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Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Spengler for Dummies

As published on Common Dreams and Online Journal, 8/31/10:






Nearly a hundred thousand people flocked to Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally. Entire families drove in from distant states. They wore red, white and blue, carried American and Don’t Tread On Me flags. Some brandished a Christian standard, white, with a red cross on blue canton. A man peddled a self designed, quite attractive Tea Party flag. “Haven’t sold as much as I would like,” he complained to me, adding, “I’m unemployed.” One woman wore a T-Shirt, “HARD GLOCK CAFÉ.” Another, “NOT RACIST, NOT VIOLENT, JUST NO LONGER SILENT.” They heard Sarah Palin proudly declare that she spoke “not as a politician. No, as something more—something much more. I’ve been asked to speak as the mother of a soldier.” This, from a woman who is nothing but a politician these days, having relieved herself of all official duties. Aiming for 2012, she’s already a very long nose or two ahead of all other stumpers. “Say what you want to say about me, but I raised a combat vet, and you can’t take that away from me,” Palin reiterated. The sun baked faithful then heard Glenn Beck urge them to “pray on your knees, but with your door open for your children to see.”

So it’s basically God, guns and country, which is familiar enough, but what made this event truly bizarre was Beck’s decision to claim Martin Luther King as predecessor and inspiration. King spoke out against our military adventurism, while Beck and Palin celebrate it. King thought the money wasted on bombs and more bombs should be redirected to social programs, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” The Beck and Palin crowd, on the other hand, only scream about big government when public funds are allocated humanely, not destructively. They hate taxes, yet never rail against the biggest looter of our treasury, the military industrial complex. If King were alive, it’s doubtful he would want to share the same stage with these grinning, cynical bobble heads, Beck, Palin, or even Obama, for that matter.

If the Beck crowd consider Obama a Socialist or even Communist, what do they really think, deep down, of the much more leftist Martin Luther King? But King was murdered 42 years ago, so he can be evoked quite harmlessly. For clues into Beck’s thinking, one shouldn’t look at any Civil Rights leader, but Oswald Spengler. Spengler was obsessed with the decline of civilization, particularly White civilization. He equated culture with honor, which is inculcated and apotheosized by the military. With its hierarchy and stress on duty, the army provides the ideal social model. Equality means anarchy. Spengler even dismissed rationalism, defining it as “the arrogance of the urban intellect, which, detached from its roots and no longer guided by strong instinct, looks down with contempt on the full-blooded thinking of the past and the wisdom of ancient peasant stock.”

The Beck crowd also don’t much care for urban intellectuals, for these tend to be “politically correct” and “liberal.” These don’t pray on their knees, if at all. They mix with other races. Some of them are gay. Spengler despised liberalism, which he saw as a gateway drug to all forms of decadence: pacifism, nihilism, freedom of the press, even jazz and “negro dances.” Spengler complained that liberals were striving for "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." How dreadful. Enfeebled by liberalism, the white race was becoming vulnerable to usurpation by the “Yellow-Brown-Black-Red menace.” Spengler lamented, “How far in fact have the white nations advanced towards pacifism? Is the outcry against war an intellectual gesture or a serious abdication from history at the cost of dignity, honour, liberty? Yet life is war.”

A war between the races, that is. Within each race, however, there is also a threat from below, from the riff raff, less refined elements of society, especially the types that swarm and fester in the city. Spengler, “The Western Civilization of this century is threatened, not by one, but by two world revolutions of major dimensions. In both their real compass, their profundity, and their workings have so far escaped recognition. The one comes from below, the other from without: class war and race war.”

Today, what do we have but a black, supposedly Socialist president? One who’s also a Muslim, as 18% of Americans somehow manage to believe. To protest against this darkness, this Spengler’s nightmare come to life, many disturbed citizens drove hundreds of miles to our nation’s capital, though not without trepidation, since it has a 55% black population. It will be worth it, since there, on that vast, white stage, is a normal looking, somewhat sexy white woman, soccer mom, deer hunter and breeder of combat soldiers. On top of that, she comes from one of the whiter states, so her values are OK. Sarah supports big oil and big military, just like Obama, actually, but he’s only faking it. Dude’s a Socialist. In two years, all of this will be over.

According to Spengler, no dialogue or cooperation is possible between the different races or classes. The life of Martin Luther King proves that he was dead wrong.








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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, it was 500,000+.......I was there.....just an fyi....

Anonymous said...

Palin was a mother before she was a politician. She'll still be a mother long after she quits politics. A big problem is career politicians. Families in which politics run. Most politicians for generations have been just that... cradle to grave, groomed as politicians by their politician families, and spend their life in office. You get a newbie like Palin, who is NOT a full time politician, and you complain about it! They should ALL be like her.

bob fairlane said...

Michael King aka MLK's idea of "dialogue between the races" was

"I'm NOT A NEGRO TONIGHT" and "I'M FUCKING FOR GOD TONIGHT!"

Linh Dinh said...

Per above comment, Lee Hubbard in Salon,

Dissing the King

White supremacists are using martinlutherking.org to defame the memory of the civil rights leader.

1/24/00--Martin Luther King Jr. made the ultimate sacrifice to make America a better place. He wanted America to become a "beloved community" where people of all races would be able to get along and live together. But the "dreamer" would have a nightmare if he knew a Web site bearing his name is being run and maintained by Stormfront, a white supremacy group.

While the opening page of martinlutherking.org may look friendly, its content does not highlight the heroic events in King's life -- such as his involvement with the Montgomery bus boycott, his famous "I have a dream" speech at the 1963 march on Washington or the Nobel Peace Prize he won. Instead, it aims to debunk King's character, denying his status as an ordained minister, attacking his academic career, spreading tales of his womanizing and his alleged ties to communist groups. It even attacks his name.

"Well friends, he is not a legitimate reverend, he is not a bona fide Ph.D., and his name isn't really 'Martin Luther King Jr.'" reads a section titled "The Truth About Martin Luther King Jr.: Why he fought and who helped in the fight." It goes on to say, "What's left? Just a sexual degenerate, an America-hating Communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own."

[...]

According to Stormfront founder Don Black, the site has been set up to combat the "propaganda" regarding King and his life. "The establishment media tries to turn Martin Luther King into a saint when the opposite is the case," he says.

[...]

The site uses government documents, such as Helms' testimony, and information from the FBI campaign against civil rights leaders, as its sources. Civil rights groups and historians fear the appearance of official sources adds to the potential for gullible people to be taken in by half-truths and revisionist versions of history. The site's existence raises a perpetual Internet controversy: the potential to spread misinformation to a wide audience.

Roger Vickers is the public affairs officer for the Martin Luther King Center and the King family in Atlanta. He is not particularly alarmed by the site's misrepresentation of King. "None of the information is new," said Vickers. "Dr. King has just about been criticized for everything." He said this "misinformation" can be found in white supremacist books.

[...]

White supremacy groups on the Internet are nothing new. Groups such as the World Church of the Creator have used Web sites for years as a recruiting tool for new members and as a platform for their views.

But the group behind martinlutherking.org is especially Web savvy. According to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks hate groups, Stormfront is at the epicenter of the white supremacy movement on the Web. Founded in 1995 by Black, it is, according to Potok, "the oldest and largest hate site on the Net."

Black is a former Ku Klux Klansman and long-standing member in the white supremacy movement. (He is now married to former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke's ex-wife.) Black went to federal prison after a failed plot to overthrow a left-leaning government on the black island nation of Dominica. "It was in the prison that he learned computers," said Potok. "Now he is the chief purveyor of hate on the Net."

Stormfront's site counter logs over 2 million hits to date. The site has a White Nationalist News Agency, white heritage e-commerce, it has a bilingual version in Spanish and German and it has links to various white supremacy sites. With the addition of the Martin Luther King site, Black seems to be taking a stab at diversity.

Spenglerian said...

Please provide quotes/citations -- from which book(s) or article(s) by Spengler are the quotes in the article from?

The fact is that many of Spengler's ideas are currently being proven correct. That much you cannot deny if you have seriously investigated the matter, and it seems you have since you have clearly taken the time to read some of his writings. As for the degenerate urban masses, I think your pictures on this website provide much evidence for that.

For those unfamiliar with Spengler, a good introduction to his life and ideas is @ http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/spengler-an-introduction/