Violence Is Bad, Oblivion is Good

But it is not just a victory for King over the White supremacists, and Democrats of the Jim Crow Deep South. It is also a victory for King over Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam.

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It is the discipline and the humanity.

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Yet through it all, they would not raise their arms in violence. They had been trained not to, they taught themselves not to, they resisted that human impulse because they thought that it was morally wrong and would damage their cause.

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A new film about the boxer Muhammed Ali - a devotee of the Nation of Islam, Cassius Clay was given his new name by Elijah Muhammed - attests that he addressed a Ku Klux Klan rally. And the Nation also palled about with the American Nazi party. They all wanted the same end, you see - racial segregation.

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And the election of Mr Obama is a rebuke to people like Malcolm X, a symbol that Martin Luther King was right with his patience, and his give and take and his belief in democracy. For, in the end, democracy triumphed. In the end, non-violence worked. In the end, moderation and self-discipline and restraint worked.

The election of Mr Obama is a rebuke too, to the Eta Basque separatists who put bombs in shopping centres, to the IRA with their pub bombs, to the Baader-Meinhof gang with their abductions and killings.

TimesOnline

He means: it's a rebuke to anyone who wants to stop the Crowd from doing the predictable thing, which is in the name of tolerance to let idiocy rule.

Most people are inert. The Crowd counts on that, and uses its numbers to demand power through passive aggression.

They also love it when "keep the peace" prevails over "do the intelligent, realistic thing," because they are a reality denial cult.

But "keep the peace" keeps people isolated from acting together to fix problems. It's a "make it go away so I can keep watching TV" impulse. It makes us docile, tractable -- like domesticated animals. And that is what "peace" in a modern context is about: keep business as usual flowing, and don't force us to engage with the world, because we are Kings of the Disengaged.

Multiculturalism has never worked. It does not work now. People like Daniel Finkelstein are pandering to a public that wants easy answers, because easy answers let them continue to be oblivious.

Humanity will either get over this hurdle or be finished by it.