With BBC news coverage of the US Presidential race hotting up, it is quite useful to consider what B-BBC’s Alan has to say here;
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity”
Martin Luther King, Jr., registered Republican….or to put another way to describe the BBC’s news output….’Villainy wears many masks, none so dangerous as the mask of virtue.’ I have just been reminded that Martin Luther King was Republican….as were most Blacks of his era. Why would they be Republican? maybe Mark Mardell would like to explain and expand on that…and maybe not?
Possibly because the Democrats were the people that invented the Klu Klux Klan and opposed all anti-slavery legislation…and later were against much of the civil rights legislation as well. Democrats fought to prevent the passage of every piece of civil rights legislation from the 1860’s to the 1960’s.
http://images.nbra.info/docs/library/NationalBlackRepublicanAssociation2009/NBRA%20Civil%20Rights%20Newsletter%202Feb11.pdf
• The Republican Party – From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks.
• The Democratic Party – As author Michael Scheuer stated, the Democratic Party is the party of the four S’s: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism.
Slavery – Democrats fought to expand it, Republicans fought to ban it
Democrats formed the Confederacy, seceded from the Union and fought a Civil War (1861 to 1865) – a war where over 600,000 citizens were killed, including many thousands of blacks – in order to keep blacks in slavery because the Democrats had built their economic base on the backs of black slaves.
Democrats enacted Fugitive Slave laws to keep blacks from escaping from plantations
and instigated the 1856 Dred Scott decision which legally classified blacks as property.
The Party of Lincoln
The Republican Party was started in 1854 as the anti-slavery party by abolitionists opposed to keeping blacks in human bondage, and Republicans, under the leadership of President Abraham Lincoln, fought to free blacks from slavery.
After the Civil War, Republicans amended the US Constitution to grant blacks freedom (13th Amendment), citizenship (14th Amendment) and the right to vote (15th Amendment).
Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan in 1866 to lynch and terrorize Republicans -black and white and drive Republicans out of the South.
Also it was FDR’s reliance on the Dixiecrats which ensured both his four presidential victories and that he did next to nothing in respect of civil rights for blacks (even if he’d wanted to). BTW, brushed out of BBC history (although I’m sure it’s mentioned somewhere in the BBC’s online archives) is that the President Eisenhower who sent federal troops to Little Rock to enforce educational integration in Arkansas was a Republican. Oh dear, facts can be so inconvenient if you’re trying to force the Narrative down the throats of licence-payers!
BTW a search on the BBC website (using “faubus” as the search word) reveals that in the two reports revealed on the Little Rock intervention, Eisenhower’s political affiliations were not mentioned.
This recent post of mine on American History and the differences between Republicans and Democrats may be of interest in this regard.
Astonishing!
I never knew that MLK was a Republican…nor that it was the Democrats that only dicovered civil rights in the 60s.
This true Mr P?….as I say, astonishing!
It’s a little bit like the claims that Nixon was the crazy war-monger and the Democrats, particularly Kennedy, were the decent near-pacifists.
It was Kennedy who first sent Americans into Vietnam and Johnson who ensured the war got hot. Nixon was the one who brought the troops home and was the first US President to visit the USSR and China. Fair enough – I know Nixon was a crook (at least you can say that he was caught out doing what I suspect most Presidents have done( but Democrats claiming that he was a war-monger is patently hypocritical.
What Leftists miss when they focus on Nixon (eventually) admitting that he was a crook (so to speak) because he tried to cover up the Watergate break in, is the absence of any contrition (no TV confession) about the far greater abuse of political power (too many to mention) by his various Democrat political opponents.
OK Kennedy never had a chance to confess. But does Clinton to this day think he did anything wrong? Has he done an interview where he has apologised for damaging the reputation of the Presidency?
wild
He hasn’t even apologised for staining Monica’s dress.
Here’s the BBC’s take on an important moment for the Democratic Party:
“The Sixties onwards saw the Democrats become increasingly out of touch with their traditional, core constituency: white working- and middle-class voters, the key “swing group” in American politics.
…The party became associated with elite opinion and special interests or “identity politics” rather than the interests of working people. This widening gulf opened the field to the populist conservatism of the Reagan presidency, uniting working and middle class America and heightening the extent to which the Democratic party became identified with minority interests, big government, welfare, racial quotas and weak foreign policy.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3341043.stm
But what is important now is the state of the Democrats in 2012 – a party eaten alive by the left. It’s standard bearer is Barrack Obama, a combination of the above mentioned “minority interests, big government, welfare, racial quotas and weak foreign policy.” It’s as if the Militant Tendency had succeeded in its plans for Labour. The Democrat Party of the 1960s is dead.
Actually that’s a pretty reasonable profile of the Democrats. However, it was written in 2007 before He was elected and before the BBC contracted Obamania. I suspect a profile written now would be the equivalent of the Whig interpretation of history ie everything is getting better and we (or rather the US) live in the best of all possible Democratic worlds.
As with the Democrats, the Labour Party of the 1960s is also dead: killed not by the Militant Tendency but by the aperçu that the electorate was amenable to being bribed with its own money and that any old PR-inpired crapola could be sold to the electorate through a complaisant – and complacent – MSM, particularly the BBC. Not that I would have preferred it had the MT succeeded but are we really any better off now than if MT had taken over Labour?
An un-Mardell take on Obama’s politics:
As The State of the Union Speech Shows: The Problem with Obama Isn’t Just Political or Ideological, It’s Ignorance, Inexperience, Character, and Incompetence, Too,
(by Barry Rubin).
This is all true, but we also have to remember that when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, he told his aide, Bill Moyers, that “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”
So the racists from the Democrats switched parties, and gave the Dems and media thought leaders a useful weapon.
That doesn’t mean it’s right for the BBC to ignore the bulk of the Republican Party’s history, or for Mardell to believe that the Tea Party movement is driven by crypto-racism, but the GOP is not what it used to be at all.
That’s the conventional explanation, but there are others.
Ann Coulter points out that the collapse of support for the Dixiecrats in 1968 closely tracked the rise in Democrat support. Meanwhile, Nixon’s support remained unchanged as the Dixiecrat polling crashed from >20% to vanishing point.
What is certain is that Tricky Dicky was pro-civil rights to the point of instituting America’s first affirmative action program, but still crushed the Dems in 1972. Weirdly enough, the Good Old Boys turned out for Carter in 1976, before reverting to racist type in 1980.
Apparently, Southerners either vote along racial lines or for the Democrats. No other alternatives are available.
All of which is vaguely familiar. To quote one of their own senators, Democrats spent the 1960s turning themselves into the party of ‘Abortion, Amnesty and Acid’, but their failure to win over real Americans proved they’re all raycists. Hence they’ve spent forty years alternatly caricaturing Southerners as ignorant hick bigots and sobbing that the South don’t trust them… not unlike a much-loved British institution’s relationship with British conservatives.
Voting trends in Presidential eletions is only half the story. State elections are equally important, and can be more telling. Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Trent Lott all held powerful and influential positions in Congress for a very long time. Gingrich too. In 1950, all Senators from Southern States (i.e. ex-Confederate ones) were Democrats. By 2000, only 8 were. All those states have had at least one Republican Governor since the 60s, and many of them have had elected several. All this says at least as much about the scene as Presidential elections.
Currently, more than half of the Southern Governors Association are Republicans, although that’s in part driven by the Tea Party movement, so we’re seeing a sea change in the Party there.
Sorry to point this out but Dr King was not a Republican. He expressed support for neither party publically but did admit previously only voting for Democratic candidates and stated that he would have endorsed JFK if he had run in 1964.
Furthermore, with regard to the 1964 presidential election, King had some very harsh comments about Barry Goldwater. In his Nobel Prize lecture, given in December 1964 about a month after the election, he said:
“Another indication that progress is being made was found in the recent presidential election in the United States. The American people revealed great maturity by overwhelmingly rejecting a presidential candidate who had become identified with extremism, racism, and retrogression. The voters of our nation rendered a telling blow to the radical right. They defeated those elements in our society which seek to pit white against Negro and lead the nation down a dangerous Fascist path.”
Given his private support of JFK in 1960 and his public denunciation of Goldwater, I think that it’s misleading at best to portray King as a Republican.
Someone should tell Dr. Alveda C. King,
niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that MLK wasn’t a Republican http://images.nbra.info/docs/library/NationalBlackRepublicanAssociation2009/NBRA%20Civil%20Rights%20Newsletter%202Feb11.pdf
The story I heard was that King made a bargain with the Kennedys that in return for civil rights legislation he would deliver the Black vote to the Democrats. If this is true it is highly likely that he began voting Democrat from that time.
Let’s just say that the issue is not cut and dried.
Classical Liberal historian Thomas Di Lorenzo gives an alternative take on Lincoln. History is written by the victor. Lincoln’s war was to keep the high protectionist tariffs on southerners needed to fund a big federal government with imperialist ambitions. Lincoln promised in his inaugural address not to interfere with slavery.
‘History is written by the victor’ what a lie! In fact the losers have written quite a lot of history ESPECIALLY the losers of the ‘War between the States’. Just about every politician, general and journalist has written his own version of WHY the ‘Lost Cause’ lost – proving, in the words of James Branch Cabell, that the Confederate government and military command was staffed exclusively by the mentally challenged.
Lincoln concieved it his duty as President of the United States to preserver the Union at all costs – even if that meant not interfering with slavery WHERE IT ALREADY EXISTED. This was unacceptable to the ‘Slaveovracy’ who knew perfectly well that the Peculiar Institution had to allowed to spread to survive. Hence the seccession.
It was about slavery. You can’t get away from it, it was ALL about slavery.
The conflict between the agrarian society and the industrial/mercantile society was inevitable from the beginning. It was there when the country was created, and the can was kicked down the road until the Kansas-Nebraska Act started forcing hands.
An agrarian society dependent on Slave Labor. And the North was an agrarian society in the beginning too. And the South not devoid of industry and merchants.
I posted this on an open thread recently, it sums up the history of the two parties quite succinctly…
Bill Whittle – A Voter’s Guide To Republicans
apdi 71 Try John Keegans’ “The American Civil War” for a thorough analysis of pre-civil war US politics.
Keegans book gets a mixed review on Amazon – is he a court historian, or does he delve into Lincoln’s adoption of Henry Clays Whig ‘manifest destiny’ imperial ambitions?. How about Lincoln’s general’s ‘final solution’ to the plains Indian problem? (making way for the state subsidised transcontinental railways with a policy of genocide- and a triumph of inefficient crony capitalism). Here’s another attack on Lincoln’s ‘liberal’ credentials:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo40.html.
When Ford reflected that ‘history is bunk’ – I guess he was thinking of history as related in the narrative of the victors – of half truths retold so often that they are accepted as genuine.