The lost wisdom of Booker T. Washington.

“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.” 


“Character, not circumstance, makes the person.” 

“I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.” 

“I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.” 

“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.” 

“Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity” 

“Among a large class, there seemed to be a dependence upon the government for every conceivable thing. The members of this class had little ambition to create a position for themselves, but wanted the federal officials to create one for them. How many times I wished then and have often wished since, that by some power of magic, I might remove the great bulk of these people into the country districts and plant them upon the soil – upon the solid and never deceptive foundation of Mother Nature, where all nations and races that have ever succeeded have gotten their start – a start that at first may be slow and toilsome, but one that nevertheless is real.” 

― Booker T. Washington

Compare this man with the vile Saul Alinsky.

Kerry proves he's stuck in the '60's and says the most absurd inane things.

Kerry: Muslim integration problem in Europe a lot like US in 1960s, or something

BY ED MORRISSEY

Our friend Jeryl Bier made this astonishing find earlier today, from a press conference after a meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and an EU official yesterday. In the press conference that followed, a reporter asked Kerry about remarks made by Barack Obama about the issues of integration between Muslims in Europe and their national communities. Kerry then offered a jaw-dropping response that equated Muslim communities in Europe to minorities in the US during the civil-rights era, getting the problem exactly backwards in the process (emphasis mine):

Question: [W]e heard recently from President Obama talking about the potential lack of integration of Muslim communities in Europe. He mentioned that as one of the greatest dangers that Europe faces in terms of terror threats that might come. Would you agree with those words from President Obama, and should he have used those? And Mr. Secretary, I’d like to get your opinion on that as well if I can.

SECRETARY KERRY: Well, let me just begin quickly on the integration issue. When I was – I entered college in 1962. And in 1963, ’4, ’5, we were deeply embroiled in this country, and we – college students in the Civil Rights Movement. And we were deeply impacted by that and have always been, I think, as a generation, much more sensitive to this question of minority and rights and integration and so forth. We’ve made unbelievable progress in our nation, unbelievable progress in the years since then. But it would be completely disingenuous not to say to you that we still have some distance to travel. We’re not finished. We’re still – you heard the President last night talk about voting rights. So what was won in 1965 still has to be fully embraced and implemented here, and other things that are linked to that. We’ve seen our own struggles in some communities and great debates about race in America in the last year.

So it would be dishonest of me – and I’m not involved in domestic politics right now, so I’m not going to go into it in depth, except to say that therefore, I think I can say with honesty that there is a challenge in many other parts of the world. And Federica is absolutely correct; this particular incident of violence wasn’t a specific targeting that grew out of that, but we all can do work in many parts of the world that I have seen where one minority or another or another is not able to share fully in the full integration in whatever country they happen to be living. So the world has a road to travel on that, and that’s why we continue to put such a high premium here on the issue of human rights and democracy, and to continue to push, because I think we’ve learned through our own experience the difference that it can make to the strengthening of the quality of our democracy, to our society, and people benefit when we live by that high moral standard.

That’s actually not the problem in Europe. Unlike the US in the Jim Crow era (or South Africa during apartheid, to use another example), the issue in France and other nations on the continent is not official policies of discrimination. It’s not even cultural pressure to marginalize and “otherize” Muslims. The insularity of those communities is self-imposed. They want to be separate, and thanks to a perverse prioritization of multicultural sensitivity in France and other countries over assimilation, those cultures allow them to do so on an extraordinary scale.

Kerry may still be living in the 1960s, but this is an entirely different problem. Ironically, Barack Obama largely got this right during his own joint press conference with British PM David Cameron last week, which was the initiating catalyst for the question:

Here’s where I actually think that Europe has some particular challenges, and I said this to David.  The United States has one big advantage in this whole process, and it’s not that our law enforcement or our intelligence services, et cetera, are so much better — although ours are very, very good, and I think Europeans would recognize that we’ve got capabilities others don’t have.  Our biggest advantage, Major, is that our Muslim populations, they feel themselves to be Americans.  And there is this incredible process of immigration and assimilation that is part of our tradition that is probably our greatest strength.  Now, it doesn’t mean that we aren’t subject to the kinds of tragedies that we saw at the Boston Marathon.  But that, I think, has been helpful.

There are parts of Europe in which that’s not the case, and that’s probably the greatest danger that Europe faces — which is why, as they respond, as they work with us to respond to these circumstances, it’s important for Europe not to simply respond with a hammer and law enforcement and military approaches to these problems, but there also has to be a recognition that the stronger the ties of a North African — or a Frenchman of North African descent to French values, French Republic, a sense of opportunity — that’s going to be as important, if not more important, in over time solving this problem.  And I think there’s a recognition of that across Europe, and it’s important that we don’t lose that.

In other words, this is exactly the opposite issue than Kerry describes. In apartheid systems like Jim Crow, governments actively blocked integration and assimilation as policy. France does not impose impediments to assimilation at all, but instead passively accept fracturing because assimilation is not a higher value than the laissez-faire multicultural shrug that allows communities like the Islamists to impose their own insularity. And it is in those shrugged-off, insular communities that radical Islam thrives and produces the kind of terrorists that slaughtered the staff of Charlie Hebdo.

They are “able to share fully into the full integration” of France and other nations. They just don’t want to do so. And without strong cultural pressure to assimilate, they won’t do so, and will continue to recruit others who want to resist assimilation in the short run, and impose their own beliefs on everyone else in their adopted countries in the long run. Unfortunately, Kerry seems unable to grasp the difference.

Meanwhile, it’s those who chose assimilation (and whose ancestors chose it) who feel the need to flee from France.

Gandhi a member of the Tea Party?

Obama, the Inattentive Student of Gandhi

By Ed Kaitz

On his recent trip to India, President Obama was lavish in his praise for Mahatma Gandhi. Obama maintained that Gandhi's message of being "the change we seek in the world" was instrumental in inspiring his own journey from community organizer to President of the United States. "I might not be standing here today," said the president, had it not been for the Great Soul's influence.

Knowing, however, that Gandhi's political philosophy included highly persuasive polemics against big government, the welfare state, foreign aid, affirmative action, identity politics, divisive rhetoric, and malice toward one's opponents, it's hard to imagine the president devoting much time as a student in quiet and humble contemplation with the great guru's writings.

Gandhi, for example, would have lasted about twenty seconds in Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity "United" Church in Chicago. On the other hand, Barack Obama and his family dutifully attended Wright's church for twenty years. Wright's racially divisive theology of "liberation" would have constituted for Gandhi a direct assault on one of the main pillars of his own political philosophy: "liberation," or swaraj.

While swaraj literally means "independence," for Gandhi, the term was much more importantly associated with intense self-examination and self-mastery. True freedom, according to Gandhi, meant an inward journey of liberation from the kind of anger, fear, and hatred that served only to perpetuate cycles of domination and division in society.

Gandhi argued, for example, that national liberation from the British would actually create a more harmful situation in India if the new Hindu political class failed to cleanse themselves of longstanding resentments and ill will. Gandhi understood quite rightly that the internal "weaknesses and failures" that might continue to animate the new rulers "would then be buttressed up by the accession of power."

It's quite impossible, in other words, to conjure up a picture of Gandhi unleashing the kind of unbridled rhetoric ("I don't mind cleaning up after them, but don't do a lot of talking") that President Obama has often used to characterize his own conservative countrymen. In addition, when the president advised Hispanic voters to think of the recent election as an opportunity to "punish our enemies" and "reward our friends," he was giving painful evidence to the suspicion that someone other than Gandhi had in fact inspired his own run for the White House.

Swaraj is also the reason why Gandhi was deeply suspicious of big government. Gandhi saw an inverse relationship between disciplined self-mastery and the need for the welfare state. Indeed, the Bhagavad-Gita-- Hinduism's holiest scripture -- is a beautifully arranged set of eighteen sermons by the avatar Krishna to the warrior Arjuna on the philosophical intricacies of self-control, or yoga, which forms the basis of an individual's moral and spiritual progress. Said Gandhi:

I look upon an increase of the power of the state with the greatest fear, because although while apparently doing good by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of all progress.

Gandhi observed that while individuals have souls, the state is "a soulless machine" that "represent[s] violence in a concentrated and organized form." Rather than rely on the state, then, to redistribute wealth and reduce inequality, Gandhi proposed what he called "trusteeship." Trusteeship meant persuading the affluent to think of their wealth as something held in trust for the indigent poor. Again, Gandhi was trying to couple the freedom inherent in Hindu philosophy with the faith in a man's ability to master and overcome his often self-centered proclivities: "We know of so many cases where men have adopted trusteeship, but none where the State has really lived for the poor."

The great Gandhi scholar Dr. Dennis Dalton, who taught for years at Columbia University, has said that when Gandhi used the term "welfare for all," he meant "economic justice and equal opportunity, not dependency on the welfare system as we know it in America." [Emphasis added.] Professor Dalton adds:

Gandhi's idealism is usually associated with compassion and charity, but in his appeal to discipline and hard work there is an undeniable strain of what we might call ‘Yankee individualism.' He identified with the gospel of self-reliance in the philosophy of two of the Americans that he admired most, Thoreau and Emerson.

For Gandhi, the dangers of welfare-state dependency extended beyond individuals to nations as well. To those advocating global wealth redistribution, Gandhi made the quite startling observation that a nation that accepts economic aid succeeds only in crippling itself:

There is nothing more degrading for a country than to beg from others when it cannot meet its requirements. It is a practical principle that if you want to be friends with someone and you want the friendship to endure, you should not seek economic aid from them.

Like all of history's great moralists from Aristotle to Kant, Gandhi recognized that the source of benevolent moral relationships included both freedom and a healthy sense of personal responsibility. Gandhi's fear of welfare-state dependency was remarkably similar to the concern Adam Smith had about the bureaucratic state "pushing too far" and destroying the basis for human benevolence. "Beneficence is always free," said Smith. "[I]t cannot be extorted by force."

In addition, swaraj was also the reason why Gandhi objected to the affirmative action and quota policies that many social reformers were advocating for India's untouchables back in the 1930s. Gandhi was strikingly clairvoyant in his belief that quota policies -- such as reserved legislative seats and separate electorates -- would serve only to inflame identity politics and perpetuate the bondage of the untouchables:

I am certain that the question of separate electorates for the untouchables is a modern manufacture of a Satantic Government ... Separate electorates to the untouchables will ensure them bondage in perpetuity. ... Do you want the untouchables to remain untouchables forever? Well, the separate electorates would perpetuate the stigma.

Gandhi believed that freedom also meant the freedom to explore opportunities beyond what seemed appropriate for one's station in life. True national unity would be predicated on individual social mobility and the ability to transcend rigid boundaries. Since affirmative action policies tend to reinforce rigid and divisive beliefs about identity, they both limit the range of future opportunity and foster ugly labels such as "sellout" for those who affirm individual achievement over group inertia. And once again, self-mastery is compromised by a reliance on the state to confer benefits.

In sum, Gandhi argued that Western socialism is predicated upon a entirely dismal view of human potential compared with Hinduism, which holds that free individuals had the capacity to "respond to the spirit" within them and rise above the petty forces of bitterness and self-indulgence. As Krishna tells Arjuna in the final stirring passages of the Bhagavad-Gita:

I give you these precious words of wisdom; reflect on them and then do as you choose. These are the last words I shall speak to you, dear one, for your spiritual fulfillment.

In other words, whether or not Arjuna fulfills his dharma in life is entirely up to him. Krishna's role is to convey Hindu philosophy in all of its brilliance and hope that Arjuna is moved by its lushness and logic into doing the right thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson -- an early American admirer of the Bhagavad-Gita -- understood, like Gandhi did, that personal initiative and a faith in human potential constitute the keys to both individual and collective flourishing. In his great essay, Self-Reliance, Emerson says:

The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire.

Gandhi would have also certainly endorsed Emerson's critical attitude toward various types of community organizers and "social justice" crusaders: "All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves."

Newsweek editor Evan Thomas once called Barack Obama a "great teacher" who "stands above everybody." The problem with "great" teachers who were indifferent students, however, is that they have a tendency to stand above everybody.

Sources:

Dalton, Dennis, ed. Mahatma Gandhi: Selected Political Writings. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc, 1996.

Killian, Lewis M. "Gandhi, Frederick Douglass, and Affirmative Action." International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. Vol. 5, No. 2, 1991.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Self-Reliance" in Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York, NY: A.S. Barnes & Co.

Good Advice

Justice Scalia gives the commencement speech at his granddaughter's high school and a fine bit of advice it is.

“[A] platitude I want discuss comes in many flavors. It can be variously delivered as, ‘Follow your star,’ or ‘Never compromise your principles.’ Or, quoting Polonius in ‘Hamlet’ — who people forget was supposed to be an idiot — ‘To thine ownself be true.’ Now this can be very good or very bad advice. Indeed, follow your star if you want to head north and it’s the North Star. But if you want to head north and it’s Mars, you had better follow somebody else’s star.

“Indeed, never compromise your principles. Unless, of course, your principles are Adolf Hitler’s. In which case, you would be well advised to compromise your principles, as much as you can.

“And indeed, to thine ownself be true, depending upon who you think you are. It’s a belief that seems particularly to beset modern society, that believing deeply in something, and following that belief, is the most important thing a person could do. Get out there and picket, or boycott, or electioneer, or whatever. I am here to tell you that it is much less important how committed you are, than what you are committed to. If I had to choose, I would always take the less dynamic, indeed even the lazy person who knows what’s right, than the zealot in the cause of error. He may move slower, but he’s headed in the right direction.

“Movement is not necessarily progress. More important than your obligation to follow your conscience, or at least prior to it, is your obligation to form your conscience correctly. Nobody — remember this — neither Hitler, nor Lenin, nor any despot you could name, ever came forward with a proposal that read, ‘Now, let’s create a really oppressive and evil society.’ Hitler said, ‘Let’s take the means necessary to restore our national pride and civic order.’ And Lenin said, ‘Let’s take the means necessary to assure a fair distribution of the goods of the world.’

“In short, it is your responsibility, men and women of the class of 2010, not just to be zealous in the pursuit of your ideals, but to be sure that your ideals are the right ones. That is perhaps the hardest part of being a good human being: Good intentions are not enough. Being a good person begins with being a wise person. Then, when you follow your conscience, will you be headed in the right direction.”

I would only add "Always Wear Sunscreen."