Happy Robert E. Lee Day!

He was a great man. (Is there someone else we're supposed to talk about?)

Happy Robert E. Lee Day! His birthday, January 19, coincides this year with the Martin Luther King federal holiday.

Lee did not loom especially large in my English childhood. We were not short of wars in British history. And I was warned by my twin brother after, as Stanford MBAs, we respectively arrived in Winnipeg and North Carolina, not to start reading about the Civil War.

“It’s like heroin,” he said. “You can’t stop.”

So I didn’t really start reading about the Civil War for more than twenty years, until I was writing my 1995 book ALIEN NATION: COMMON SENSE ABOUT AMERICA’S IMMIGRATION DISASTER.

For relief from that kind of ordeal, I generally take twenty minutes of every hour to read something completely different. I chose to read about the Civil War.

And I found my brother was right.

One conclusion from my reading: you simply have to be enormously impressed by Robert E. Lee—as an “organizer of victory”, as a soldier, on the offense and defense, and as a Christian (there is no suggestion he was ever unfaithful to his invalid wife despite what must have been enormous temptations on campaign).

I should also say, since it is currently ignored, that America should give credit to Lee for advising his men to surrender and apply for pardon after Appomattox.

Although it apparently hasn’t occurred to his modern denigrators. Lee (who applied for a pardon and was ultimately granted one by President Gerald R. Ford in 1975) could have told his followers to scatter to the hills and resort to guerilla warfare—which is exactly what protracted the Anglo-Boer War for two bitter years after the British took the Boer capital cities in 1900.

The video clip above is from Ron Maxwell’s 1993 movie Gettysburg.

Famously, this scene was entirely spontaneous. It erupted when Maxwell asked actor Martin Sheen to don his Robert E. Lee outfit and ride out to rally the flagging re-enactors. (A liberal Democrat, Sheen looks scared to death)

The white nation a.k.a. America is still there.

My opinion of Martin Luther King is somewhat lower, as discussed in what we’ve salvaged from New York Attorney General Letitia James’ unconstitutional mugging of VDARE.com below.

PETER BRIMELOW: Time To Rethink Martin Luther King Day, The January 2024 Edition

[First published on VDARE.com, January 14, 2024]

See also: “MLK Worship Gives Us DEI”—Scott Greer Is Right And Here’s 24 Years Of VDARE.com Coverage To Prove It

James Fulford writes: VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow called for a rethinking of Martin Luther King Day in 2015, arguing that MLK was a deeply flawed figure and an inappropriate role model for American whites. Now this is even more the case, because the MLK Day symbolic appeasement project has manifestly failed, as the Floyd Hoax/BLM Insurrection showed, and we propose to repeat this call until We (so to speak) Overcome.

We first posted this on January 19, 2015, when Robert E. Lee’s actual birthday coincided with MLK Day, the third Monday in January. However, in Mississippi and Alabama, Lee’s birthday is still observed as King-Lee Day, to the annual consternation of GoodThinkers [Two states still observe King-Lee Day, honoring Robert E. Lee with MLK, by Meena Venkataramanan, Washington Post, January 16, 2023].

Ms. Venkataramanan writes

The two men’s birthdays fall just four days apart, but their legacies couldn’t be more different. King gave his life to the cause of racial equality; Lee fought in the Civil War to keep Black people enslaved.

Well, that’s one way of putting it. Another would be to say that King fought for the rights of his people, and Lee fought for the rights of his people.

The North and South were eventually reconciled after the Civil War (although they’re becoming unreconciled), but black America is still refusing to reconcile with the Historic American Nation, and pushing MLK Day, while suppressing the days honoring Lee, George Washington, and Christopher Columbus is just one more example of that.

Time To Rethink Martin Luther King Day

By Peter Brimelow

First published here on MLK/Robert E. Lee day, 2015.

Happy Robert E. Lee Day! His January 19 birthday was once widely celebrated across the South (it still is mentionable in Alabama) but during the Second Reconstruction has been quietly suppressed to the point where even such a devoted son of the Confederacy as American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor was unaware, when I talked to him on Sunday night, that its local variant in his and Lee’s state of Virginia, Lee-Jackson Day, was supposed to be celebrated last Friday. (Not surprisingly—it seems to have been recently crudely scrubbed from Virginia’s webpage.)

But there’s a silver lining, sort of, in this tale of attempted historical lobotomy: It shows that public holidays come—and they go. Martin Luther King Day, rushed through Congress with Obamacare-style disregard of process in 1983, has been by now weighed in the balance for almost thirty years. It has inarguably (but unmentionably) been found wanting. It is time for it to go.

And in fact, I believe it will go, or at least be quietly suppressed like Robert E. Lee Day. The reasons:

• MLK Day’s 2027 Problem

It is obvious to everyone that there is a reason King’s FBI files were sealed for fifty years back in 1977, and only the Main Stream Media’s typically relentless Politically Correct air cover prevented this flagrant maneuver from discrediting the Martin Luther King Day legislation in 1983.

The problem that these sealed files pose, the MSM/ Ruling Class determination to repress it—and incidentally the unimpeachably reasonable nature of the MLK Day opponents’ position—emerged at President Ronald Reagan’s famous October 19, 1983 press conference:

[Sam Donaldson, ABC News]. Mr. President, Senator [Jesse] Helms has been saying on the Senate floor that Martin Luther King, Jr., had Communist associations, was a Communist sympathizer. Do you agree?

The President. We’ll know in about 35 years, won’t we?

No, I don’t fault Senator Helms’ sincerity with regard to wanting the records opened up. I think that he’s motivated by a feeling that if we’re going to have a national holiday named for any American, when it’s only been named for one American in all our history up until this time, that he feels we should know everything there is to know about an individual. As I say, I don’t fault his sincerity in that, but I also recognize there is no way that these records can be opened, because an agreement was reached between the family and the government with regard to those records. And we’re not going to turn away from that or set a precedent of breaking agreements of that kind.

Donaldson: Sir, what do we do then in 35 years if the records are opened and we find that Dr. King was a Communist sympathizer? Do we then try to undo the law? I mean, I’m not quite certain where the logic is there.

The President. The logic is there in that there is no way that this government should violate its word and open those records now.

I happen to—while I would have preferred a day of recognition for his accomplishments and what he meant in a stormy period in our history here, I would have preferred a day similar to, say, Lincoln’s birthday, which is not technically a national holiday, but is certainly a day reverenced by a great many people in our country and has been. I would have preferred that, but since they seem bent on making it a national holiday, I believe the symbolism of that day is important enough that I’ll sign that legislation when it reaches my desk.

The President’s News Conference, Reagan Library, October 19, 1983

At the time, there was much MSM hyperventilating because Reagan had not roundly rejected the idea that King had Communist connections [Not A 35-Year Question, Editorial, New York Times, October 21, 1983]. But this was simply a demand, now familiar, for religious conformity to the burgeoning King Cult. Reagan’s was the only rational position, especially given the (widely known but little reported) information that Senator Helms had already placed in the Congressional Record.

Note, also, the bizarre MSM claim (which Reagan sidestepped) that there would be no “logic” in revoking MLK Day if King turned out to be a Communist. To put this in perspective, consider the protracted and merciless persecution, then just getting underway, of Arthur Rudolph, creator of the Saturn V moon rocket, because of the discovery of his alleged connection with forced labor projects in World War II Germany.

More recently, consider the continuing campaign against GOP Majority Whip Steve Scalise—who now, not coincidentally, is being attacked for his votes against the King holiday: GOP House Majority Whip Steve Scalise tried to kill Louisiana resolution apologizing for slavery, by Scott Kaufman, Raw Story, January 15, 2015. What Kaufman calls Scalise’s “ties” to David Duke’s relict organization in Louisiana were, on any reading, infinitesimal compared to King’s relationships with Communists and their causes. And when Scalise gave his speech, the U.S. was not engaged in a global struggle with a white supremacist power, nor losing thousands of men in a desperate war against one of its allies.

The plain fact is that King was a Man of the Left and American radicals are quite right to complain that he has been stolen from them. Thus, given that Leftist agitations are much more organized than the MSM cares to report, it might very well turn out that King’s decision to come out in opposition to the Vietnam War in April 1967 was ultimately at the behest of America’s foreign enemies.

A federal holiday for Benedict Arnold?

All this and serial adultery too.

But whatever embarrassments these files may contain—and chilling as it seems to those of us who were around at the time—only twelve years remain before they will be opened. Of course, the way things are going, criticizing King may then be considered Hate Speech.

• “Integration” Just Isn’t Working

This week near Dover, Delaware, a viral video appears to show another instance of black-on-white violence among high school students.

Editor’s Note: YouTube has deleted the video originally embedded in this article. Should users navigate to the video’s URL, a message states: “This video has been removed as a violation of YouTube’s policy prohibiting content designed to harass, bully or threaten.”

The shaky cell phone video shows a group of black teenage boys punching, knocking down, and kicking a white teenage boy, leaving him dazed and confused on the school bus floor.

The victim of the attack had been riding home from Parkway Academy School near Dover when the assault reportedly began. The video shows him sitting alone, facing front, when the attack begins from the rear—and continues from the side and the front of the school bus. “I didn’t do nothing,” he protests.

Video: Black Teens Assault White Student on School Bus, by Colin Flaherty, Breitbart, April 30, 2014

Just another day in the life of white America in the aftermath of the Civil Rights revolution—Flaherty has chronicled scores of similar stories. But one entry in the comment thread, and the reaction to it, was really significant:

I noticed that the School Bus driver failed to intervene or notify the police. It is shockingly evident that we need to create a segregated public school system where the victims of racial violence are separated from their abusers…

This comment received a remarkable 868 positive votes.

Fifty years after the Civil Rights Act, the sophisticated arguments of its opponents go undiscussed, but the simple reality that drove segregation seems to be winning it a new generation of supporters—albeit silent, for now.

From Selma to Birmingham to Detroit, the results of the Civil Rights revolution have been uniformly catastrophic.

The worst racial conflicts since the 1960s are being used to launch a new campaign of Leftist activism. But, although there has been little overt opposition, the election returns make clear that American whites just aren’t buying it.

How long will they continue to buy the Holiday?

• MLK Day can’t be contained

Many Americans unquestionably thought that, if they just made this one symbolic concession of accepting Martin Luther King Day, they would then be left alone. (They probably think the same about homosexual “marriage.”) But it hasn’t worked out that way. Martin Luther King Day has simply become a staging area for the inculcation of more white guilt, above all in the classroom.

Thus when my son Alexander was eight, he came home from public school early in January and told us that he’d been in some kind of play to dramatize an African American being turned away from a restaurant in the bad old days of the segregated South. In honor of Martin Luther King Day. Sort of like a Christmas Pageant. (Remember Christmas Pageants?)

The Connecticut Berkshires, where we lived, are a whitopia with absolutely no history of segregation whatsoever. Alexander was deeply puzzled. He was particularly impressed by the news that it was bad for policemen to use the word “boy.”

But this area of Connecticut was a hotbed of abolitionism. Those Connecticut farm boys joined up in vast numbers, and died in vast numbers, fighting to free the slaves. There was one famous regiment raised in Litchfield County: the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery, which despite its name was an infantry regiment and which was shot to pieces at Cold Harbor.

There’s still a substantial blue-collar population of colonial Yankee stock in northwestern Connecticut. The woman who cut my hair, the man who delivered my mail, had relatives who died in that battle. They were aware of it—but I have never heard any mention of it in the public schools.

I asked teachers about it, I asked the principals about it. None of them had ever heard of it, although they certainly had children in their classes whose ancestors were involved.

Those children could have been taught, even accepting the conventional Civil War morality play, that their forebears had done a noble thing. Instead, they were taught that they, whites, had oppressed blacks—even though their forebears had specifically not done so.

This goes to the issue of what we mean by a “Proposition Nation.” Maybe kids are being taught some kind of a “Proposition,” a national creed, in the public schools. But what is it?

Writ large, the result of this sort of brainwashing can be seen in the ludicrous spectacle of the Republican Establishment stampeding away from Republican National Committeeman Dave Agema just because he reposted on his FaceBook page an article from Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance called Confessions of a Public Defender, by “Michael Smith.”

It made no difference that Agema apparently picked up the AmRen story from the website of Black Republican and former Congressman Allen West, who wrote respectfully of it. Nor does it make any difference that Confessions is basically a straight description of scenes (admittedly dismaying) in heavily black courtrooms—bearing an unmistakable resemblance to scenes in Tom Wolfe’s 1987 best-seller Bonfire of the Vanities.

VDARE.com has defended Agema before, when he was under attack for being insufficiently enthusiastic about Muslim immigration. He didn’t resign then, and we hope he doesn’t resign now.

But the unfortunate reality is that debate about race has gone backward in the three decades that Martin Luther King Day has been celebrated—at least in part because of the emotionalism that it systematically exacerbates.

This emotionalism is not an accident. Just as the hyping of the Ferguson fiasco and the Trayvon Martin scam bears all the signs of a concerted campaign to rally the Left’s core voters, so the intensifying King Cult, and the regular Two-Minute Hates against race deviationists like John Derbyshire, Pat Buchanan, Frank Borzellieri, and James Watson, reflect the profound instability of American politics. As the Democratic Party tips away from whites, it can now only hope to form (to put it brutally) Obama-style Minority Occupation Governments. At all costs, the Left must keep the historic American nation from uniting before it is swamped by government-imposed nontraditional immigration—which it began to show alarming signs of doing (no thanks to the GOP leadership) in the 2010 and 2012 elections.

This comes naturally, because the Politically Incorrect fact is that neither the Left’s black, Hispanic, nor Jewish components have any strong tradition of free speech. The question is whether they can cow the historic American nation into accepting its subjugation.

Diversity is not strength: It is weakness. The celebration of a deeply flawed figure like Martin Luther King was a confession of weakness, and the attempt to turn him into a national role model has required unsustainable myth-making. Perhaps in the future, Americans will be allowed to celebrate their own races’ heroes separately, just as Italian villages have different patron saints. Right now, however, the cost of the King cult to white America is too high.