On this, the holiest day of modern America’s liturgical calendar, we should revisit Samuel Francis’s writing on the significance of Martin Luther King Jr.

Yet, incredibly — even after thorough documentation of King’s affiliations with communists, after the revelations about his personal moral flaws, and after proof of his brazen dishonesty in plagiarizing his dissertation and several other published writings — incredibly there is no proposal to rescind the holiday that honors him. Indeed, states like Arizona and New Hampshire that did not rush to adopt their own holidays in honor of King have been vilified and threatened with systematic boycotts. The continuing indulgence of King is in part due to simple political cowardice — fear of being denounced as a “racist” — but due also to the political utility of the King holiday for those who seek to advance their own political agenda. Almost immediately upon the enactment of the holiday bill, the King holiday came to serve as a kind of charter for the radical regime of “political correctness” and “multiculturalism” that now prevails at many of the nation’s major universities and in many areas of public and private life…

To those of King’s own political views, then, the true meaning of the holiday is that it serves to legitimize the radical social and political agenda that King himself favored and to delegitimize traditional American social and cultural institutions — not simply those that supported racial segregation but also those that support a free market economy, an anti-communist foreign policy, and a constitutional system that restrains the power of the state rather than one that centralizes and expands power for the reconstruction of society and the redistribution of wealth. In this sense, the campaign to enact the legal public holiday in honor of Martin Luther King was a small first step on the long march to revolution, a charter by which that revolution is justified as the true and ultimate meaning of the American identity. In this sense, and also in King’s own sense, as he defined it in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the Declaration of Independence becomes a “promissory note” by which the state is authorized to pursue social and economic egalitarianism as its mission, and all institutions and values that fail to reflect the dominance of equality — racial, cultural, national, economic, political, and social — must be overcome and discarded.

By placing King — and therefore his own radical ideology of social transformation and reconstruction — into the central pantheon of American history, the King holiday provides a green light by which the revolutionary process of transformation and reconstruction can charge full speed ahead. Moreover, by placing King at the center of the American national pantheon, the holiday also serves to undermine any argument against the revolutionary political agenda that it has come to symbolize. Having promoted or accepted the symbol of the new dogma as a defining — perhaps the defining — icon of the American political order, those who oppose the revolutionary agenda the symbol represents have little ground to resist that agenda.

Sam is all too correct that “MLK writ large” has become the foundation of American identity; and in many ways, the situation is far worse than he depicted it in this 1998 article (which appeared in American Renaissance).

At the time, Sam described a pitched battle between MLK’s egalitarian “Dream” and “traditional American social and cultural institutions,” which he describes, in Cold War language, as “anti-Communist foreign policy” and Constitutional liberty.

With breathless, wide-eyed dismay, the BBC has reported findings from a listening of audiotapes recently released containing a interview with Jackie Kennedy, granted to a historian shortly after her husband’s assassination.

In the audiotapes, Mrs. Kennedy offers her opinions of Lyndon Johnson, and world leaders Indira Gandhi and Charles de Gaulle (in all cases negative).

However, by far the worst offence by Mrs. Kennedy, and the one determined the title of the report, was her daring to express a negative opinion of Martin Luther King.

According to the BBC, she

strongly criticised Dr King, recalling how her brother-in-law, US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, told her the civil rights leader had been intoxicated at JFK’s funeral and mocked Cardinal Richard Cushing’s Mass.

She said: “He made fun of Cardinal Cushing and [Robert] said that he was drunk at it. I can't see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, that man's terrible.”

Can you believe the effrontery?

How dare she criticise the most important man that ever lived in the United States of America! How dare she disapprove of his intoxication at her husband’s funeral, and his mocking the service.

It is inconceivable that any sane wife of a recently deceased husband would articulate such uncharitable opinions, let alone plumb the churlish depths of snobbery with the gusto evident in that audiotape.

And, note, it’s “Dr King” for you, you peonish baboon. Don’t you ever forget that.

One would think that, given the unquestionable evidence—uncovered twenty years ago—of King’s plagiarism in his doctoral dissertation of 1955, efforts would be made not to emphasise his holding a doctorate—a degree that under normal circumstances, not to mention circumstances involving holders who campaign for White civil rights, would have been revoked, with fulminant effect and endless media gloating.

I have no doubt that BBC journalists find it genuinely outrageous that anyone would have anything critical to say of their Afro-American secular saint.

But I also have no doubt that the BBC’s report is intended as a reminder, albeit perhaps unconscious, for the readers that it is not OK to cross that line—to blaspheme against the deities of the Marxist pantheon, to fail to show due reverence, to speak out of turn, to have feelings other than awe, marvel, admiration, and humility for the likes of Martin Luther King.

As I'm sure you know by now, America's patron saint of Multiculturalism, Black Empowerment, and White Guilt has been memorialized on the Washington Mall, in gargantuan fashion.

There is, of course, a patent incongruity to the Black civil-rights activist sharing the same grounds as aristocratic salve-holders and a 19th-century nationalist who sought to “de-colonize” the American Negro back to Africa.

But in the end, the massive, laughable kitsch that has been erected is a fitting tribute to the man, as well as to the federal government that, in so many ways, has been reconstructed in his image.

Many have expressed alarm that the commissioned sculptor was Chinese, and that the work has a certain...Maoist...quality to it. They shouldn't be surprised. When it comes to MLK depictions, for decades, artists have been stuck in an aesthetic rut, remaking the heroic, statist works of prewar totalitarianism.

In a wash of Holocaust memorials and cool corporate abstraction, the only kind of public art that is allowed to express brute masculinity must involve Negro advancement. 

Take, for instance, Patrick Morelli's “Behold,” which graces Atlanta's corrupt and dilapidated King Center for Nonviolent Social Change (which functions mainly as a tax-payer funded cash cow for various King offspring.) “Behold” was erected in 1990, and yet, when I first laid eyes on it, I sensed that the artist must be, quite consciously, channelling Arno Breker. (I hesitate to associate such an ghastly work with Breker, whose genius has been unfairly shrouded by his association with German National Socialism.)

I'm reminded as well of the massive mural that hovers above the baggage-claim exit of Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, which I am convinced was painted by a crypto-bigot as some kind of elaborate joke.

(Interestingly, by the '60s and '70s, Communists sculptors had moved beyond the pompous style of the '30s and embraced postmodernism and abstraction. Tito, for instance, commissioned some of the most bizarre creations extant.)

So much for aesthetics. Stephan Kinsella, an expert of copyright law, has alerted me to the fact that the King family charged the not-for-profit foundation that lead the MLK project some three quarters of a million dollars for the rights to the Good Reverend's words.

The New York Post reports:

WASHINGTON -- The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s family has charged the foundation building a monument to the civil-rights leader on the National Mall about $800,000 to use his words and image -- and at least one scholar thinks that Dr. King would find such an arrangement offensive.

The memorial is being paid for almost entirely through a fund-raising campaign led by the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation.

"I don't think the Jefferson family, the Lincoln family [or] any other group of family ancestors has beenpaid a licensing fee for a memorial in Washington," said Cambridge University historian David Garrow, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Dr. King. ". . . [He would've been] absolutely scandalized."

Financial documents revealed that the foundation paid $761,160 in 2007 to Intellectual Properties Management Inc., an entity run by the King family. They also showed that a $71,700 "management" fee was paid to the family estate in 2003.

This kind of thing certainly makes one question America's system of patents and copyrights. (Kinsella advocates doing away with the concept of “intellectual property.”)

And the King family's actions becoming doubly dubious when one remembers that Martin Luther King plagiarized most of the writings for which he has become world renowned.

Marcus Epstein:

When Boston University founded a commission to look into it, they found that that 45 percent of the first part and 21 percent of the second part of his dissertation was stolen, but they insisted that "no thought should be given to revocation of Dr. King’s doctoral degree." In addition to his dissertation many of his major speeches, such as "I Have a Dream," were plagiarized, as were many of his books and writings. For more information on King’s plagiarism, The Martin Luther King Plagiarism Page and Theodore Pappas’ Plagiarism and the Culture War are excellent resources.

King apologists like to claim that their idol shouldn't be held accountable for plagiarism, since he was raised in a Souther Baptist milieu in which borrowing and sampling from other preachers was the norm. Whatever the case, if you want to use a text that King once pilfered, then you should expect to pay. He done stole it first, it seems.

The arc of the moral universe is long, and let's hope it bends toward the truth. Until that day, one can only conclude that the MLK legend, and its attendant industry, has reached a state of self-parody.

When you live in a place like Memphis, the local news media (which is owned by and takes its marching orders from the National news media-ABC, CBS, NBC, Scripps-Howard, Gannett, etc.) is constantly fanning the dying embers of the “Civil Rights” movement.

Why? Because the CRM was the one unqualified success of liberalism since WWll. It was the one manifestation which, at least among both mainstream conservatives and liberals, is like Caesar’s wife and is “beyond reproach.”

A case in point is the article, “United in Prayer,” taken from the Monday, August 1 edition of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, our daily fish wrap. The occasion for this article is to focus attention on the unveiling of the new MLK Statue on the National Mall in Washington D.C. next week.

The story features the “iconic” Clayborn Temple, formerly Second Presbyterian Church until 1949 when, as often happens in Memphis, the old neighborhood transitions from white to black and the white churches sell their facilities to black churches. Clayborn Temple is “iconic” because MLK and other “civil rights pioneers” used it as a base of operations back in the 50s and 60s.

Clayborn Temple is a stone building, and therefore the only thing that needs to be done to keep it presentable is to keep the roof repaired, but like so many other buildings in the black neighborhoods of Memphis, this didn’t happen and the AME denomination, which owns it, is now offering to sell the dilapidated hulk for $1 million plus, due to its “iconic” status, in hopes that some guilty white liberals will buy it and convert it into yet another CRM shrine.

Right on cue, the GWLs show up, this time a contingent from the now uber-liberal Second Presbyterian Church, the original owners. A gaggle of liberal “church ladies” fighting back tears of guilt and remorse despite the fact that most of them hadn’t been born when the CRM occurred, took to falling on their knees before black folks at Clayborn Temple to beg forgiveness for the imagined and unspecified “racial sins” of their forefathers and mothers.

The following is an installment in AltRight's ongoing series “So This Is How It Ends” (STIHIE), which chronicles instances of decadence so advanced that one can only conclude and hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization.

The NAACP was able to erase, temporarily for now, America's unsightly, racist past.  

From Free North Carolina:

The annual MLK observance at the state house in Columbia SC had an interesting twist this year. The event is held on the north side steps of the statehouse. Prominent at that location is a large bronze statue of George Washington. This year, the NAACP constructed a "box" to conceal the Father of His Country from view so that participants would not be offended by his presence.

Today the American media, politicians of all stripes, and public educators will invariably fall into rapturous tones describing the black leader whose birthday is being celebrated, namely, Martin Luther King (1929-1968). King’s birthday is the only national holiday devoted to an individual American whose public observance has been commanded by Congress, and in 1983, this honor was accorded, with more or less bipartisan support. The same tribute is no longer extended to the founder of our country George Washington, or to our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, who is still widely honored for ending black slavery. Washington and Lincoln both now share a generic President’s Day that is wedged in between their two birthdays in February. The gallant Southern leader Robert E. Lee, whose birthday coincides with King’s and who after 1983 was to be co-celebrated in Southern states along with the black civil rights leader, has now fallen upon exceedingly hard times. Lee has become a non-person or even worse, someone identified with Southern slavery, although there is nothing to suggest that this Christian gentleman favored that institution or that he led the Confederate forces in Virginia for any reason other than the one he gave upon turning down an invitation to command the Union army—to protect his ancestral state against invasion.

There is a very clear relation to be drawn between these two recent developments, as my longtime friend Sam Francis delighted in pointing out. The replacement of Lee and Washington, who were related through Washington’s wife Martha, by King as the center of a public cult signaled a true “iconic revolution” in our country. Nor was this revolution in consciousness likely to end with the congressional enshrinement of King or with the public acknowledgement of his birthday. Every January, there takes place an orgy of guilt-tripping and pseudo-Christian penance, one that seems to become shriller and more robotized with the passing of time. There is also in the U.S. a relation between the downplaying of Christmas, which is being reduced here no less than in Britain to a “holiday season,” and King’s birthday in mid-January, which is followed by Black History Month, formerly know as Febuary. What the new liturgical season highlights is King’s martyrdom in 1968, when he was assassinated while leading a garbage employees’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, and the need for national atonement for our country’s long embedded white racism. This penance, which is a post-Christian form of Lent, goes on through Black History Month and is then resumed for another putative victim group during Women’s Month. Although the establishment Right (that is, GOP operatives and neoconservative journalists) and the Left disagree on how this sacral calendar is to be observed, they all see eye-to-eye on its contents.

The dispute here resembles nothing so much as the councils of the early Church that were devoted to clarifying the nature of Christ. Instead of the strife released over whether the concept of homoousia or that of homoiousia properly described the nexus between the first two members of the Trinity, we now have a more timely question: Did Martin Luther King, by his suffering and death, release our country from further atonement for racism or must this atonement become even more frenzied because of how his “unfinished mission for racial justice” ended?

Although the Heritage Foundation proclaimed King to be a “Christian theologian” as well as a “great conservative thinker,” the reality is exactly the opposite: this now beatified figure was a self-proclaimed social radical, who provided the god figure of a post-Christian religion, albeit one that is parasitic on Christian narratives. He is living proof of the continuity between Christian images and a now victorious leftist ideology.

Lest I be accused of being unfair to my subject, let me stress that he was not really responsible for this glorification. As far as I know, King could never have imagined how he would be used after his death, any more than Karl Marx could have imagined that his ideas would be cited to justify Soviet tyranny. He might even have had the decency to blush if he had heard our “conservative” presidential candidate John McCain apologizing last spring in Memphis for having not supported the King public holiday soon enough. McCain characterized this failure as “the single biggest mistake in my political life.”

Richard Hoste seems to differ from my view that the Right (used, of course, in a very broad sense) could in no way benefit from misrepresenting MLK as a small-government conservative. Richard believes that if we continue to tell blacks the noble lie, which the neoconservatives and Glenn Beck have worked so hard to spread, we may be able to neutralize all the race-hustling black leaders.

There are at least three problems with this argument that come readily to mind. One, the lie is so transparent that until now only movement conservatives have bought it; and in this case we are dealing with people who are so incredibly gullible or so thoroughly bribed that they’ll say anything they’re told to say by those who move their strings. I myself have never met a movement conservative or GOP hack who actually thought that King was a “conservative theologian” or an exponent of Thomistic natural law. Rather I’ve encountered dolts who read NR or Weekly Standard and who have told me “we should say this because that’s what we have to say.” Of course the same humanoids have proclaimed Joe Lieberman to be a conservative “because he’s good on the war.”

Two, nobody, including blacks, could possibly believe the crass lie that Richard wishes to see propagated. There is overwhelming evidence, plus media treatment of King’s life and influence, that would keep anybody with even room temperature intelligence (which may exclude most movement conservatives) from buying the proffered snake oil. Watching Beck go nuts (that is more nuts than he usually seems) because a black celebrity described King as a socialist, I had the definite feeling of being on Mars. Does anyone on this planet with even a grade school education not know that King was a left-leaning socialist, who favored special rights for his race? One can quote until the cows come home that banal line about judging people by “the content of their character.” But this does not change the rest of King’s politics, which are an open book, even for blacks.

Three, the cult of King is intertwined with a political purpose, from which it cannot be dislodged. It is a replacement theology for a now mostly moribund Christianity, which incorporates certain older religious themes but places them in a multicultural context. King is the suffering Redeemer, whose birthday comes a few weeks after the traditional date for celebrating the Christian Redeemer; and his death was expiatory, like that of Christ, although, unlike Christ’s kingdom, that of the black socialist savior is situated in this world. King’s mission began the process of cleansing white America of its original sin of racism. But this redemption did not work all at once when he died. Further sacrifice is demanded of the sinner in the form of the demands that the fallen Redeemer laid upon us, that is, more socialism, more set-asides, more rites of atonement, etc. To try to change this powerful symbolism by reconstructing King into something he clearly was not, perhaps a precursor of Glenn Beck or David Horowitz, is a fool’s errand. King was exactly what he was. That he has become the replacement Deity in a post-Christian public theology may strike some of us as laughable. But that elevation is connected to what he said and did. The cult of MLK reflects a certain reality, while Richard’s counter-narrative builds on nothing more than a neocon lie.

When commentating on a public figure it’s important to judge him by what makes him different instead of by what he shares with everyone else in society.  If there was a Saudi Arabian talk show host, and I told you he glorified the Prophet Muhammad, it wouldn’t tell you much.  I may criticize the society as a whole for following the founder of their faith, but it would make little sense to get after the individual talk show host for being a Muslim.

This is leading into what I find strange about Paul Gottfried’s criticisms of Glenn Beck. Yes, he reveres Martin Luther King, Jr.  And though I’m no King scholar, I would bet that if the man were alive today he would see affirmative action, other black supremacist legislation and big government in general as just reparations, as blacks in general tend to. But what the man’s true ideology was is irrelevant.

Latin American socialists claim Jesus as one of their own, as do American Christian fundamentalists.  His teachings have been used to justify everything from anarcho-capitalism to communism.  What creed would the Savior believe in if he were resurrected today?  I'm guess he'd be so fascinated by computers, TV, running water and how tall everyone's gotten that he wouldn't have time to think too much about politics.  As a beloved public figure with vague political views, he'd be recruited by both the Republicans and Democrats to be their next presidential candidate, the way Dwight Eisenhower was in the 1950s after winning WWII.  The point is it doesn't matter what Jesus would think about progressive taxation from a political perspective, but what you can convince people he would want.

With MLK, we can better guess how he'd feel on contemporary issues.  But this still shouldn't matter.  Leave it to sites like this one to deconstruct Martin Luther King and what's he done from a historical/philosophical perspective and Glenn Beck to convince the rubes that the man would oppose affirmative action, socialized medicine and the entire Obama agenda. 

The other day, Beck "set the record" straight on King by "showing" that he rejected social justice and collective salvation, which the Fox host sees as staples of the left. As his witnesses Beck brought on a black preacher and a niece of King.

 Things get weirder in the second segment, when the two black guests start demanding reparations from Planned Parenthood and decry the "eugenics movement" still operating in America!  But even this has its uses.  Seeing that abortion is in the hands of the Supreme Court, convincing black people that liberals want to kill them off may get them to vote for pro-life anti-redistributionist Republicans who can't do anything about abortion anyway.  We'd then have smaller government while the purifying of the gene pool that the legality of the procedure entails would go on unabetted.   This kind of paranoid and faith based pandering would probably work much better than the Bushian/Rovian attempts at getting blacks to develop the right "values" and become economic conservatives.  One can use the values, prejudices and fears that African-Americans already have instead of inventing new ones for them.  It doesn't have to be honest and it doesn't have to be in their real interests.  And all the while, no matter what you're advocating, tell them that Martin Luther King, Jr. would've supported it. And Jesus too.  This is precisely what liberals do when they try to use the words of the Founding Fathers to justify homosexual marriage or race replacement immigration, and it works.  

This is politics.  Leave more honest discussions about the "real Martin Luther King" to the historians.

As I was turning on TV earlier in the week (my wife keeps the set permanently on FOX), I heard Glenn Beck complaining about the Black Panthers. Viewers were then shown a picture of a presumed Klansman in a truck carrying a noose. Supposedly this is what the Black Panthers were planning to do, by looking tough in the presence of approaching voters near a polling station in Philadelphia. Beck then began screaming about how we were ceasing to judge people by “the content of their character,” a reference to the government’s failure to take action against the Panthers’ interference with voting procedures. For the next five minutes Beck dwelled on the idea that “Dr. King gave his life to prevent this from happening.” Indeed King, who had spent his life bearing witness to the truth, would be truly upset to see “how we’ve blown his legacy.”

Three observations are in order here. One, there is nothing in what the Panthers were doing that looked as they were planning a lynching. It’s not even clear that the white guy shown earlier was about to engage in the same quaint custom. Two, I couldn’t imagine that the real MLK would have been entirely unhappy with what Beck disapproved of. King favored all kinds of favors and set asides for his race and would undoubtedly have been delighted with a lopsided black voting majority in Philadelphia or anywhere else that brought his soulmates to power.

An isolated phrase from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech admittedly reveals very little about the speaker’s leftist politics, but perhaps Beck could bestir himself to notice what else King said and wrote. Perhaps Beck could even be induced to stop quoting that magic line that he uses in his monologues once he discovers more about King. But then perhaps he shouldn’t. If he keeps on long enough with his drippy routine while inventing new black founding fathers, he may achieve a victory of sorts, by lifting the GOP’s share of the black vote from 2 to 2.1 percent. But I certainly won’t listen to him as he engages in this Herculean task.