MLK Jr’s Take On “Moderates”. 16 April 1963

Posted by Arthur Gilroy | Jan 9, 2017 | 9 |

—snip—

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, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…

—snip—

Prescience defined.

This has nothing to do with a specifically racial problem. One could excise the word ‘white” from that statement…in fact excise anything whatsoever that specifically relates to the racial inequities that Martin Luther King Jr. was fighting at the time…and the resultant statement would be no less true. Now, then, and quite probably in the foreseeable future as well.

Over the past years I have been gravely disappointed with the U.S. moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the moderate is more devoted to “order” than to justice and prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the very presence of justice…

And there you have it.

The Obama/HRC condition in a nutshell.

Preferring “a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the very presence of justice.”

I found the above MLK Jr. quote in a Counterpunch article which also contained this one by Antonio Gramsci (Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks [1926-37]) I guess being in prison allows one to focus the mind much as did the prospect of imminent execution for Samuel Johnson when he said “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

The intellectuals are the dominant group’s `deputies,’ exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government.

Not so much “prescience” as a precise description of how captive so-called intellectuals…read “Those who populate the upper ends of academia and the DC think tank establishment”…act in the interests of maintaining the Permanent Government’s stranglehold on the entire system as it now stands in the U.S.

Beware the “moderates,” brethren and sistren. They are nothing but the velvet glove that is presently being tasked with hiding the iron hand of universal, surveillance-operated and enforced totalitarianism.

The New Age version thereof:

Bet on it.

About The Author

Arthur Gilroy

Born. Still working on it.

9 Comments

Arthur Gilroy on January 9, 2017 at 2:33 pm

Frenzied accusations of “Trump supporter!!! Russian agent!!!”

Lissen up.

The supposedly “deplorable” minds of one hell of a lot of Americans saw through the whole Dem front a couple of months ago and voted for what they considered to be “the lesser evil.”

And that’s exactly what they got.

An “evil” that at the very worst has a long way to go before it becomes as effectively entrenched as was the previous one.

Now at least we have some wiggle room.

Before the vote?

More like this:

Bet on that as well.

At least now we know that there are enemies on both sides of the fishing line.

Time for the worms to turn.

Please!!!

AG
karl pearson on January 9, 2017 at 8:21 pm

Sounds like MLK Jr. may have read Thomas Paine:

“Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.”

It seems like since the 1980’s, “Moderate” has been the favorite political word of the PermaGov.
- Arthur Gilroy on January 9, 2017 at 9:40 pm
  
  Of course.
  
  The two sides of the UniParty can both be described as “moderate.” Moderately honest, moderately wealthy, moderately intelligent…moderately moderate, in fact.
  
  And totally in the pocket of the immoderately dishonest, wealthy and yes…intelligent….01%.
  
  They’re no dummies, those controllers.
  
  They are simply lacking any moral code other than self-regard.
  
  A very short-sighted kind of intelligence.
  
  So it goes.
  
  AG
Oui on January 10, 2017 at 9:24 am
From BooMan’s fp story: You Wanted Evidence on the Russians?

○ How the Democratic nominee plans to use America’s energy boom to weaken Russia | Newsweek |
by Leah McGrath Goodman On 11/3/16 at 12:10 PM

Reads like a call for war on Russia a casus bellum. Writer Goodman parroting the lines of Clinton and Michael Hayden, the fearsome twosome. Nice combine, of course. Leah McGrath Goodman of Newsweek and Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto infamy.

Hayden who learned the trade from William and McGeorge Bundy in Operation Rolling Thunder. Well schooled in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Debating Drones: A Response to Michael Hayden | Peace Policy |

Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA and NSA, recently published a New York Times op-ed article claiming that Americans should embrace drone warfare because it helps to keep us safe. The article seriously misrepresents the nature of the U.S. drone warfare program and triggered a number of sharp reactions.

Hayden claims that drones strikes have been extremely precise and that civilian casualties are low, but Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations contests these claims. Using data from non-governmental groups that monitor drone strikes, Zenko calculates that during the time Hayden was director of the CIA he personally authorized an estimated 48 drone strikes, which killed 532 people, 144 of whom were civilians. The civilian death toll in those strikes was 27 percent.

○ Drone Wars: The Constitutional and Counterterrorism Implications of Targeted Killing Testimony presented before the U.S. Senate Committee by Peter Bergen

The attempted execution of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen by US cruise missile killed scores of
clan members including 14 Bedouin children in 2009 … look at what has evolved ever since!

○ Drone Strikes Cause Fierce Blowback In Yemen
The Voice In The Wilderness on January 10, 2017 at 12:42 pm

IOW “Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

:-;
das monde on January 11, 2017 at 5:34 am

Dead Center — The New Republic

At the dawning of the Cold War, a worried Arthur Schlesinger Jr. looked out on a bleak horizon. The Soviet Union was a threat, but Schlesinger concluded that the roots of the crisis ran much deeper. “Our lives are empty of belief,” he wrote in his 1949 book, The Vital Center. “They are lives of quiet desperation.” Figures he looked to for guidance — Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus — would become staples in the rhetoric of student protesters a generation later. So too would the concerns he dwelled upon: loss of community, feelings of powerlessness, a sense that politics had been drained of meaning. Even the poem he selected for his book’s epigraph became a touchstone in the turbulent years to come: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

The Vital Center was Schlesinger’s bid to hold on to this tenuous middle ground. Unlike the youthful radicals of the 1960s, Schlesinger thought the alienation he saw around him could only be alleviated by accepting the broad outlines of the status quo. Power was more than a necessary evil. When properly restrained, it was “the source of wisdom,” a check on the juvenile tendency to seek refuge from a harsh reality in fantasy. For the childish dreamers clinging to hopes for revolutionary change, Schlesinger had simple advice: “We must grow up now.”

Yet Schlesinger had more in common with the dreamers than he wanted to admit. The Vital Center culminates with a call to turn liberalism into “a fighting faith” with a moral grandeur of its own, a creed that could meet the challenges of totalitarianism by calming the psychological anxieties of the age. Schlesinger’s bluster was a thinly concealed disguise for his own idealistic yearnings. He was as hungry for meaning as any dewy-eyed radical; he just found it in an unlikely spot. Pragmatists have their own kind of romanticism, cynics their own kind of naïveté. The twentieth century had no better spokesman for sentimental realism than Schlesinger, who could portray a vote for Adlai Stevenson as an appropriate reaction to existential dread.

“Liberals found the experience of Obama’s presidency mostly dissatisfying,” [Chait] claims, “because they find power itself discomfiting” — part of a larger “infantile rejection of the compromises inherent in governing” that perennially dogs the left. The tone recalls Schlesinger’s, and Chait makes the connection explicit when he quotes The Vital Center on how idealistic liberals supposedly dislike “making concrete decisions and being held to account for concrete consequences.”

[… Chait] discarded Schlesinger’s faith in political activism, replacing it with a vision of Americans too busy with their own lives to bother with politics. Ignorant of the stakes in policy disputes, they become averse to partisan conflict, assuming that the truth must fall between the two sides. Having removed voters from the picture, policy-making becomes a battle between conservative activists and liberal technocrats, with the business community often serving as tiebreaker. Chait sees the interplay between radicals and policymakers as a burden foisted on Republicans, while Democrats merely have to fend off demands from an ineffectual left.

[Schlesinger …] was confident that the United States had set out on a road that would lead it to social democracy. Future economic downturns would lead to more New Deals and “capitalist suicide.” His only fear was that liberals would fail to meet the craving for a deeper purpose than transactional wheeling and dealing. Chait doesn’t share this anxiety. Schlesinger’s radical democracy has become Chait’s chastened technocracy, with all Schlesinger’s self-righteousness intact. With that in mind, his claim that Obama’s distinctive genius lay in his ability to “make technocracy lyrical” becomes high praise. Today, it could hardly be more damning.

[…] Obama did not make technocracy lyrical; he made reform seem radical.

The liberals have a very apologetic relation to their own authority, power. And then they wonder, why people would not trust them with the power they do not really enjoy.
- mino on January 11, 2017 at 2:33 pm
  
  “Though excluded from Chait’s account, such points have become standard elements in left-wing evaluations of the Obama years, which might be why Chait ignores them.”
  
  Yep.
  
  We don’t like his dog food anymore, it appears.
  
  “Chait has also discarded Schlesinger’s faith in political activism, replacing it with a vision of Americans too busy with their own lives to bother with politics.”
  
  Centrist Dems be hoping desperately to make it so??? With all those McJobs created in the last 8 yrs? Wonder how they plan to choose THEIR voters, if indeed there has been a sea change as regards economic leadership and their preferred methodologies are being spit out by more and more?
  
  Thanks for the link.
- The Voice In The Wilderness on January 11, 2017 at 4:56 pm
  
  “infantile rejection of the compromises inherent in governing”
  
  Example compromise – “You vote for me and I’ll vote for your boss.”
  - Arthur Gilroy on January 11, 2017 at 10:42 pm
    
    Or:
    
    “You jerk me off and I’ll jerk off your boss.’
    
    Probably closer to the truth of the matter…
    
    AG

MLK Jr’s Take On “Moderates”. 16 April 1963

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Arthur Gilroy

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