that deal specifically with race: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=922 The FBI’s United Crime Reports can be found here: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr Reports for the years 1995 to 2010 are available as is a preliminary report for 2011. To find the racial figures, first click on one of the years, then on “rates” under “Offences Known to Law Enforcement”. This will open a page with a series of options in a horizontal bar at the top. Click “Persons Arrested” then choose the options available for “race” under Expanded Arrest Data at the bottom of the page. Note carefully, that because most crime is intraracial, these figures mean not only that blacks commit a disproportionate number of American crimes, but that they are victims at a disproportionately high rate as well. Therefore, the constant attempts of progressives and their media allies, to slander and libel anyone who points these facts out as a “racist”, is harmful rather than helpful to black Americans, because it covers up a problem that afflicts them worse than anyone else in the USA.