Recently Lewis Diuguid (pictured left) wrote a commentary piece in the Kansas City Star and it has gotten some attention across the blogosphere. Unfortunately, it is riddled with factual inaccuracies and outright falsehoods and needs some critical context in order to be evaluated.
So, I'm happy to provide both Mr. Diuguid's article and my own critical context for your consideration;
Shame on McCain and Palin for Using an Old Code Word for Black
By Lewis Diuguid
Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist
October 21, 2008-10-22 http://voices.kansascity.com/node/2493
By Lewis Diuguid
Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist
October 21, 2008-10-22 http://voices.kansascity.com/node/2493
The "socialist" label that Sen. John McCain and his GOP presidential running mate Sarah Palin are trying to attach to Sen. Barack Obama actually has long and very ugly historical roots.
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, used the term liberally to describe African Americans who spent their lives fighting for equality.
Those freedom fighters included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who led the Civil Rights Movement; W.E.B. Du Bois, who in 1909 helped found the NAACP which is still the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization; Paul Robeson, a famous singer, actor and political activist who in the 1930s became involved in national and international movements for better labor relations, peace and racial justice; and A. Philip Randolph, who founded and was the longtime head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a leading advocate for civil rights for African Americans.
McCain and Palin have simply reached back in history to use an old code word for black. It set whites apart from those deemed unAmerican and those who could not be trusted during the communism scare.
Shame on McCain and Palin.
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OK, and I'm trying very hard not to be overly harsh here, as that is occasionally a flaw of mine, but the article in question is quite simply, moronic. There is just no other word for it.
And I use the word “moronic,” because the article is not rooted in ANY factual context whatsoever. If Lewis Diuguid knew ANY history at all, he’d have known that (A) modern socialism (from the time of Marx - mid-19th Century) was a largely Jewish inspired and led political and economic movement and (B) African-Americans played little or no notable part in either the development or expansion of that failed system. Haven't blacks been blamed for enough bad stuff, from an out-of-control crime rate, to race and gender-based preferences to rap? Well, let me be clear on THIS, "I don't know about any of that other stuff, but blacks in America ARE NOT to blame for socialism!"
Mr. Diuguid shows his ignorance by using Paul Robeson as a notable example. Paul Robeson, who self-exiled himself and lived out a self-described miserable existence in what was then the USSR! You can easily look up Robseron's own accounts of his misery in the former-USSR.
If he’d used Hunter Pitts Odell, one of MLK’s advisors, who was also a member of the CPUSA, that would’ve been more accurate, but Robeson and King (despite King’s acquaintance with many “socialists”) are very poor examples.
M. L. King never advanced an agenda that was even as “socialistic” as, say, Hubert LBJ and Humphrey’s at the time.
In fact, African-Americans are even “Johnny-come-lately’s” to American Liberalism, only embracing it during the 1960s, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement that the larger American Left tacitly supported and after that, only continued its support for contemporary Liberalism out of naked self-interest in preserving race-based preferences (ironically enough, a very non-socialist idea) advanced by various anti-establishment Leftists.
Do you know some of the people who've truly advanced socialism and benefited most by it?
The likes of Armand Hammer, founder of Armand-Hammer Products and Occidental Petroleum and founder of the CPUSA (Communist Party USA).
Mr. Hammer had a veritable monopoly status in Stalin’s USSR, running the only state-sponsored factories in that country.
Socialism benefits the wealthiest among us by, in effect, “freezing the game in place,” thereby cementing their gains at the top.
You know who else was a Socialist?
Much opposed as I am to violating Godwin’s law, I’ll let his own words indict him; "We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, used the term liberally to describe African Americans who spent their lives fighting for equality.
Those freedom fighters included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who led the Civil Rights Movement; W.E.B. Du Bois, who in 1909 helped found the NAACP which is still the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization; Paul Robeson, a famous singer, actor and political activist who in the 1930s became involved in national and international movements for better labor relations, peace and racial justice; and A. Philip Randolph, who founded and was the longtime head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a leading advocate for civil rights for African Americans.
McCain and Palin have simply reached back in history to use an old code word for black. It set whites apart from those deemed unAmerican and those who could not be trusted during the communism scare.
Shame on McCain and Palin.
.
.
.
.
OK, and I'm trying very hard not to be overly harsh here, as that is occasionally a flaw of mine, but the article in question is quite simply, moronic. There is just no other word for it.
And I use the word “moronic,” because the article is not rooted in ANY factual context whatsoever. If Lewis Diuguid knew ANY history at all, he’d have known that (A) modern socialism (from the time of Marx - mid-19th Century) was a largely Jewish inspired and led political and economic movement and (B) African-Americans played little or no notable part in either the development or expansion of that failed system. Haven't blacks been blamed for enough bad stuff, from an out-of-control crime rate, to race and gender-based preferences to rap? Well, let me be clear on THIS, "I don't know about any of that other stuff, but blacks in America ARE NOT to blame for socialism!"
Mr. Diuguid shows his ignorance by using Paul Robeson as a notable example. Paul Robeson, who self-exiled himself and lived out a self-described miserable existence in what was then the USSR! You can easily look up Robseron's own accounts of his misery in the former-USSR.
If he’d used Hunter Pitts Odell, one of MLK’s advisors, who was also a member of the CPUSA, that would’ve been more accurate, but Robeson and King (despite King’s acquaintance with many “socialists”) are very poor examples.
M. L. King never advanced an agenda that was even as “socialistic” as, say, Hubert LBJ and Humphrey’s at the time.
In fact, African-Americans are even “Johnny-come-lately’s” to American Liberalism, only embracing it during the 1960s, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement that the larger American Left tacitly supported and after that, only continued its support for contemporary Liberalism out of naked self-interest in preserving race-based preferences (ironically enough, a very non-socialist idea) advanced by various anti-establishment Leftists.
Do you know some of the people who've truly advanced socialism and benefited most by it?
The likes of Armand Hammer, founder of Armand-Hammer Products and Occidental Petroleum and founder of the CPUSA (Communist Party USA).
Mr. Hammer had a veritable monopoly status in Stalin’s USSR, running the only state-sponsored factories in that country.
Socialism benefits the wealthiest among us by, in effect, “freezing the game in place,” thereby cementing their gains at the top.
You know who else was a Socialist?
Much opposed as I am to violating Godwin’s law, I’ll let his own words indict him; "We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
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Adolf Hitler
(Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p. 306)
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Who else?
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How about Margret Sanger (founder of the American Birth Control League which eventually became Planned Parenthood), who said, "We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal.“We don't want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."
-- Margaret Sanger's December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 255
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I’m generally loathe to interfere with those who’d embrace their own destruction and that’s probably why I generally both despise and am disgusted by Liberals of any and every background with a roiling passion, but there are so many obvious, ahistorical references and conclusions in Mr. Diuguid’s piece, that they shouldn’t go unchallenged, nor should they be digested whole by the gullible without at least some critical context.In short, it often pays to know what you’re embracing.
2 comments:
Thanks JMK for setting the record straight. I am so sick of misinformation being disseminated and regurgitated as factual.
It really IS an astounding article, given the historical context of the socialist movement, CBW.
I am always amazed how groups that true socialists revile (Jews, blacks, Catholics and others) are so easily conned into supporting a movement that would result in their ultimate disaffection and destruction.
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