Stokely Carmichael: Remembering the Hate

Stokely Carmichael:
Remembering the Hate

After five months of jetting around the world, Black Power Proselyter Stokely Carmichael announced last week in Sweden that his journey is about to end. “I shall return to hell,” he declared. “That is, to the United States.”

[In Paris] the quondam chairman of the misnamed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the star anti-American ideologue at a left wing-sponsored “Che Guevara Week” meeting. Standing under a huge portrait of the late Cuban revolutionary and flanked by Viet Cong flags and a Christmas tree, Carmichael [said]: “We do not want peace in Viet Nam…we want the Vietnamese people to defeat the United States.” And: “We feel we are not paying too high a price even if we have to destroy the structures of the United States.”

In Cuba, he boasted that “we have our own list, and it includes McNamara, Johnson and Rusk—if we have to kill them, we will.” In North Viet Nam, he gave his “warm support for the struggle against the common enemy.” In London, he vowed that “we are going to take over—if the whites don’t like it, we will stamp them out.”

In Conakry, Guinea, he declared: “We will win our rights or we are going to burn the country down to the ground.”

A note from Radarsite: Hating America. It may not be the world’s oldest profession, but it’s certainly not the newest one either. To our younger generation, Hating America may appear to be a relatively recent phenomenon, a post-9/11 exercise in self-flagellation, a reaction to our invasion of Iraq, or an expression of the left’s near-psychotic loathing of George Bush. On the international stage, America has been seen by it’s enemies (and often by its purported allies) as an aggressive imperialist power, whose impulsive military blunders have threatened the stability of world peace — something that the Europeans had hoped — and still hope — to achieve through their philosophy of appeasement and conciliatory gestures towards dangerous and predatory tyrants.

It is important for us to remember, however, that Hating America has had a long dishonorable history. And to remember that today’s hate-filled and inflammatory rhetoric is no more outrageous and disgusting than it was in 1967, when this article was written. It is also interesting to point out that almost invariably the fanatical leaders of these virulent Hate America movements are the products of successful middle — or even upper class family backgrounds (Stokely Carmichael grew up in his carpenter-father’s home in an all-white area of New York’s The Bronx — “We were immediately and completely accepted,” recalls his mother Mabel). In short, they never missed a meal, were well provided for, well educated, and seemingly endowed with all of the advantages needed for a successful life. Our Jane Fondas and Danny Glovers and Stokely Carmichaels all share these incongruous biographical details with our international America Haters, the Osama bin Ladens and Mohammed Attas.

Contrary to their own propaganda, these Hate America movements are not the rebellious insurgencies of the poor and downtrodden but, rather, are almost without exception the results of a pampered and coddled existence, coupled with the poisonous indoctrination of a leftist educational system. Almost all of these fanatical rebels were radicalized, not on the cold streets of hard living, but on comfortable ivy-covered paths of expensive college campuses.

Conversely, the poor and downtrodden of this world can’t wait for their chance to get to America, and will pay almost any price to achieve this lofty goal.

How, then, do we reconcile these two diametrically opposed views of our controversial country?

We could just stop sending our children to colleges and universities and send them out to work. Or, perhaps more realistically, we could at least attempt to counter the leftist propaganda which eminates from our Ivy League Hate America factories. We could pay a little closer attention to what our children are being taught, and who is teaching them. In short, we could stop abrogating our responsiblities and fight back against the hate. It is, as we have seen, an unending battle.

Read the entire 1967 article here:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,837582-1,00.html

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