Within the same week, CNN reported on the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and the official start of Barack Obama's run for the White House.
For me, this race is personal.
Growing up in the South, I thought I knew what the Ku Klux Klan was. The folks in my neighborhood saw it as an extension of the law. We lived so far out in the country that, if trouble did occur, it would take the Bradley County Sheriff's Department 15-20 minutes to get there. In the 30 years I lived on the farm, I could count on one hand the number of times I saw a patrol car on our road.
And, though I never actually saw anyone in a hood and robe, it was always felt. The party line was, if a man was abusing his family and was too lazy to support them, a burning cross in his yard was a warning. If the warning went unheeded, "the militia" would take him out for "an attitude readjustment."
And, if that didn't work, his remains would be found some time later.
That's just the way it was in Buck's Pocket.
Then, about 10 years ago, I had the opportunity to ghost-write a history textbook about the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama in the 1920s. And, as I mentioned earlier, I just thought I knew what the Ku Klux Klan was. The historian I worked for had spent his entire career collecting primary evidence that even included an interview with the Grand Wizard himself.
Come to find out, there have been three Ku Klux Klans, and about the only thing they've had in common was the name. The first Klan existed from 1865-1871. The second Klan existed from 1915-1929. And, the third Klan appeared during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Dr. Snell's work focused on the second Klan.
I learned the second Klan began as a patriotic movement, a reaction to "the Huns" that were sweeping across Europe during WWI. At the top of their hate list were "hyphenated Americans," i.e., German-Americans and Italian-Americans. Then, they hated immigrants in general. Then, they hated Catholics. Then, they hated Jews. And, if there was any hate left over, they hated black folks.
I also learned it was the newspapers that eventually beat the Ku Klux Klan. Investigative reporters infiltrated the meetings and reported relentlessly what they saw. One day, the Klan would donate money to a school district, so it could keep its doors open. The next day, it would burn down a Catholic church. Day in and day out, the newspapers kept reporting the insane ups and downs of the Klan, until people just didn't want to have anything to do with it.
Now, here's the other half of the story, the half that makes it personal.
I never fit into Buck's Pocket. I was stuck in that world, but I wasn't of it. My father taught me early on to judge a man by his merits, not his skin color.
My father wasn't an eloquent man, but he knew the value of a true friend. And, pigment had nothing to do with it.
So, when I rushed my college fraternity, Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, I was happy to learn that my fraternity was the only fraternity in America that was inter-racial from its inception. When I converted to Catholicism, it was partially because I wanted my family to know that God spoke to more than just hillbillies.
And, now, Barack Obama has become part of our national landscape. And, guess what. Barack Obama is my age. He was born on August 4, 1961; I was born on October 8, 1961. All my life, I've watched the Sunday political talk shows and it's been easy to see myself as the little kid watching the grown-ups run things. But, now, it's our turn. He's one of us.
Tim Hooker is an English professor in Tennessee. He is the author of three books: "Rocket Man: A Rhapsody of Short Stories," "Duncan Hambeth: Furniture King of the South," and "Looking For A City." His politics are progressive liberal; his religion is Catholic Humanism. He is married, with four cats.
Yes, the KKK is evil, and stupid... but Obama is worse.
But Obama is probably worse. Before you jump down my throat, let's compare Hitler and Stalin:
Hitler was a raving racist nutjob (a collectivist, a socialist, and a denouncer of individualism), but nobody believed him when he told the world what he intended to do. As soon as he started to act out his depreaved fantasies, the world rose up in opposition to him.
Stalin, on the other hand, lied to the world about what he intended to do. He said he was going to use government force to feed and clothe the USSR, and that his government was the first benevolent altruistic government in the history of man. Well, it was as altruist as governments can be. It was altruist to the core!
But government's only tool is force. And force is a poor tool for achieving "altruist" goals. Why? Because governments don't ask for your money -they take it.
So, when people could no longer give to Stalin's version of "the Great Society", he forced them to keep giving. They were starving and ragged. They might rebel... So he killed them, by the thousands, while America's socialist universities apologized for his behavior.
Stalin, by stating rosy sounding (the poor will be clothed and fed, etc...) but unrealistic goals had the world fooled. In short: everyone believed Stalin, and that belief allowed him to do his dirty work.
Stalin killed around 55,000,000 innocent citizens of his own country. Hitler killed about 22,000,000 innocent civilians in his. (See: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills for the actual evidence, collected from the secret police of both dictatorships)
Hitler was a madman, but it soon became obvious to everyone. The KKK are madmen, and it is obvious to everyone.
Stalin was a murdering bastard, but he murdered out of
1) Bad ideology
2) The all-consuming desire to stay in power , and since Obama got elected to office on Stlain's economic ideas, it is apparently not obvious to everyone that socialism/communism/collectivism/statism/forced altruism is a bad idea.
It was not obvious to the left that Stalin was killing so many people. Plus, he agreed with the Left's stated goals of a collectively-owned, altruist society. Most people in the US don't pay any attention to the victims of social engineering (unless its them).
R.J. Rummel (whose website I've given above), the world's foremost authority on mass-murder by government, states that the very worst mass-murdering governments grow from "altruist" states, -those states that purport to 'help' the individual help himself. They wind up murdering in the name of "the greater good".
Why? because people don't like to be told what's best for them, or how to live their lives. They can do that just fine on their own, if the government just leaves them alone.
A few people slip through the cracks, but there are charities that are willing to help them. There are even charities that will help criminals, if they are willing to modify their behavior. Private charities never murdered millions of people --but governemnts have. ESPECIALLY the governments that murdered in the name of charity.
Private charities don't help chronic exploiters. They draw the line there, because there are more deserving candidates. Why help someone who refuses to better himself? Why help someone who holds you in contempt?
Governments are not the same. The money is taken from one person, and given to strangers. Why would those strangers modify their behavior? -There is no reason, since they will not be held accountable if they continue to accept the free money. Moreover, why would the government stop giving them the money? There is no reason: The more money government redistributes, the more power it assumes, the more there is an apparent "need" for the redistribution.
This is the trap of totalitarianism: "It's for your own good".
Well, in the comparison above, the KKK is Hitler, and Obama is Stalin.
If Obama is allowed the reins of power, they will be horribly misused, at best. At worst, the consolidation of power will allow him to murder 90%+ of the United States population.
Now, hold on a second, he may be a Weimar-style socialist "Democrat", but he wouldn't be a dictator.
Well, not with the technology our government currently possesses. But what about with tomorrow's technology? Our current technology is too awkward and inefficient to kill the majority of US citizens (and they are still armed).
If the current government were to cause the economy to crash, the people would refuse to continue paying taxes. The government would then attempt to initiate force against them, they would defend themselves with armed force, and true advocates of limited government (not fake advocates of limited government like Reagan and Bush) would win the very next election.
The first big strike against Obama: he thinks that there is no right for the individual to be armed. This philosophy allowed Hitler and Stalin to murder those aforementioned millions of innocent civilians, during peacetime. Hitler Banned guns with the Nazi Weapons Act of 1968. Guns were banned in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1959 ( See: http://www.jpfo.org/deathgc.htm ).
Obama had a representative come to a community forum in Chicago that I spoke at who told me that Obama doesn't beleive that there is an individual right to keep and bear arms. I have since further confirmed it by independent study. He should be held accountable for this mass-muder sympathetic view. (His rep was held accountable that night by two pro-gun Democrats. It was funny. They were very old jewish holocaust survivors. In Logan square, no less.)
If Obama succeeds in getting elected and banning guns, he might well be paving the way for mass murder by government in what would formerly have been the USA.
Moreover, his philosophy believes that the individual can be sacrificed to the group. In fact, this is the entire premise of the "Keynesian" economics that Obama has bought into, as revealed in his book: "The Audacity of Hope"
I, for one, have no doubt that Obama becoming president would cause us all to regain hope.
We would all regain the hope that one day, Barack H. Obama, a tyrant even worse than George Bush (and his patriot act) would be removed from office. He would give us hope that we would one day get to live in a nation unmarred by violent conflict, for there will be many many more Waco-type incidents if Obama is elected president.
And, unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately if the US remains free), the US military is forging ahead to develope weapons that will make guns completely uselese for self-defense. These weapons are a part of something known as Drexlerian nanotechnology. You can read about them here: http://www.foresight.org/EOC
They don't exist yet (to my knowledge).
But when they do, it is possible that the person or group who commands them will become the ruler of the entire world.
Do we want to risk that that person is someone who buys into the economic ideology that murdered 55,000,000 innocent people in Soviet Russia, 60,000,000+ in Communist China, and many many more in the other Marxist/Keynesian-decay totalitarian states?
A large part of Obama's youth/hippy appeal seems to be that he inhaled, while smoking marijuana. T-shirts on his website boast as much, as does he himself.
OK. Great! That's a good sign. Perhaps it means that Americans are ready to take a baby step towards the individual property rights enumerated in our Constitution.
But one can't protect the property rights of some by violating the property rights of the many.
Anyway, why not vote for the person who supports EVERYONE'S property rights?
Such a person is always on the ballot, since 1971. That person is the Libertarian candidate.
The Libertarian candidate doesn't have any grandiose plans for you or your money.
The Libertarian candidate thinks we should:
1) Have a foreign policy of noninterventionism and free trade with all countries that have not actively displayed both the will and the ability to destroy us.
2) Have universal protection of everyone's property rights: from the homeowner who wants to keep her home safe from eminent domain, to the cocaine user who wants to use cocaine in some of his free time, to the gun owner who wants the government to keep their hands off his guns, to the CEO of a giant pharmaceutical company who wants to own the right to patent and sell a vaccine process that will save millions of lives. The LP recognizes that if one person's property rights are violated, then everyone's property rights are AT UNACCEPTABLE RISK.
3) Have no income tax at all (since legitimate government confined to resolving issues of force doesn't need to be expensive), as our country was before 1913. Have corporate excise taxes and property taxes that are vastly lower. Decrease all taxes, and eliminate all Unconstitutional regulations.
4) As a step towards achieving these goals, reinstate the practice of requiring the judge to inform the jury in every trial that they have the right to try the validity of the law (and whether it is being fairly applied), in addition to simply determining whether the law was broken. Before 1900 all judges in the US did this. The Supreme Court case "Sparf Vs. Hansen" eliminated this practice, thus effectively eliminating the most powerful check on the abusive government power -the trial by jury. Every single person must get a trial by jury before they are punished by the government -this is the bare minimum necessary for a free government.
In closing, yes, the KKK are slime.
But Obama is worse, because he will effect the lives of every single US citizen. His policies will cause thousands to starve, be sent to prison, lose initiative (by decreasing the incentives for self-employment), and possibly die (if he bans the individual ownership of guns).
What will the KKK do? They are a laughing stock. (Read "Freakonomics" By Stephen Levitt if you want to find out how they became a laughing stock.)
Reading Freakonomics will be a possible first step for you, the reader, into the realm of economics: the study of the result of human incentives and disincentives. Such a study has been sadly neglected by Barack Obama.
As such, he should not become president, because he doesn't understand the difference between 'leading' and 'ruling'.
Moreover, if he actually bans guns, that act will create a domestic civil war in the US.
If you want to vote for an Anti-prohibitionist who opposes the patriot act, vote for Wayne Root, or whomever the Libertarian Party runs. See: http://www.lp.org
Hell, vote for ANYBODY BUT OBAMA.
-Jake Witmer
by
Jake Witmer (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments)
on Sunday, February 11, 2007 at 4:04:07 AM
I confess I don't have the breadth and depth of historical background that you have on Hitler and Stalin, so I can't debate you. But, I appreciate your comments. They give me something to think about. Thanks.
TWH
by
Tim Hooker (10 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 6 comments)
on Sunday, February 11, 2007 at 11:04:40 AM
That is the first article I have read in a very, very long time that have made me reconsider having any hope for this racist country, because I didn't. If more and more whites thought like you, this could be a greater place. Thanks for that. And coming from me, a staunch pro-black activist, that is a great compliment.
CR
by
staff (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments)
on Sunday, February 11, 2007 at 8:42:57 AM
Thanks for commenting. Race-related issues are a powder-keg in America, so I wasn't sure how this post would be received. But, I wanted to be honest. Thanks for understanding.
TWH
by
Tim Hooker (10 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 6 comments)
on Sunday, February 11, 2007 at 10:58:29 AM
4 comments
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