Reading the Black Commentator’s essay (below) takes me back to those carefree days of 1969, where I discover this from the late, great, lamented I.F. Stone:
“The so-called Southern strategy, which has led wags here to call the Nixon White House, Uncle Strom’s Cabin, is more than Southern. It aims to mobilize the smug against the concerned, the unthinking wealthy against the despairing poor, bewildered middle age against idealistic youth, and bigoted whites against desperate blacks.
“This strategy may indeed put Wallace out of the running in 1972, as it is intended to do, and let Nixon ride triumphantly back into power on an undivided Know Nothing vote. But the cost in social turmoil will be high, and the price may make the U.S. in 1976 a police state like South Africa. Here as there the price of racial repression must prove to be everybody’s freedom.
“Seen through the eyes of the blacks, the events of the year end are sinister. The effort to get rid of the 1965 Voting Act and to slow down school desegregation looks like a second post-Reconstruction era, an attempt to solidify white supremacy again in the South.
“Law-and-order seems to translate itself in this Administration only into black repression. In New York City a U.S. Attorney who has been vigorously prosecuting white-collar crime is under White House pressure to get out just as his investigations touch financial interests involved in Saigon black marketing and the Mafia’s Swiss bank operations. Crime in the banks arouse no such passion as crime in the streets.”
Posted by Jerome Doolittle at December 12, 2003 03:42 PM