David McElroy

Charging someone with racism has become the ultimate trump card for almost anyone in modern American society. So what do we do when the person playing the race card is simply a moron who’s seeing something that isn’t there?

In the case of the University of Alabama’s student newspaper, the answer was to apologize anyway and promise to be even more un-racist. In doing so, the paper is bowing to idiots and promising to self-censor in an effort to make it harder for morons to misunderstand what they’re looking at.

Let me back up.

After Alabama’s last-second loss to hated arch-rival Auburn in a football game nine days ago, the Crimson-White ran an editorial cartoon that satirizes the current tendency by many to blame the president for anything that goes wrong. The cartoon shows an Alabama player tripping while an Auburn player races by to score the winning touchdown. The caption says, “This is what happens in Obama’s America.” It’s clearly a parody of the graphic memes that say, “Thanks, Obama,” any time something goes wrong in the country.

I don’t think it’s an especially funny cartoon, but it’s probably no worse than what many college-level cartoonists produce. (When I was on staff at the CW many years ago, we had a couple of really excellent cartoonists, so the current work looks amateurish and lazy to me, but that’s a different issue.) Even though I don’t find the cartoon funny, it’s impossible to find racism in the art unless you’re determined to see something that isn’t there.

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If you’re in Fairbanks, Alaska, you can hear me on KFAR-AM Saturday morning at 9 a.m. Alaska time. For those elsewhere, you can listen live online and an archive will be online later if you miss it live. If you’re in the central time zone, as I am, air time is noon Saturday.

I’ll be interviewed on a show called Patriot’s Lament, which specializes in topics of interest to libertarians and anarchists, so this is a rare opportunity to appear on radio with people already family with my political belief system.

In preparation for the show, I’ve been listening to its archives. They’ve recently interviewed some of the real rock stars of the libertarian/anarchist community, people such as Lew Rockwell, Jeffrey Tucker, Tom DiLorenzo, Larkin Rose, Scott Horton and Ben Stone.

It’s a very laid-back show and I’m looking forward to a great conversation. I hope you can join us.

Winners get to write history books. Nelson Mandela was on the right side of history and he also won his struggle. When he died Thursday, he died as a hero to most people.

I don’t know of a soul who’s all sinner or all saint, but history likes to paint with a broad brush. We don’t like to let people be human and see them as a mixture of good and bad. We want to glorify or vilify them. Current history has passed its verdict on Mandela, though. He’s a saint.

I think Mandela was more complicated than that. He was a leader in the movement to free black South Africans from a government that treated them as little better than slaves. He evolved over time into a sophisticated spokesman for his movement. And he was part of negotiating a deal which changed South Africa without the bloodshed that comes so often with struggles such as this.

But some people claim he was a terrorist and a communist, as his detractors said more than 5o years ago. A British historian claimed last year that he had unearthed evidence confirming Mandela’s membership in the communist party in South Africa. And the Soviet Union was widely believed to supply money and other support to further the rebellion in its early years.

Almost anyone who has led a rebellion has been guilty of atrocities or at least allowing terrible things to be done. The British considered the American revolutionaries to be terrorists, although they had slightly different language two centuries ago. (And some of the American revolutionaries certainly adopted terrorist tactics. Read about the man who history remembers as “the Swamp Fox” sometime.)

Your irregular fighter is a terrorist. Mine is a freedom fighter.

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