For anyone interested, this is the sixth installment of a little self-educational, comparative study of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Clarence Thomas in their own words perhaps inappropriately posted under the Book Notes banner.  Please refer back to my Preface diary for a little more background (1). While obviously amateurish in nature, we’ll see where this one time experiment takes me/us and hopefully the effort will spark someone with talent to take up andyd’s torch.

Just as the first section of Mr. Douglass’s story gives powerful insight into parts of slavery not often discussed…a topic I hope to return to in some detail in the final installment of this exercise…Mr. Thomas ends with his passage through the conformation process for the Supreme Court.  Much of this section is devoted to that episode.

First, some firsthand insight from Mr. Douglass and proof he knew Joe Biden long ago:

“It is easy to whip a man when his hands are tied.  It requires little courage…” (2)

At least, thanks to the previous Bork experience, Mr. Thomas knew his hands were to be tied going in and the cowardly machine he was about to face (emphasis added):

“…there was nothing to be gained from engaging in extended debate with the members of the Judiciary Committee.  A confirmation hearing…is something to be endured, not an opportunity to engage in thoughtful public discussion.” (3)

Once again, Mr. Douglass provided a preview a century earlier…and where you see the word “popular” think “cynical liberal”:

“…I was under a considerable cloud not altogether free from angry lightning.  False friends of both colors were loading me with reproaches.  No man, perhaps, had ever more offended popular prejudice than I had then lately done.  I had married…a wife a few shades lighter than myself.” (4)

And once again, Mr. Thomas knew the coward’s playbook…the coming smear campaign to provide cover for targeted voters to not support him:

“…by making discreet, strategically placed mentions of the fact that my wife was white” (5)

Oh, and he also knew who the cowards were.  When asked if anyone would be bothered by his interracial marriage he replied:

“Only bigots and liberals!” (6)

On that note, a quick aside for my take on the Cain takedown that seems to have reached an unfortunate end game as of yesterday.  The truth is that the long, drawn out circus was not the intention of the perpetrators of this political assassination but the product of a MSM that used it for their own sensationalistic purposes…a Frankenstein’s monster wholly owned by our ruling class.  In a way, the whole thing reminds me of a friend of a friend who once took his talents to open tryouts for an NFL team and the better he did the more blatant the efforts by the insider class…those drafted into the system…became to end his year (if you know what I mean.)

Anyway, putting the whole circus aside, the Cain takedown was intended to be a much quicker and quieter affair…it was actually executed to near perfection in the first couple of days…the discreet, strategically placed leaks and then the face of a white woman “accuser” plastered on front pages all over the country…now the targeted subsets of voters had the cover needed to withdraw their support.  This was supposed to be a three day story…a quick cut to his Achilles to let him limp to the side of the road and out of the race.  As Mr. Thomas puts it:

“I’d warned her that some of my opponents would try to kill me.  Now we both knew what their weapon of choice was to be: the age-old…instrument of accusing a black man of sexual misconduct.” (7)

The rest has all been fluff…partially brought on by Mr. Cain’s refusal to go quietly…and nothing more than a MSM game.  As a similarly proud and defiant character, Mr. Thomas already had his back:

“This is a circus.  It is a national disgrace.  And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I am concerned, it is a high tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that, unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured [by cable TV schmucks] rather than hung from a tree.” (8)

For the record, I believe Mr. Thomas.  I believe Anita Hill is a liar…but I also believe she was a sinful pawn in this matter.  The real evil resided in the Senators on the Judiciary Committee (and the liberal establishment en masse) and probably even more so, by reading a bit between the lines, in the nameless, faceless committee staff that orchestrated the entire charade.  Per Thomas (bold emphasis added):

“Hypersensitive civil-rights leaders who saw racism around every corner fell silent when by liberal enemies sneered that I was unqualified to sit on the Court; editors and reporters who claimed to be objective substituted a pretense of balance for true fairness, presenting outrageous, wholly unsupported allegations side by side with sputtering denials.  The implausible was now being treated more favorably than the obvious.”

“As for the Senate, it had abandoned all semblance of decorum to consider a set of trumped-up charges better suited to the tabloids than the Congressional Record.  I know of at least one senator sitting in judgment of me against whom accusations of sexual improprieties had been leveled that made Anita’s charges look mild. … I was sickened by their hypocrisy as I was mystified by the sequence of events that had set this hideous farce in motion.” (9)

Hypocrisy…hideous farce…for some reason the names Pelosi and Reid come to mind.  As for back then, those Senators and their staff are truly despicable people.  And, in case you haven’t noticed, Joe Biden is a schmuck.

Ntrepid
Proud Redstate Member since April 2006…?

(1) http://www.redstate.com/ntrepid/2011/07/15/remedial-book-notes-volume-1-primary-american-character/
(2) The Life and times of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass.  Page 400.
(3) My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir by Clarence Thomas. Page 232-233.
(4) The Life and times of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass.  Page 391-392.
(5) My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir by Clarence Thomas. Page 232.
(6) My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir by Clarence Thomas. Page 210.
(7) My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir by Clarence Thomas. Page 243.
(8) My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir by Clarence Thomas. Page 271.
(9) My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir by Clarence Thomas. Page 257-258.

Previous Installments:

Volume 1.1: http://www.redstate.com/ntrepid/2011/08/20/remedial-book-notes-volume-1-1-%e2%80%93-evolving-expectations/

Volume 1.2: http://www.redstate.com/ntrepid/2011/09/30/remedial-book-notes-volume-1-2-%e2%80%93-%e2%80%9ci-had-better-things-to-do-than-be-angry-%e2%80%9d/

Volume 1.3: http://www.redstate.com/ntrepid/2011/11/11/remedial-book-notes-volume-1-3-%e2%80%93-%e2%80%9cslavery-was-a-state-of-war%e2%80%9d/

Volume 1.4: http://www.redstate.com/ntrepid/2011/11/18/remedial-book-notes-volume-1-4-%e2%80%93-%e2%80%9ca-tonic-like-no-other%e2%80%9d/

Volume 1.5: http://www.redstate.com/ntrepid/2011/11/19/remedial-book-notes-volume-1-5-%e2%80%93-douglass-decimates-obamacare/

This has been an incredible book, and I think it will stay with me for a long time to come.  I was amazed at how much this book was a testimony to Chambers faith.  I expected an  inside look into Communism in the United States.  I didn’t expect a description of Chambers conversion from Communism to Christianity.

I think there are two messages that we should take from this book.  The first is that Communism isn’t the opposite of Capitalism.  Communism is the opposite of Christianity.  Christianity believes that man is made in God’s image.  We are required to treat one another as we want ourselves to be treated.  We, as Christians are required to follow the Commandments.  Communists are not only free of these requirements, they look at them as a weakness. Communists believe that men are simply another form of beast.   As such, there is no higher order they have to respect.  Any action, any betrayal, any lie is OK, provided it helps or protects Communism.

The other lesson is to remember just how far inside our own government communism had penetrated.  Alger Hiss was instrumental in the United States involvement at both the Treaty of Yalta and the formation of the United Nations.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a resurgence of Russia, it’s hard to know how far Communism may have penetrated our current government.  However there can be no denying that communists “fellow travelers”  of socialism, Marxism, and statism are deep in our government.  The current administration and the current Congress have used these as their guiding principles for the last two years.

For Next Week: Let’s start Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.  I plan on covering through the end of Book 2, Chapter 2 “The Invasion”.  For those of you keeping up with the reading, do you want to have an assignment for Christmas week or not?

For this weeks book notes, I covered up to chapter Four of Witness.  I want to focus in on the third chapter.  I thought this chapter was very interesting because Chambers explains why people become communists and why he became a communist.  Some of the reasons are still out there today.  While we don’t think of Communism as a threat in today’s world (we are more concerned with Islamic terrorism) I think we should be worried.

Towards the end of chapter three, Chambers describes the scene where he consciously accepted communism.  Below is a partial excerpt of his choice.  This is important because Chambers made a conscious decision to become a communist, no one held a gun to his head.  As you read this ask yourself if these paragraphs apply to today’s world:

The dying world of 1925 was without faith, hope, character, understanding of its malady or will to overcome it.  It was dying but it laughed.  And this laughter was not the defiance of a vigor that refuses to know when it is whipped.  It was the loss, by the mind of a whole civilization, of the power to distinguish between reality and unreality, because, ultimately, though I did not know it, it had lost the power to distinguish between good and evil.  This failure I, too, shared with the world of which I was a part.

The dying world had no answer at all to the crisis of the 20th century, and when it was mentioned, and every moral voice in the Western world was shrilling crisis, it cocked an ear of complacent deafness and smiled a smile of blank senility — throughout history, the smile of those whom the executioner waits.

Only in Communism had I found any practical answer at all to the crisis, and the will to make that answer work.

I think this is a very important passage.  How many young activist might sit down and think these same thoughts?  How many young environmentalists might yearn for a strong government that could simply force global warming solutions on the country?  Remember, Chambers says that he had also failed to see the difference between good and evil.  I think many who think of themselves as socialists or environmentalist have fallen into this trap.  They believe anything is acceptable if it “saves the planet” without recognizing the dangers that road is fraught with.

While the Soviet Union has collapsed, a communist Russia and a communist China are on the rise.  I think the book notes project has shown us that socialism eventually leads to communism.  Who can argue that socialism isn’t on the rise in the West and here in the United States?  We as conservatives must arm ourselves against this.  We must look for those who make the same arguments Chambers did and who begin to draw the same conclusions.  Then we must step in and show those lost souls where they are going wrong, and why conservatism does offer a solution to these problems.

For Next Week. I plan on reading up to section X X I V of Chapter 4.  Have a good week!