What blacks contribute to civilization

Did you know this? I didn’t. I just came upon it in Wikipedia’s article on Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King’s successor as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference:

On the eve of the Apollo 11 launch, July 15, 1969, Abernathy arrived at Cape Canaveral with several hundred members of the poor people to protest spending of government space exploration, while many Americans remained poor. He was met by Thomas O. Paine, the Administrator of NASA, whom he told that in the face of such suffering, space flight represented an inhuman priority and funds should be spent instead to “feed the hungry, clothe the naked, tend the sick, and house the homeless.” Mr. Paine told Abernathy that the advances in space exploration were child’s play compared to the tremendously difficult human problems of society, and told him that “if we could solve the problems of poverty by not pushing the button to launch men to the moon tomorrow, then we would not push that button.” On the day of the launch, Dr. Abernathy led a small group of protesters to the restricted guest viewing area of the space center and chanted, “We are not astronauts, but we are people.”

So there you have it. One of the greatest achievements in history, the first manned flight to the moon, and the most prestigious black civil rights organization, the SCLC, wanted it not to take place, because they thought the money it cost could be better spent on transfer payments to blacks. And that is all that blacks as an organized community have to contribute to our civilization: endless complaints about white injustice to blacks, and endless demands for the wealth and goods that white people have produced, and that blacks are incapable of producing. Plus a third “contribution” not brought out in this incident: endless threats of violence and riots if the blacks don’t get their way.

The black blackmail and dragging down of white civilization will continue, until whites stand up, name it for what it is, and say, “No more.”

But since there is zero indication that whites will do that in any foreseeable future (to the contrary, as we can see in the George Zimmerman affair, whites, including many “conservatives,” are becoming more, not less attuned to the worldview of “Black-Run America”), the black blackmail and dragging down of our civilization will continue and intensify, until the civilization is ruined.

- end of initial entry -

Karl D. writes:

I had to laugh. I went to VFR and saw the entry “What blacks contribute to civilization” and mistakenly hit a link on my web bar that took me to the Daily Mail. This was the first thing I saw. It just made me laugh out loud.

Timothy A. writes:

I wonder if our first black President just happened on that same Wikipedia article as well? The Obama administration is proposing a 20 percent cut in NASA’s space exploration budget next year, effectively crippling efforts in that area.

Ken Hechtman writes:

I wouldn’t say that opposing space exploration on anti-poverty grounds is specifically a black thing. It’s a far-left thing in general and it always has been, as long as there’s been a space program. To be more specific, it was a New Left thing. The Old Left was all for science and exploration. The New Left was always suspicious of them. [LA replies: You’re underscoring my point. The New Left was a marginal movement among whites. The SCLC and other civil rights organizations virtually represented black America as such. The SCLC was King’s organization, and thus the NASA protest was in the name of, and under the sacred aegis of black America’s pre-eminent fallen leader.]

Phil Ochs wrote “Spaceman” to protest the space program back in 1965.

More recently, in 2006, the Congressional Progressive Caucus killed off NASA’s Origins Program.

They knew they couldn’t get the votes to zero out the Iraq War funding which was what they really wanted to do. Instead they went after the one thing the Bush Administration was doing right. Origins was the most important thing NASA had ever done and it wasn’t that expensive, not compared to manned missions, and the Progressives killed it out of pure spite. NASA carried the program on the books as “unfunded” for five years. I assume that means some number of engineers were working without salaries for that long. But last year NASA finally admitted Origins was dead.

Catherine H. writes:

I must admit I agree with at least part of Mr. Abernathy’s stated position: I have long regarded the space program as a phenomenal waste of money and manpower. Of course, I do not think welfare would have been a better drain for those funds to be poured down, either. I think the money wasted by the space program should never have been taken from the taxpayers in the first place. I cannot see any value in what you call “one of the greatest achievements in history,” because I cannot see any way in which it enriched Christian civilization, nourished faith, or contributed to the common good.

Otherwise, I agree with your assessment of the black contribution to society.

LA replies:

But Western civilization has never been co-terminous with Christianity. As I always put it, Christianity is the center of our civilization, not the whole of it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 15, 2012 02:27 PM | Send