Fifty Years of Cant

1,459 words

Like the “Sharpeville massacre” in South Africa,[1] and the USA’s “Wounded Knee” confrontation between US troops and Indians,[2] the exaggerations of the authorities’ reaction to the civil rights marches and protests in the Southern states during the 1960s, led by Martin Luther King, provides world Liberaldom and its string-pullers with a moral rectitude analogous to the heart-rending account of Holocaust survival in works such as Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood,[3] and an major part of the ongoing Black history narrative brought to scholarly credibility by Basil Davidson’s magnum opus,[4] or Alex Haley’s Roots,[5] a brilliant history of Black Slavery and literary plagiarism.[6] Every white state or former white state that has a significant non-white population has its own non-white narrative, whether they are stories of the Reconstruction Era Ku Klux Klan, New Zealand’s Parihaka “invasion,”[7] Mandela’s “Long March to Freedom,” for the benefit of global capitalism, or the mythic “extermination” of the indigenous Tasmanians.[8]

With the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington,[9] and with the current agonising on the impending death of Nelson Mandela,[10] we are indeed fortunate to be living at this time, to be reminded simultaneously of the heroism and vision of both King and Mandela. In particular, they are lauded as examples of a Christ-like passive resistance, of love of one’s enemies and of turning the other cheek; as the paragons of all that could be godly in humanity, if only we could follow the examples of these humble, noble darkies.

There is something that is usually missing in considering the implications of the “passive resistance” of which King is regarded as one of the great exponents. “Passive resistance” is a strategy of tension. It is designed to oblige state authorities to use force to maintain order. It can then be claimed that the state was undertaking aggression against peaceful protestors. It is the means by which Te Whiti harassed the hapless colonial settlers of Taranaki, New Zealand, year-after-year, defying the law in destroying the livelihoods of humble framers and their families, while the British colonial authorities, condemned today as so merciless, vacillated, until finally invading the filthy village that has become an icon, and peacefully disbursed the followers of a religious lunatic (Te Whiti) of Jim Jones-type psychopathy.[11] Parihaka, Wounded Knee, the Selma March, Sharpeville; all are of a certain type: a great mythos has been woven about scabrous antics disguised as “noble” through an avalanche of literary and verbal dysentery of mostly “white” and Jewish emanation.

That such “passive resistance” is designed not merely to highlight a cause, but to cause a confrontation is not usually recognised, or more likely, deliberately obscured. Therefore when Martin Luther King flooded Blacks, and a goodly number of Whites and Jews from the North, into the Southern states, his aim was to create disruption and force the authorities to take action in the only manner they could – physically. When appeals to disperse are unheeded, there is no other option.

King, like Mandela, is today heralded as a “moderate” whose wise counsel and restraint prevented violence. However, in reality King, who like Mandela and Rosa Parks, seems to have been a Communist functionary,[12] in his condemnation of “moderates,” described the strategy in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension’. I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. . . . The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. [13]

King talked of “nonviolent tension” and fostering “crisis.” King even disparaged the lenient manner that Southern police dealt with the public disorder he caused, as such leniency did not serve the strategy of tension and crisis.[14] Addressing himself to “fellow clergymen,” the “Letter” was specifically aimed at his moderate critics. He described his actions as “a process of self-purification,” indicative of a Messiah complex. To the “moderates” he wrote:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate . . .[15]

King also lamented the restraint that was used on his mobs by the Southern police. Their restraint did not provide sufficient martyr status to the Blacks, in King’s views, but perhaps he was underestimating the ability of the corporate media to contrive a myth of Southern hate and violence. King wrote of this lamentable Southern leniency:

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather “non-violently” in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice.[16]

Beneath the rhetoric about Jesus, et al. King sought a violent confrontation and martyrdom that verges on the mania of a Te Whiti or Jim Jones in hoping for martyrdom. What thoughts of glory might have flashed through his brain when struck by an assassin’s bullet five years later? “Glory, hallelujah, now I will ascend and stand beside the right hand of God.”

The type of “passive resistance” that is intended to force a physical reaction from the state authorities, in order to claim martyr status, is moral humbug; it is hypocrisy. It is analogous to the riots against the Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand in 1981 when police confronted thousands of helmeted demonstrators who were carrying shields, and where gang members were put at the front lines. The necessity of police to establish public order against demonstrators running riot has become part of the New Zealand postmodern narrative that has supposedly “defined who we are,” and the situation is the same, although on a much bigger scale, in the USA vis-à-vis King and the “Freedom Marchers.”

The supposedly idyllic existence of today’s post-apartheid South Africa, “the Rainbow Nation,” is apparently sufficient justification for the riots, just as are the apparently wonderful gains made by Afro-Americans as the result of King’s riots to desegregate the South. Now Afro-American children have the freedom to violently run amok in the hallways and classrooms of desegregated schools, making teaching impossible, and the Bantu have the freedom to kill Boer farmers and turn a once prosperous nation into yet another African basket case – under the benevolent smiles of Saint Nelson and Saint King.

Notes