Every revolution begins with lofty concerns but most often ends in violence, bloodshed, loss of freedom, and long-term despotism — from the French Revolution to the Cuban Revolution and every revolution in between and since (China and Venezuela).
David Chilton writes the following in Part One of his review summary of James H. Billington’s Fire in the Minds of Men:
In many ways, the French Revolution set precedents for those which were created in its image. Beginning ostensibly as a revolution for “democracy” in the name of “the People,” it soon revealed the irresistible drive toward centralization that is the hallmark of modern revolutions. The Reign of Terror, that eminently logical application of the Enlightenment, claimed 40,000 victims in 1793–94, but that was only to be the beginning. For, as the Revolution progressed, its leaders calmly calculated the number of citizens who would have to be exterminated, laying elaborate plans for the methodical liquidation of two-thirds of the population — more than sixteen million people (see Nesta Webster, The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy, 1919, 423-429)…. The search for revolutionary simplicity required the destruction of the complex fabric of Christian civilization, the dissolution of the many estates into one unitary State, the substitution of slogans for thought. Tied to belief in a secular salvation, radical simplicity led to violence: a ritual of blood atonement, providing deliverance through destruction (cf. Otto Scott, Robespierre: The Voice of Virtue, 1974).
Democrats don’t really care that much about black people. They need them as victims. If victims ever get rescued, then the power base of the Party disappears. That’s why programs have been developed by the Democrat Party to keep the majority of poor whites and blacks down economically. Republicans get sucked into the charade because they do not want to be perceived as “racist,” so they go along with these programs. But there’s always a new program developed in terms of “you’re a racist if you don’t vote for it.”
What has the Martin Luther King holiday or naming streets and schools after him ever done for blacks? This short video says it better than I can: https://bit.ly/3fU7Giy.
I heard former UN Ambassador Andrew Young asked a similar question. Anyone who spoke against these symbolic efforts would immediately be labeled a racist. The Democrats know this, so they continue to bait conservatives with these meaningless gestures while growing the power and reach of government.
Will removing any of these edifices of our nation’s past (including, it seems, Mount Rushmore) lead to the advance of a single black person in the United States? No, but it will embolden the social revolutionaries.
A number of black “leaders” (e.g., Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton) have made their living by promoting black victimhood and white guilt. Jesse Jackson has been shaking down corporations with the scam for decades. Booker T. Washington (1865–1915) warned of such people within the black community in his 1911 book My Larger Education. He described them as “problem profiteers”:
There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs – partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.
Washington could have had in view, although writing more than a hundred years ago, black people who rail against black conservatives like Herman Cain, Tim Scott, and Clarence Thomas. These men do not present themselves as victims, and this disturbs people like Al Sharpton.
Cain lived at a time when there were “colored” water fountains, segregated schools and neighborhoods, and racial discrimination that few people today can imagine. If anyone has a right to play the victim card, it’s those who grew up when segregated facilities and the Green Book were everyday realities. Cain didn’t feel sorry for himself. He stayed out of trouble, worked hard, and made something of himself without the help of a cadre of today’s “poverty pimps” and race baiters.
_The Negro Motorist Green-B_ook
Washington continues with a story that encapsulates what is wrong with so many black “leaders” and their guilt-ridden white supporters. Those victimizing blacks are other blacks:
A story told me by a coloured man in South Carolina will illustrate how people sometimes get into situations where they do not like to part with their grievances. In a certain community there was a coloured doctor of the old school, who knew little about modern ideas of medicine, but who in some way had gained the confidence of the people and had made considerable money by his own peculiar methods of treatment. In this community there was an old lady who happened to be pretty well provided with this world’s goods and who thought that she had a cancer. For twenty years she had enjoyed the luxury of having this old doctor treat her for that cancer. As the old doctor became — thanks to the cancer and to other practice — pretty well-to-do, he decided to send one of his boys to a medical college. After graduating from the medical school, the young man returned home, and his father took a vacation. During this time the old lady who was afflicted with the “cancer” called in the young man, who treated her; within a few weeks the cancer (or what was supposed to be the cancer) disappeared, and the old lady declared herself well.
When the father of the boy returned and found the patient on her feet and perfectly well, he was outraged. He called the young man before him and said:
“My son, I find that you have cured that cancer case of mine. Now, son, let me tell you something. I educated you on that cancer. I put you through high school, through college, and finally through the medical school on that cancer. And now you, with your new ideas of practicing medicine, have come here and cured that cancer. Let me tell you, son, you have started all wrong. How do you expect to make a living practicing medicine in that way?”
I am afraid that there is a certain class of race problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.
If the patient gets well, an entire industry of victimhood will get cancer and die. This would be the best thing for the black community. Until blacks throw off the shroud of victimhood, they will be at the mercy of “doctors” who treat a self-inflicted cancer that only makes the doctors rich.