By Rick Landry, Corvallis
With all due respect owing one of our nation’s approaching octogenarians, I must respond to David Stover’s assertion that “your party (Democrats) own the KKK as you started that organization.” Mr. Stover clearly states an opinion, but without providing the basis or a historically sound foundation from which his accusation arises. Lacking a credible or verifiable source, his argument is further weakened.
And, as I so often do when replying to local right authors who dominate this LTE forum, I must point out that appealing to an unidentified, unqualified, biased or fabricated source is a logical fallacy: the fallacy of false attribution. The use of logical fallacies, a mainstay of the Dunning-Kruger set, simply invalidates one’s reasoning.
Not only is this gentleman broadcasting misleading information gleaned from strongly-biased sources who have a pony in the parade, he is utilizing a favorite tactic of the Vichy Republican’s sect: reverse logic. The quasi-Orwellian use of reverse logic, not altogether unlike the ‘reverse discrimination’ movement of a few decades past, is a tactic whose intent appears to be to reinforce prejudice, and the inherent perseverance bias which bigotry and racism feed upon.
This is the same skewed and conflated thinking currently on display on rural roadside billboards in Arkansas, which read: “Anti-racist is code for Anti-white.” Of course, this particular sloganeering is a stark example of employing logical fallacies, and has characteristics of three common fallacies: circular reasoning, begging the question, and the reductio ad absurdum fallacy. At the core of every logical fallacy is flawed thinking.
Now, let me attempt to set the historical record straight, without belaboring the subject: all incarnations of the Klan have been formed by white supremacist hate groups. The first KKK, founded in Pulaski, Tennessee on Dec. 24, 1865, was created by six former officers of the Confederate army. The second KKK was founded in Stone Mountain, Georgia, by a man named William Simmons. Simmons’s Klan was closely-based upon Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”; it was Simmons who introduced the white costumes and burned crosses (nice touch, Bill!). And finally, the third KKK arose in the 50’s and 60’s as a response to the civil rights movement and desegregation. Think ‘George Wallace, and Birmingham, to place things in perspective on our time continuum.
In point of fact, it wasn’t until we had the Internet in 2000 that the first counter-accusations that the Democrats were ‘behind’ the formation of the KKK is found. And of course, we can now track it to a right-wing message board thread.
With today’s internet atmosphere, which more closely resembles ‘asocial media’ than social media, it’s very easy for an initial embellishment to quickly snowball into both an apparent authoritative fact as well as to become a popular partisan bludgeon, here being wielded by our aged friend and neighbor in Stevensville. We should learn to resist that temptation and to be suspect of partisan and ideological uses of history.