King Holiday a launch pad for the revolutionaries

By the Council of Conservative Citizens, 21 January 1999

"....A few months later, Robert Weisbrot, a fellow of the DuBois Institute at Harvard, was writing in The New Republic (1/30/84) that "in all, the nation's first commemoration of King's life invites not only celebration, but also cerebration over his --- and the country's --- unfinished tasks." Those "unfinished tasks," according to Mr. Weisbrot, included "curbing disparities of wealth and opportunity in a society still ridden by caste distinctions," a task toward the accomplishment of which "the reforms of the early '60s" were "only a first step." Among those contemporary leaders "seeking to extend Martin Luther King's legacy," Mr. Weisbrot wrote, "by far the most influential and best known is his former aide, Jesse Jackson."

The exploitation of the King holiday for radical political purposes was even further enhanced by Vincent Harding, "Professor of Religion and Social Transformation at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver," writing in The New York Times (1/18/88). Professor Harding rejected the notion that the King holiday commemorates merely "a kind, gentle and easily managed religious leader of a friendly crusade for racial integration." Such an understanding would "demean and trivialize Dr. King's meaning." Professor Harding wrote:

"The Martin Luther King of 1968 was calling for and leading civil disobedience campaigns against the unjust war in Vietnam. Courageously describing our nation as 'the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,' he was urging us away from a dependence on military solutions. He was encouraging young men to refuse to serve in the military, challenging them not to support America's anti-Communist crusades, which were really destroying the hopes of poor nonwhite peoples everywhere. This Martin Luther King was calling for a radical redistribution of wealth and political power in American society as a way to provide food, clothing, shelter, medical care, jobs, education and hope for all of our country's people."

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.

It is hardly an accident, then, that in the years since the enactment of the holiday and the elevation of King as a national icon, systematic attacks on the Confederacy and its symbolism were initiated, movements to ban the teaching of "Western civilization" came to fruition on major American universities, Thomas Jefferson was denounced as a "racist" and "slave-owner," and George Washington's name was removed from a public school in New Orleans on the grounds that he too owned slaves.

In the new nation and the new creed of which the King holiday serves as symbol, all institutions, values, heroes, and symbols that violate the dogma of equality are dethroned and must be eradicated. Those associated with the South and the Confederacy are merely the most obvious violations of the egalitarian dogma and therefore must be the first to go, but they will by no means be the last.

The political affiliations of Martin Luther King that Sen. Jesse Helms so courageously exposed are thus only pointers to the real danger that the King holiday represents. The logical meaning of the holiday is the ultimate destruction of the American Republic as it has been conceived and defined throughout our history, and until the charter for revolution that it represents is repealed, we can expect only further installations of the destruction and dispossession it promises....."