Some of you may remember when Hillary Clinton told Today’s Matt Lauer about a “vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband [Bill Clinton] since the day he announced for president.”[1] That was on January 27, 1998.
Right to left: Paul Robeson, his son Paul, Jr, daughter-in-law Marilyn, unidentified woman. Soviet Embassy, Washington, DC, 1951
Nineteen days later, on February 15th, the San Francisco Public Library marked the centennial of Paul Robeson (1898-1976), the American singer and actor, Stalinism’s first global superstar. Among the panelists was Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), Stalinism’s chief American propagandist, also revered by the Left as an historian, who reminisced about Robeson.
Near the end of his remarks at the podium Aptheker—W. E. B. Du Bois’s comrade and literary executor—expressed his hope that the U.S. Postal Service would one day honor Robeson with a postage stamp as, two weeks earlier, it had Du Bois—for the second time.[2]
Du Bois and (on his right) wife Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Nikita Khrushchev in 1951. Khrushchev was then one of Stalin’s advisors, not yet First Secretary.
In 1997 Hillary’s husband established by executive order (13050) the “One America Initiative on Race,” headed by John Hope Franklin.[3] “I have great confidence in him and his committee,” Aptheker predicted. “Nothing but good can come of it.” Actually, nothing at all came out of it except another “report.” It was, however, another step on the road to the South African-style “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions” being planned for us in the Age of Critical Race Theory.
Shortly after my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness was published in 2019, Lloyd Billingsley reviewed it for Frontpage Magazine. John Hamelin commented on his review at the time, but somehow I missed it, and comments are closed. It attempts to defend Aptheker’s scholarly credibility; it warrants an answer.
Hamelin starts off with:
While The Black Jacobins [hereafter, TBJ] is certainly a significant work in its own right and Aptheker’s avoidance in citing it can be considered an example of petty political rivalries, the idea that it somehow demolishes Aptheker’s writings on Black American history is absurd.
It would be absurd, but that’s not what I wrote. It’s not even in the review. The reviewer got it right: “Flood aims to modify the received opinion that Herbert Aptheker was a historian.”
I sure do.
What I argued for in the book, which Hamelin gives no evidence of having read, is that Aptheker’s work cannot be trusted. That doesn’t mean everything Aptheker wrote is a lie. It means that nothing he has written can be taken at face value.
Video interview (February 22, 2021; UK) with Diana West.* In less than an hour, she traces the genesis of her research into Communist subversion via her interest in Islam immediately post-9/11.
“Van Til observed that both the unbeliever and the believer maintain correlative views of continuity (rationalism) and discontinuity (irrationalism), and that these two sets of correlative views stand in contradiction to each other. . . . The Christian holds that God knows and controls all things (resulting in rationality and continuity), which contradicts the non-Christian’s view that reality is an expression of pure chance (resulting in irrationality and discontinuity). The Christian holds that God must reveal Himself and does so with authority over man’s reasoning (stressing discontinuity and ‘irrationality’ or man’s rational inadequacy), which contradicts the non-Christian’s view that reality is controlled and (in principle) completely knowable by the laws of his own mind (stressing rationality and continuity).
A long excerpt from Frame’s The Doctrine of the Christian Life (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing Co., 2008) is freely available online; his exposition of the square of religious opposition is in chapter 4, 42ff. What follows is my rendering (part transcription, part paraphrase, done at least ten years ago) of Greg L. Bahnsen’s interpretation of Frame’s idea. My source is Bahnsen’s lecture “Disarming Worldviews” in his Loving Godwith Your Whole Mind series GB1413. (Clicking the link will take you to a file you may play or download.)
* * *
Greg L. Bahnsen (1948-1995)
There’s an antithesis between the Christian worldview and the non-Christian worldview, but at least they have being worldviews in common. Every worldview incorporates considerations of transcendence and elements of immanence.
A worldview’s elements of transcendence are the absolutes, authority, and universals it depends on, all of which are prior to experience. They are the controls that provide unity, continuity, and order for experience.
What is absolute is not part of transient experience, but renders the latter intelligible and therefore must transcend that person-relative, changing, and qualified experience.
Every appeal to authority relativizes momentary thinking. If I claim to live according to a principle, then that principle, and not any thought that happens to cross my mind, functions as an authority for me. That standard, external to my mind and not a product of it, is that to which my thinking must conform.
No philosopher looks upon the world as a realm of utter diversity, so it must notice “commonalities” and employ universals to refer to those commonalities in order to conceive and talk about the diversity he or she does find. When we analyze the reality presented in our experience, we use universals that necessarily transcend the experience to be analyzed.
Gordon supplied the (for me) elusive passage in Insight where Lonergan elaborates on the role of those marks in human knowing. The narrowing of my search to a half-dozen pages was a godsend, for I would have never made the time to comb the 748 pages of the Longmans edition I’ve used since 1978. In either edition the textual “address” of this portion of Insight is Chapter XVII, “Metaphysics as Dialectic,” Section 3, “The Truth of Interpretation,” Part 7 (or subsection 3.7) “Counterpositions.” In the original edition, it comprises pages 581-86.
Before dipping into that pregnant passage, let me review the problem the previous post touched on. It’s theological. Or rather, it’s a hermeneutical problem governed by theological commitments. My point of departure was Gordon H. Clark’s epistemology, which he believed his commitment to the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) logically demanded he adopt.
According to Clark, human knowledge is restricted to the propositions that one either reads in Holy Scripture or can validly infer therefrom. That was Clark’s axiom, his absolute, nondemonstrable starting point. All other beliefs, even if true, are at best opinion if not so stated in or deducible “by good and necessary consequence” (WCF I:VI) from Scripture.
My question continues to be: how did Gordon Clark access the propositions of Scripture? He was adamant that ink marks on a Bible’s white paper pages (or pixels on a computer screen) convey nothing to the mind. The Holy Spirit, however, uses those marks to “stimulate” or occasion the divinely intended proposition in the believer’s mind.
Clark was aware of the issue. As he formulated and rebutted a criticism:
Don’t you have to read the Bible? Well do I know the objections that this [ideal of axiomatization of Biblical propositions] immediately raises. Evidentialist apologists and secular philosophies alike exclaim, “But that assumes the point at issue; you are begging the question; you are arguing in a circle.” The reply to this objection should be obvious. The opponents, both secular and religious, assume the authority of experience, the inerrancy of sensation, the validity of induction. But this assumes the point at issue, this begs the question, and the one is as circular as the other.[1]
Trump supporters, who vastly outnumbered security, could have “stormed” the Capitol building, but didn’t. They had the means and opportunity, but no motive. January 6, 2021
President Trump brushed aside the notion of running again in four years. If the theft of the 2020 general election stands, why wouldn’t the thieves do it again?
In Georgia, the crooked machines that shifted votes away from him eight weeks ago shifted them yesterday to give Democrats control of the Senate. Right under our noses. Should we expect different effects from similar causes four years from now?
Trade Secretary Peter Navarro summarized with great clarity evidence that widespread, results-altering electoral and voter fraud occurred. It’s enough to show probable cause to investigate apparent interstate criminal conspiracy (if there’s ever been such a thing). Navarro’s case remains as unrefuted as it is unexamined.
Trump said “You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.” And when theft is proven, shouldn’t something analogous to asset forfeiture apply? Traces of performance-enhancing drugs cost athletes who ingest them their medals. Drug kingpins lose their homes and cars.
Should political actors who rip off 74 million voters occupy their ill-gotten offices?
Trump’s attorney Rudolph Giuliani tirelessly marshaled the evidence before cameras, at risk to his stellar reputation, but it’s been systematically ignored.
Not only by scores of jurists, who are simply not interested in it and who concoct one erudite rationale after another to evade its force.
Not only by a militant leftist media who for years fantasized about a non-existent Russia-Trump conspiracy, while ignoring massive evidence of Chinese Communist Party-Biden Family collusion .
Ben Garrison, “The Back Stabbers”
But some of Trump’s so-called friends have outdone jurists and pundits by stabbing him in the back.
Martin Luther King memorably lamented the silence of friends, but the fair-weather variety that bedevil Trump are profiles in cowardice.
Jeff Sessions’s pathetic recusal led the way. It was followed by Mitt Romney’s impeachment vote and Brian Kemp’s refusal to call the Georgia legislature into session to weigh evidence of fraud there.
State legislatures certified electors chosen in violation of their own state laws, thereby violating the U.S. Constitution. They’re complicit in the theft.
Some of them, however, realizing and regretting their error, petitioned VP Mike Pence, President of the Senate, whose office it is to open the envelope and accept or object to the votes, to send the matter back to them for ten days. That’s all Pence had to do. He didn’t have to assume the role of One-man Decider of the Election.
Instead, he waxed sanctimoniously, and irrelevantly, about his alleged inability to object to electors chosen unconstitutionally. His blather about counting all, but only, legal votes turned out to be just that.
The half million peaceable assemblers at the Ellipse on January 6th represented Trump’s 74 million voters. They’re now being smeared as “insurrectionists” by the moral equivalent of Der Stürmer, a Nazi rag that didn’t merely lie—as Pravda and Izvestia did daily under Stalin—but also slandered and defamedmillions of innocent people.
What is to be done?, Lenin famously asked. Should workers fight only to improve their economic well-being? Or also to rid the country of Czarist tyranny? (Yes, he replaced it with another.)
Should we naively continue run candidates in electoral systems that have no integrity ? How has that worked out?
Yes, we prefer deliberation to violence. But the other side is interested in vengeance—state-directed or otherwise—not deliberation over regular order.
And vengeance not only against Trump, but also his supporters who are being slandered indiscriminately and collectively in the public mind for the misdeeds of a few.
Regarding election integrity, there’s a case to be made for 100% paper ballots. Nothing online. I suggest the same goes for what is to be done about the coup.
In the wake of the Secure the Steal movement’s success, ought we not conclude that the Constitution is a dead letter, a tissue of instructions for ceremonies which the mendacious and vindictive perform to lend their crimes an air of legitimacy?
As the Deep State decides on their course of violence against the people who voted for Trump, its corporate, media, and congressional puppets decry violence (which they call “mostly peaceful” when BLM and Antifa perpetrate it).
Patriotic Americans outnumber their enemies, but are not yet strategically positioned to crush the latter. How might they get there?
Again, ask yourself, family members, and friends what is to be done, but before you answer, keep the conversation offline.
Trump has been compared to Lincoln. What we may need at this hour, however, is a George Washington.
While reading The Presbyterian Philosopher, Doug Douma’s authorized biography of Gordon Haddon Clark, I was struck by this 1962 lecture snippet:
. . . ink marks on a paper, or sounds in the air, the noise I’m making, never teach anybody anything. This is good Augustinianism. And Protestantism is supposed to be Augustinian, at least it was in its initiation. And it was the most unfortunate event that Thomas Aquinas came in and replaced Augustinianism with Aristotelianism and empiricism which has been an affliction ever since. But the point is that ink marks on a paper, and the sound of a voice, never generates any idea at all. And Augustine’s solution of it is that the Magister is Christ. Christ is the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. This not a matter of regeneration. This is a matter of knowledge. And Christ enlightens the unregenerate in this sense just as well as the regenerate. If an unregenerate man learns anything at all, he learns it from Jesus Christ and not from ink marks on paper.[1]
Bernard J. F. Lonergan, SJ (1904-1984)
Now, whom did these remarks put me in mind of? Why, Bernard Lonergan, S.J., the great transcendental Thomist, steeped in the Aristotelian tradition:
“Reading categories into” is a particular application of the great principle that you know by taking a look at what’s out there. Either it is out there or it is not; and the man who sees what is out there is right and the other fellow reads his own mind into what is out there. That is a fundamental error on what the exegete or interpreter does. What’s out there are black marks on white paper in a certain order. And if the exegete or interpreter gives you anything distinct, in any way different from those black marks on white paper in the same order, then it is due to his personal experience, his personal intelligence, and his personal judgment, or it is due to his belief in what someone else told him.[2]
“All-Negro Comics” (1947), the first such book “to be drawn by Negro artists and peopled entirely by Negro characters” (Time Magazine).
Election integrity, or rather the lack thereof, is the topic of the day. Some Americans are now reflecting on how we might avoid social conflagration, even secession.
Fifty-seven years ago my late friend Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), the great economist, political philosopher, and author of Conceived in Liberty (a five-volume history of the American republic’s founding) pursued the logic of revolutionary resistance to oppression in the essay appended below.
Its relevance to our time should be clear. There is no better example of Rothbard’s historical insight, politically incorrect frankness (which would get him “canceled” today), adherence to principle, and polemical adroitness. It should go without saying that this anticommunist’s citations of communists implies no endorsement of their illiberal program (but I can’t take any chances these days).
Some readers may need to be reminded, or told for the first time, that those who identify as “African Americans” are descendants of those who once preferred “Black,” “Afro-American,” “Negro,” and “Colored.” (See this post’s initial illustration above.)
“The Negro Revolution” appeared in the Summer 1963 issue of The New Individualist Review, a classical liberal-libertarian scholarly journal edited by John P. McCarthy (another friend), Robert Schuettinger, and John Weicher; its book review editor was Ronald Hamowy. Besides Rothbard, NIR’s distinguished contributors included Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Russell Kirk, Ludwig von Mises, Richard Weaver, and Henry Hazlitt (a far from exhaustive list).
On the 28th of August in the summer of ’63, millions of Americans heard and saw Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his memorable “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I’m happy to promote Rothbard’s essay on the eve of another march in that city, one that portends another revolution.
—Anthony Flood
The Negro Revolution
Murray N. Rothbard
In his thirties; he wrote this article when he was 37.
DESPITE INCREASING USE of the term, it is doubtful that most Americans have come to recognize the Negro crisis as a revolution, possessed of all the typical characteristics and stigmata of a revolutionary movement and a revolutionary situation. Undoubtedly, Americans, when they think of “revolution,” only visualize some single dramatic act, as if they would wake up one day to find an armed mob storming the Capitol. Yet this is rarely the way revolutions occur. Revolution does not mean that some sinister little group sit around plotting “overthrow of the government by force and violence,” and then one day take up their machine guns and make the attempt. This kind of romantic adventurism has little to do with genuine revolution.
Otis Q. Sellers 1901-1992, in his Los Angeles office and studio, probably early 1980s.
“If a student advances, changes, corrects, or clarifies his position as the result of the truth he finds, it will leave a trail of discarded ideas and abandoned positions. But this is a price that must be paid if we would “buy the truth” (Proverbs 23:23); a price that is all the more difficult to pay when one has thousands of books or pamphlets in print; a price that cannot be paid by anyone who has pledged eternal fidelity to a static system of theology. . . . If the reader of these lines is seeking an authority who speaks infallibly and never needs to change, I am not that man. If he desires fellowship with a student whose life is devoted to perpetual and progressive Bible study, then come along with me. I may probably be of some help to you. You probably can be of some help to me.”—Otis Q. Sellers, 1951
I urge you to become familiar with the Bible, and to have it at hand so that it can become your compass pointing out the road to follow.
To my surprise and delight, my friend has more recently expressed respect and even admiration for the dedication to and submission before Scripture that Otis Q. Sellers exemplified, responses based on what I told him about how Sellers resisted the urge to deny the truth he was unearthing, even at the cost of leaving a pastorate in the middle of the Great Depression. (He had been ordained as a Baptist minister, but could no longer teach what that denomination believed about “baptism.” He moved into his parents’ attic with his wife and young daughter.)
Surprise, I say, because my friend is a traditional Catholic. His confessional commitment is essentially Benedict’s. Delight, because it means Sellers’s zeal for the truth is evident even to some who can’t accept the conclusions his studies led him to.
(That’s probably because Sellers’s conclusions do not cohere with what Catholic teaching authority holds; which understanding, to be fair, my friend does not believe contradicts the meaning of Scripture. He is free, of course, to test that understanding against Sellers’s labors, or not. In my view, one can trace all disagreements among Christians back to their divergent interpretations of Scripture and the weight they give one non-divinely inspired person’s interpretation of it over another’s.) Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers: A study in integrity”
Last December 15th in Birdland, 1949-1965: Hard Bop Mecca, I marked the 70th anniversary of the opening of that legendary Jazz club on Manhattan’s Broadway off 52nd Street. Over the weekend I wondered what else was going on that year, but not the trivia one can learn from Wikipedia, such as:
President Harry S. Truman’s inauguration in January
Astronomer Fred Hoyle’s coining of “big bang” (a term of disparagement) in March
Hamlet’s Best Picture Oscar win later that month
The opening of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in February at the Morosco (six blocks south of Birdland’s near-future site)
The Soviet Union’s successful A-bomb test in August and Truman’s sharing that news a month later
Twin Communist victories: the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on the first of October and of the German Democratic Republic a week later.
World War Two was in the rearview mirror. but the Cold War with its threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction was straight ahead.
No, I was remembering what writers who influenced me over the past fifty years were doing in 1949. Most of the embedded links below will take you to posts that elaborate upon that influence. Continue reading “1949: What were my influencers doing?”
Shortly after my 
Welcome to my shortest blog post to date.
This sequel to 
Last December 15th in