As I’ve been saying for years:
The Civil Rights Movement was a series of cynical, manipulative, carefully plotted publicity stunts which immunized the even more cynical, manipulative and carefully plotted publicity stunts we now put up with every day, but for increasingly idiotic causes:
The architects of Freedom Summer were shrewd, pragmatic veterans of a brutal street fight … they wagered that if white students from prominent Northern families were arrested, beaten and illegally jailed—as they fully expected they would be—the federal government would finally recognize its responsibility to intervene in Mississippi.
The goal, explained (organizer Bob) Moses in advance of the summer project, was to create a political crisis. “Only when metal has been brought to white heat can it be shaped and molded,” he said. John Lewis … predicted that if white students were placed in harm’s way, “the federal government will have to take over the state … out of this conflict, this division and chaos, will come something positive.”
Though Moses rejected the charge that … (they) planned “to get some people killed so the federal government will move into Mississippi,” he also maintained that “no privileged group in history has ever given up anything without some kind of blood sacrifice.”
And if two of them were “privileged” white Jews, all the better, right guys?
