By Anton Chaitkin [originally published on Substack]
During the Black Lives Matter campaign in 2020, a mob tore down and set fire to the statue of Confederate general Albert Pike that had been standing in Judiciary Square in Washington DC.
Now, President Trump has gotten the National Park Service to restore the statue. It is planned to put it back in its original place this October.
The news media had covered the 2020 mob event as a part of the wave of indiscriminate attacks on History in the name of woke madness.
But this statue has a much deeper significance than what came out at the time it was torn down. This may become a political rallying point in the months ahead.
Albert Pike was the principal founder of the Ku Klux Klan just after the end of the Civil War.
The statue honoring him was dedicated in October 1901, a month after the assassination of William McKinley made Theodore Roosevelt the President.
Teddy Roosevelt and his elite Anglophile friends had long campaigned to crush Abraham Lincoln‘s American System strategic orientation. They acted to swing the United States over into the camp of the British empire, to destroy our reputation as the leader of republics fighting imperialism.
Albert Pike was an elite Northerner who had gone South to stir up anti-American treason. When assassination put Teddy Roosevelt in the White House, the erection of a statue in Pike’s honor was a signal, to the transatlantic elite, that America was to be humiliated and whipped into line behind the British empire. We were to be the dumb giant, with the muscle and the money, to pull the British irons out of the fire.
Pike’s central role in the creation of the post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan was well known in Klan circles. (See excerpts from the KKK self-history, below.) But the facts about the KKK, or even about his being a Confederate general (union veterans had protested the statue), were suppressed in the words inscribed on the pedestal of the statue at the time it went up.
The cover story, was that he was the head of the southern section of the Scottish Rite Masons, as well as a poet and philosopher. Even the Masonic side of the Pike story is essentially a ruse, since Benjamin Franklin’s friends were Masons who were republican in orientation, and the British and the tories set up the Scottish Rite in America during the American Revolution to promote the British connection in leadership circles. So it’s not a question of being pro or anti-Masonic.
And this is not about “wokeness.”
One assumes that Donald Trump does not want to blindly restore a statue honoring the founder of America’s Ku Klux Klan in a predominantly Black city which is the nation’s capital!
The advent of Teddy Roosevelt was a terrible turning point in our history. We were to change sides in the world struggle, to abandon the anti-imperialist leadership, bowing to the enemy and joining the enemy.
Teddy Roosevelt’s political clique in London and Boston pushed for the USA to go to war against Spain, to conquer the Philippines and Cuba, and to join Britain for the “English-speaking peoples” to rule the world. This clique forced the 1898 war against Spain, over the determined opposition of President William McKinley. Then Teddy Roosevelt was pushed onto the 1900 Republican ticket as vice-presidential running mate for his enemy McKinley’s re-election campaign. Soon after the 1901 inauguration, McKinley was shot to death.
Albert Pike was a perfect symbol of TR’s philosophy glorifying war and conquest (see TR’s quotes, below) .
It is now intended to re-erect the Pike statue on the October anniversary of its original placing in Washington, DC, an anniversary of dishonor and humiliation for our country.
When we oppose the re-erection of the statue, we have a simple message:
We should go back to the American side and renounce and shut down support for Israeli genocide, war against China, war against Russia, and all the other sanctions and wars that the empire dictates that America should sponsor. We should keep in mind that the military and intelligence apparatus of the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel are institutionally interlocked. The present mass murder is sponsored by the joint globalist apparatus.
Republicans, whose ranks are now breaking on the Gaza genocide, will sympathize with this objective. Democrats, whose progressives are in some sense speaking the same language as Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Green, will think likewise. It’s a time for reconciliation, of Americans to do the right thing. Let this not be a partisan affair. We need to rebuild CIVILIZATION.
Perhaps, in the place where the Pike statue stood, we should get a memorial featuring President John F. Kennedy giving his Peace Speech of June, 1963.
My Personal Role
I had first inquired into the background of the Pike statue in preparation for my book, Treason in America, published in 1985. I traced Pike’s career as an Anglo-American agent for the spread of slavery and secession. Further research revealed Pike’s role after the Civil War, as a principal founder of the national Ku Klux Klan terror organization.
I participated in educational rallies of the Lyndon LaRouche political organization at the Pike statue in 1992, calling for the statue to be taken down. (See photograph at the bottom of this report.)
I helped get many city councils, from Washington DC to the Midwest, to pass resolutions at that time calling for the KKK statue to be taken down.
We never wanted violence or disorder. This was a matter for the Congress and the President to decide, it was a federal jurisdiction issue.
Well, the President at that time was George H. W. Bush. And the book I had co-authored, George Bush, the Unauthorized Biography, had just then been published. A month after he lost reelection — Bush (perhaps in revenge for the book) got the National Park Service police out to our rally and I was arrested, along with James Bevel (Martin Luther King’s lieutenant from the Birmingham campaign).
We were charged with the federal crime of “statue climbing,” on the grounds that we had stood on the pedestal in order to be more clearly seen and heard while speaking.
After a little trial, where all the facts came out, we were jailed for a week.
That was an exciting moment in my life, for sure. In the Washington jail, Rev. Bevel told me about his adventures in the jails fighting for justice in the South.
I will be speaking out about this in the coming weeks. As the KKK side of the matter permeates the discussion between now and October, the President and the Congress should not embarrass themselves by re-establishing the leading symbol of anti-American racist hatred.
To me, the central point to be addressed is, really, who we are as a nation.
Teddy Roosevelt dragged us down the road to war, taking the side of Empire. We are now sponsoring mass murder in wars that will certainly destroy us one way or another unless we reverse course and go back to the American side in world affairs.
A Note on the Meaning of Christmas
The King James Version of the Gospel of Luke, 2:14, tells us that the angels proclaimed,
“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”
This has been revised, for example in the New International Version, to read,
“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
Those predisposed to war and empire will prefer this revision, which may in their view give them Divine permission to slaughter people whom God does not “favor.”
If that is the spirit in which the birth of Jesus is commemorated, I don’t think anyone ought to celebrate Christmas.
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Teddy Roosevelt’s Words
Theodore Roosevelt wrote a favorable review of the book, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by the English-born proto-Nazi writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain. In it, TR condemned the Declaration of Independence by which the
Americans had formed a nation separate from Great Britain.
“Much that [Chamberlain] says,” TR wrote, “regarding the prevalent loose and sloppy talk about the general progress of humanity, the equality and identity of races, and the like, is not only perfectly true, but is emphatically worth considering by a generation accustomed, as its forefathers . . . were accustomed, to accept as true and useful thoroughly pernicious doctrines taught by well-meaning and feeble-minded sentimentalists.”
(*Published in The Outlook, July 29, 1911, reprinted in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt; National Edition (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), volume XII, pp. 107-12.)
Teddy Roosevelt said the “English-speaking peoples”
must supervise “alien races.” Speaking at Oxford in 1910, he
said,
“In the long run there can be no justification for one race managing or controlling another unless the management and control are exercised in the interest and for the benefit of that other race. That is what our peoples [sic] have in the main done, and must continue . . . to do, in India, Egypt, and the Philippines.”
(Romanes lecture, “Biological Analogies in History,” TR Works, volume XII, pp. 57-58.)
Prefiguring Hitler, Teddy Roosevelt wrote,
“The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori — In each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people . . .
[This is] primeval warfare… where no pity is shown to non-combatants, where the weak . . . and the vanquished [are] maltreated with merciless ferocity. A sad and evil feature is that the whites, the representatives of civilization, speedily sink almost to the level of their barbarous foes . . . There follow deeds of enormous, of incredible., of indescribable horror . . .
[It matters little] whether Lorraine is part of Germany or of France . . . but it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.”
(Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (Amazon.com edition combining Vol. 1 through 4, print-on-demand; originally published New York, 1901), Volume 3, Chapter 2, The Indian Wars, 1784-1787, pp. 310-311.)
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The following are excerpts from the KKK’s self-history, published in 1924. Albert Pike’s career is featured on pages 271 to 277 of the book. Pike’s portrait, reproduced below, was furnished to the author, Susan Lawrence Davis, by Pike’s family, who were proud of his KKK leadership.
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Title Page from Volume IX of A History of the American People, written by Woodrow Wilson, the edition published in 1917 when Wilson was President of the United States. Wilson admired the Ku Klux Klan as saviors of his native South. (As President, he segregated federal government offices by race, thereby disgracing our country.)
Illustration from page 286 of the Wilson book, entitled “Some Clansmen.” Pike is shown in the center. He is captioned, “Gen. Albert Pike, chief Judicial officer.”
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An Original Anti-Pike Rally from the 1990s
A late-1992 LaRouche movement rally protesting the statue, which the participants have dressed in KKK robes. Anton Chaitkin is at the microphone; rally organizer Dennis Speed at left; civil rights activist Hosea Williams at right. (Photograph by Stuart K. Lewis.)
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