{"id":20044,"date":"2012-01-22T01:22:48","date_gmt":"2012-01-22T01:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=20044"},"modified":"2017-02-11T22:24:58","modified_gmt":"2017-02-11T22:24:58","slug":"tale-of-a-seditionist-the-lawrence-dennis-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=20044","title":{"rendered":"Tale of a \u2018Seditionist\u2019\u2013The Lawrence Dennis Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tale of a \u2018Seditionist\u2019\u2013The Lawrence Dennis Story<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

AntiWar.com<\/a>
\n2000-04-29<\/p>\n

Justin Raimondo<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

War infects and weakens our republican form of government, spreads social and political diseases throughout the body politic\u2014but is, as Randolph Bourne<\/a> put it, \u201cthe health of the State.\u201d The State, in wartime, is glorified and empowered: the militarization of society means that all resources are mobilized and placed at the disposal of government, and all dissent, however meek and mild, must be utterly discredited if not entirely snuffed out. In wartime the benevolent mask of the \u201cdemocratic\u201d state invariably slips, and the true face of repression is revealed in all its leering ugliness…<\/p>\n

…WORLD WAR II AND THE HIGH ART OF DEMONIZATION<\/strong><\/p>\n

The infamous Moscow Trials<\/a> of the 1930s, staged by Stalin<\/a> to cement his hold on absolute power, were the model for the effort undertaken by the US government during the war years to not only discredit its opponents but also to jail them, if at all possible. The massive roundup of Japanese, German, and Italian-Americans was a corollary to the relentless propaganda campaign that singled them out as a \u201cfifth column<\/a>\u201d coiled and ready to strike. This massive smear campaign was also directed at the large and combative antiwar movement of the time, the America First Committee<\/a>, as well as its leading spokesmen: Charles A. Lindbergh<\/a>, John T. Flynn<\/a>, and \u201cisolationists\u201d in every walk of life were singled out by the War Party and viciously attacked\u2014and this was true especially in the arts, from the actress Lillian Gish<\/a> to the poet Robinson Jeffers<\/a>, and in publishing, where the editorial staffs of the major American newspapers and magazines were purged of virtually all \u201cisolationists.\u201d When war finally came, the War Party took its terrible revenge on all who had held out the hope of peace\u2014and none suffered more than Lawrence Dennis<\/a>, who has yet to finally receive the honor that is his due.<\/p>\n

THE OUTSIDER<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lawrence Dennis was an outsider in a movement of outsiders, a unique and largely solitary figure whose career as a writer and notorious \u201cseditionist\u201d embodies the tragedy and bravery of the Old Right, the pre-World War II<\/a> \u201cAmerica First<\/a>\u201d generation of conservative intellectuals and activists. In many important ways, Dennis is the prototype of modern \u201cpaleo-conservatives.\u201d His career as a controversialist and the leading American nationalist intellectual of his time charts the rise and fall of the Old Right \u2013 and, perhaps, holds a lesson for us today. Born in Atlanta in 1893, Dennis had what historian Justus Doenecke<\/a> describes as \u201ca varied career,\u201d which included a stint as a \u201cboy evangelist.\u201d A recent article on Dennis in The Baffler<\/em>\u2014in which the author, transcending his own leftist politics, seems to appreciate if not fully understand his subject\u2014informs us that he was born Lonnie Lawrence Dennis, adopted by a mulatto<\/a> couple, and was undoubtedly of mixed race: his mother was black, but his father was in all probability white. To say that young Lonnie was a precocious kid is a definite understatement: by the age of five he was preaching before large audiences in Atlanta, and was soon bringing the Word to congregations around the country as \u201cThe Mulatto Boy Evangelist,\u201d and taking his road show as far as England. He published his autobiography at the ripe old age of ten.<\/p>\n

…THE BLACKEST IRONY
\n<\/strong>
\nFor Dennis to be anointed leader of a racist fifth column in America was just another irony in a life rich with them. For a supposed fellow-traveler of Hitler<\/a>, Dennis hardly fit the Aryan mold. Charles A. Lindbergh<\/a>, for whom Dennis is said to have written a few speeches, described him as having a \u201crugged,\u201d dark-complexioned look that made him seem as if he would be more \u201cat home at a frontier trading post.\u201d Dennis\u2019s archenemy, the notorious agent provocateur John Roy Carlson<\/a>, noted that \u201cDennis\u2019 hair is woolly, dark and kinky. The texture of his skin is unusually dark and the eyes of Hitler\u2019s intellectual keynoter of \u2018Aryanism\u2019 are a rich deep brown, his lips fleshy.\u201d This is the measure of what Lawrence had to endure: the man Life<\/em> magazine called, in a picture caption, \u201cAmerica\u2019s No. 1 intellectual Fascist . . . brain-truster for the forces of appeasement\u201d and Hitler\u2019s alleged pawn was almost certainly an African-American….<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tale of a \u2018Seditionist\u2019\u2013The Lawrence Dennis Story AntiWar.com 2000-04-29 Justin Raimondo War infects and weakens our republican form of government, spreads social and political diseases throughout the body politic\u2014but is, as Randolph Bourne put it, \u201cthe health of the State.\u201d The State, in wartime, is glorified and empowered: the militarization of society means that all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,459,1467,8,26,20],"tags":[9303,9304,1925,969],"class_list":["post-20044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-antiwar-com","tag-justin-raimondo","tag-lawrence-dennis","tag-world-war-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20044"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51533,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20044\/revisions\/51533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}