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Monumental Hubris (Chinese laborers worked on MLK memorial)
Human Events ^ | September 5, 2011 | Daniel J. Flynn

Posted on 09/07/2011 7:13:47 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks

Will work for national honor.

We don’t know if the Chinese stonemasons who built the new Martin Luther King memorial got the job by shoving a sign bearing that message into the faces of its overseers. We know only that unpaid, nonunion, foreign nationals built the massive shrine on the Mall. They toiled for “national honor” and “to bring glory to the Chinese people,” one of them explained to an investigator hired by the DC-area stonemasons promised the job.

Happy Labor Day!

Martin Luther King died in Memphis supporting a strike by the city’s garbagemen. So it’s not a stretch to assume that he would be horrified that imported workers making the Chinese minimum wage constructed an American tribute to him. Hurricane Irene postponing the monument’s opening ceremonies last weekend, and an earthquake moving a service scheduled for the National Cathedral, suggest that maybe the Great Shop Steward in the Sky wasn’t pleased, either.

The National Martin Luther King Memorial Foundation, like those who commissioned the pyramids, hope future visitors to their stone temple won’t wonder how it was built. Alas, the slave-labor scandal is just the most discussed way that an honor has become an insult to Martin Luther King.

King’s children charged the foundation building the memorial for the use of their father’s words and image in the project’s fundraising. A clue to their indifference to history came when Bernice King, at an event celebrating the new memorial, noted her father’s place on the National Mall not far from Abraham Lincoln, “remembered for signing the Declaration of Independence.” Confirmation came when they skipped history for economics by burdening the overburdened organizers of the monument with an $800,000 bill.

Is that why the foundation had to go cheap on labor?

Martin Luther King had a dream. His children have a scheme.

One of the quotes attributed to King etched into the memorial actually comes from Theodore Parker​, an antebellum reformer who helped bankroll John Brown’s Kansas activities. Should Parker’s descendants seek their cut from the King family?

Another “quote”—I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness—is a cut-and-paste job compressing several sentences into one. Unsurprisingly, the words that King didn’t say do not reflect King’s sentiment, which was the opposite of a congratulatory self-eulogy. “The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King​ look like an arrogant twit,” poet Maya Angelou, a consultant to the memorial, reacted. “He was anything but that.”

You get what you pay for. When Chinese Communists write your history, don’t be surprised when your history is neither yours nor history. Commissars vanish from the picture and words get erased from the quote. Outsourcing reportedly saved the project $8 million. It cost the remembrance its integrity and authenticity.

The arrogance of rewriting history to fit a granite slab is matched by hubristic art and architecture. The monument’s social realist style meshes as well in neoclassical Washington, DC as an igloo might in King’s hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. Lei Yixin, a Chinese sculptor known for a cult-of-personality statue of Mao Zedong​, crafted the centerpiece of the new memorial. Social realism appealed to mid-century totalitarian narcissists, who ridiculed a deity above them as a blasphemy against man, demanding that we accept the truly ridiculous idea that we should worship men as gods. But a man of god can never be a god of men.

The stone relief may have nailed King’s image. It is a grotesque distortion of his soul.

As off-putting as entombing a liberator’s likeness in a style evoking the twentieth century’s great oppressors is the not-so-subtle juxtaposition of this King with the King, the King of Kings. Visitors emerge from a “Mountain of Despair” to glimpse a “Stone of Hope,” a journey from King’s struggles to our national redemption. Along the way, those making the pilgrimage to the Washington, DC holy place pass through a 14-station Inscription Wall.

Why not cut the pretense and just call it the Via Dolorosa​?

Eric Hoffer famously wrote: “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” The MLK temple is a stone-cold reminder that the civil rights movement has become all three.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; Government; News/Current Events; US: District of Columbia
KEYWORDS: chicomms; chineese; civilrights; communist; maozedong; martinlutherking; memorial; mlk; monument; outsourcing; prc; redchina; socialistrealism

1 posted on 09/07/2011 7:13:56 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
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To: 3D-JOY; abner; Abundy; AGreatPer; Albion Wilde; AliVeritas; alisasny; ALlRightAllTheTime; ...

Our government seems somewhat less than enthusiastic about getting Americans working again /understatement

PING!


2 posted on 09/07/2011 7:15:33 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks (It's the Tea Party's fault!)
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To: Tolerance Sucks Rocks

And King looks vaguely Chinese in the pictures I have seen.

This should have been designed and built by Americans, black and white.


3 posted on 09/07/2011 7:19:09 PM PDT by DBrow (Oh the Huge Manatee!)
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To: DBrow

Dr. Maotin Luther King...


4 posted on 09/07/2011 7:38:23 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks (It's the Tea Party's fault!)
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To: Tolerance Sucks Rocks

When I saw the statue I was reminded of Chinese propaganda in which Mao is shown in the center of a picture leading the workers and peasants towards a shining future. Just sayin’.


5 posted on 09/07/2011 7:43:53 PM PDT by 17th Miss Regt
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To: Tolerance Sucks Rocks

Why is there now a giant statue of Chairman Mao on the Mall?


6 posted on 09/07/2011 7:53:32 PM PDT by kaehurowing
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To: Tolerance Sucks Rocks

A gift from Chinese communist workers in honor of the most famous American communist. Makes sense to me.


7 posted on 09/07/2011 8:09:19 PM PDT by crusader71
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To: Tolerance Sucks Rocks

Just as an fyi, 0bama and his communists buddies built the monument for one of their own:

King attended the Highlander Folk School which the Communist Party operated at Monteagle, Tennessee. Identified in a picture is King, Abner Berry, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and writer for the “Daily Worker,” Aubrey Williams, Communist Party agent and president of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) a red front organizing blacks in southern states. Miles Horton, head of the Highlander Folk School, King was listed on the schools’ letterhead as a “sponsor.”

The Highlander school was financed by the Julius Rosenwald Fund. At one time Rosenwald headed Sears Roebuck Co. He spent $22 million financing civil rights groups. His daughter Edith Stern continued to give money to the SCEF and Highlander Folk School after her father’s death. Her husband, Alfred stern of New Orleans, fled to Russia just before he was to be arrested on spy charges.


8 posted on 09/07/2011 8:18:28 PM PDT by Coleus
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To: Tolerance Sucks Rocks

The irony


9 posted on 09/07/2011 8:53:18 PM PDT by tsowellfan (Perry/Bachmann 2012)
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To: Coleus

Dang!


10 posted on 09/07/2011 9:30:30 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks (It's the Tea Party's fault!)
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To: crusader71

King is virtually always presented as a man dedicated to arguing against racial biases. His lefty ties — even the very union activity he was cheering on at the time he was shot — are not well known.


11 posted on 09/07/2011 9:35:07 PM PDT by HiTech RedNeck (There's gonna be a Redneck Revolution! (See my freep page) [rednecks come in many colors])
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To: Tolerance Sucks Rocks

Paging Trumka...


12 posted on 09/07/2011 10:10:53 PM PDT by Army Air Corps (Four fried chickens and a coke)
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To: tsowellfan

Well, Obummer is the Outsourcer in Chief...


13 posted on 09/07/2011 10:11:54 PM PDT by Army Air Corps (Four fried chickens and a coke)
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To: Tolerance Sucks Rocks; DBrow

Why should Americans work when their fellow citizens provide them with food, housing, medical care, education, and even a “free” cell phone? At least the Chinese are willing to work.


14 posted on 09/07/2011 10:14:11 PM PDT by Pining_4_TX ( The state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else. ~)
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To: Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Martin Luther King admired W.E.B. DuBois for his decision to join the Communist Party USA;

We cannot talk of Dr. Du Bois without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life. Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years. It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist. Our irrational, obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.'

Martin Luther King Jr address at Freedomways celebration of Du Bois centennial, 1968.[11]

source: KEYWIKI

DU BOIS IMAGES

15 posted on 09/07/2011 11:46:28 PM PDT by Fred Nerks (fair dinkum!)
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To: Tolerance Sucks Rocks

16 posted on 09/08/2011 2:44:50 AM PDT by 1010RD (First, Do No Harm)
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To: Tolerance Sucks Rocks

Every one a dreamer pointing the way forward to a future that simply never comes to pass. Perhaps it is the philosophy underlining the dream?

17 posted on 09/08/2011 2:53:36 AM PDT by 1010RD (First, Do No Harm)
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To: Pining_4_TX

American artists and sculptors and their interns (paid or unpaid) would have loved to have worked on a memorial to MLK.

Without them, we have a giant hunk of junk on the Mall.


18 posted on 09/08/2011 3:46:22 AM PDT by miss marmelstein (Run, Sarah, Run! Please!)
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To: Fred Nerks

Interesting quotes. MLK in the late 60s was not the young preacher of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Sad.


19 posted on 09/08/2011 3:48:51 AM PDT by miss marmelstein (Run, Sarah, Run! Please!)
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To: Tolerance Sucks Rocks

and if they would have given him more negro features, they would then complain that they did that on purpose...you can’t please everybody.


20 posted on 09/09/2011 4:51:33 PM PDT by Coleus
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