This time of
year, Martin Luther King, Jr., is lauded up and down as an icon of
conservatism, but undistorted history tells a different story.
Most
importantly, perhaps, there is the legacy of federal civil rights actions in
which his work culminated. Most
conservatives are furious with the federal government for its social
engineering schemes, attempting to redefine marriage, to erase the binary
understanding of the sexes, to indoctrinate kids in schools with the LGBT
ideology, and so forth. But the door to
social engineering by the federal government was opened with Mr. King’s civil
rights battle. If the federal government
has the power to reorganize social relations and institutions to fit its preferences
in one field, no one can deny it the power to do so in other fields, either.
The late
paleocon Sam
Francis gives Mr. King his due in this regard:
[T]he 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. . . .
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.
Mr. King does not
deserve a place of honor in the pantheon of conservative heroes. But this does not mean there are no Africans
worthy of our praise and adoration and emulation. Far from it.
Over the next couple of days – 17 and 18 January – there are three
saintly Africans who offer us a compelling alternative to Mr. King.
Let us
compare and contrast these men.
One of the
troubling aspects of Mr. King’s character is his out-of-control sexual passion,
which led him to sexually abuse women.
In St.
Anthony the Great (+356 A.D.), from whom the angelic life of monasticism
received its first great impetus, we see the opposite, one who through God’s
Grace conquered the fallen human passions and became a vessel of the Holy Ghost:
Saint Anthony
went into the desert alone. The devil tried to hinder him, by placing a large
silver disc in his path, then gold, but the saint ignored it and passed by. He
found an abandoned fort on the other side of the river and settled there,
barricading the entrance with stones. His faithful friend brought him bread
twice a year, and there was water inside the fort. Saint Anthony spent twenty
years in complete isolation and constant struggle with the demons, and he
finally achieved perfect calm.
Mr. King
stood with the oppressed; so too did St. Anthony:
In the year 311 there was a fierce
persecution against Christians, in the reign of the emperor Maximian. Wishing
to suffer with the holy martyrs, Saint Anthony left the desert and went to
Alexandria. He openly ministered to those in prison, he was present at the
trial and interrogations of the confessors, and accompanying the martyrs to the
place of execution.
Mr. King committed
plagiarism in order to get his doctorate, to make a name for himself among the
learned and the powerful. St. Anthony,
despite lacking such man-derived honors, showed himself greater than those
classes of men:
Pagan philosophers once came to Abba
Anthony intending to mock him for his lack of education, but by his words he
reduced them to silence. Emperor Constantine the Great (May 21) and his sons
wrote to Saint Anthony and asked him for a reply. He praised the emperor for
his belief in Christ, and advised him to remember the future judgment, and to
know that Christ is the true King.
. . .
The rest is
at https://thehayride.com/2023/01/garlington-the-dubious-conservatism-of-mlk/.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us
sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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