Prometheus 6

In all the obituarial pieces I have read today about the sainted William F. Buckley, Jr. there has been nary a mention that Buckley long supported state sanctioned racial segregation and opposed, among other things, the Supreme Court's 9 to 0 decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. If you are white and live long enough in America you can outlive your past. That's one of the reasons why it is good to have have black folks around. We're like elephants. We don't forget.

The following paragraphs appeared in a 1957 editorial in the National Review the conservative magazine co-founded by Buckely:

The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. …

National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way; and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.

Many so-called liberals who write for the mainstream press try to defend this and other statements by declaring that Buckley himself was not a bigot just blind to bigotry. They never offer, however, any explantion as to how someone who is simply blind to the bigoty of others could have written those words.