What do you think?
Rate this book
It's Very Simple : True Story of Civil Rights
It's Very Simple : True Story of Civil Rights by Alan Stang 218 pages Western Islands; Later Printing edition (January 1, 1965) English 0882790072 978-0882790077 Product 7 x 4.1 x 0.6 inches Shipping 4.8 ounces
218 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 17, 2021
"In America the idea has been created that our country's major problem is race. The phony idea has been created that the problem is between black Americans and white Americans.... the fact has been obscured that the real problem is between Americans of all colors and Communists of all colors." (p. 202).
December 7, 2021
"It's very simplistic" is more like it!
I came across this book in a thrift store, and thought it might be an interesting perspective on the events of the mid-1960’s. There was some insight in the book, though almost exclusively into the narrow, vindictive and paranoid mindset of the author. The basic premise of the book is that the entire civil rights struggle is a communist plot to destroy and/or take over America. In support of this hypothesis, the author takes a convoluted, omission-riddled, self-contradictory path through recent history and then-current events. He lays out what, to his own satisfaction at least, is an irrefutable case, though most readers with any historical knowledge or critical thinking skills are likely to feel differently. Throughout, Stang’s condescension and smug tone is repellant. His constant use of phrases like “as we have seen” as ”as has been shown”, even when nothing of the kind has, makes him come across as a stuck-up know-it-all. He’s utterly addicted to adding italics anytime he quotes someone (which he does very frequently) to make the quote sound sinister, or link the reference to some other event, however big a reach that is. Stang is also fond of using the phrase “in other words…” when interpreting a quote from someone he disagrees with, then follows that phrase with very different words indeed, with a meaning far removed from that of the person or publication he’s citing; for example, he takes a quote about protesting policy and declares it’s about seizing and keeping someone else’s property. He likes to definitively declare the inner thoughts of such diverse persons as Martin Luther King jr, President Lyndon Johnson, and a generic communist revolutionary, all very unconvincingly (except perhaps to himself).
The author’s capacity for doubletalk is amazing. He spends much of the early part of the book denouncing any attempt by a colony to seek independence (this was one of the major trends on the world stage at the time the book was written). He casts these “wars of national liberation”, as ridiculous, as the colony had never had a separate national identity under the same name, and because of existing close cultural ties to the colonizing country. He also denounces all independence struggles as an excuse by violent people to commit violence. Fifty pages in, something or someone must have reminded him how the USA began, because he tosses in a comment that the American revolution was “a genuine war of national liberation”. He doesn’t even attempt to explain how it meets the criteria he previously laid out (which it doesn’t). After spending a whole chapter denouncing the New York Times as utterly naïve or actively complicit in covering for communists (apparently the Times thought Mao Tse-Tung, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, wasn’t a communist until he turned out to be one (?!)), he then states that he is in no way impugning the New York Times. After stating that an economy can’t mix capitalist and socialist elements without becoming entirely socialist, he later says that any fully-socialist economy will end up mixed with capitalist elements. Throughout the book he denounces any group addressing racial discrimination as either communist or violently criminal (two categorizes which for him are clearly interchangeable), and amidst that he tosses in that racial discrimination in the U.S. is “tragic”; how can you denounce everyone, individual or group, working on an issue and still acknowledge it’s a legitimate issue? He denounces all attempts at secession within larger countries as communist plots, then denounces the United Nations, a communist tool in his mind, for taking action against secession in the Congo. Stang declares that the right way to deal with exclusion and discrimination is to start one’s own enterprise. Later he scorns the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, formed by Mississippians in response to being excluded from the state’s Democratic party, refuting his own prescription. He praises checks and balance in American government, then condemns an effort (new at the time the book was written), to have oversight panels for police departments. In the concluding chapter of a book that’s all about communism as the source of the nation’s and world’s troubles, he suddenly tosses in that communists are just a “small part” of a bigger “conspiracy” (what?!).
His capacity for omissions is equally incredible. Stang laments the reduction in capitalism in the U.S. since the mid 1920’s, and the loss of potential prosperity thus brought about; (apparently he believes the 1950’s were neither prosperous nor capitalistic) If something happened since the mid-1920’s which could have shaken public faith in unregulated capitalism, such as the great depression, he’s apparently unaware of it. He cites the difficulties encountered by immigrant groups, specifically the negative stereotypes directed at them, and declares they overcame them, wondering why “negroes” would need any extra help to do the same; he seems unaware that none of the groups he cites had to endure centuries of enslavement followed by decades of legally-enforced discrimination. He states that political activists in Mississippi had no right to vote in an election they put together, and is oblivious to the deliberately insurmountable obstacles put between them and voting, such as poll taxes and unpassable “literacy” tests. Stang declares that “no man can make another feel inferior”, and seems unaware that under slavery, and to a similar extent under Jim Crow, persons where given nonstop messages that they were inferior, and those who refused to act inferior were punished with impunity, up to and including murder.
Stang is mired in the red-scare mentality which was most prevalent in the early 1950’s and most memorably embodied by Joe McCarthy. The fight against communism in America, in his mind, remains urgent and perilous. Never mind that by the mid 1960’s the always-small U.S. communist party was nearly extinct, with many of its remaining “members” informants for the FBI. No amount of decimation or infiltration of the communist party by police, and no number of lives or careers sidetracked or ruined through accusations of connections to communists, however old, tangential, or imagined, is enough for Stang. When citing press reports on anything involving some sort of activism, Stang’s chief concern is whether or not the reporters dug around for some communist connection (even for victims in altercations), rather than reporting on the incident itself. The disdain he shows for communists, or anything resembling them, is so hatefully vitriolic in tone that it is disturbingly similar to the way in which neo-nazis , such as William Pierce, would described jews; a secretive, preternaturally effective group utterly dedicated to destruction and evil.
Although his precise worldview is difficult to pin down in the sea of assumptions, innuendo, prejudice, contradiction and omissions, something of a picture begins to emerge toward the end of the book. In the authors view, so far as this reader could discern, the purpose of government is to “control criminals” or “keep criminals off our backs” , not the more standard terminology “prosecute” or “incarcerate” them. Since by “criminals” it becomes clear he means communists, socialists or any leftist (right-wing or conservative dissenters don’t seem to exist for Stang) his model society is evidently one in which government protects business and property owners and quashes anyone who challenges their free reign and economic/political dominance.
Stang basically invents a bag called “communism”, and tries to shove every negative thing in the world into it. Leftism, secession, slavery, racism, violence, efforts at independence, radicalism, civil unrest, and crime, amongst other ills, are treated as though they were the invention of, and sole property of, communists, however long they’ve been with us. By his reasoning, the Confederate States of America would have been a communist effort, representing as it did a convergence of slavery, secession and racism (if he ever mentioned it). Per Stang, racism can only be forced onto a society by an overly powerful, “collectivist” government; apparently that describes the weak state governments of the post-reconstruction southeastern U.S. , forcing Jim Crow laws onto an unwilling populace (?!!).
Conversely, he invents a bag called “capitalism” and tries to put all the positive things in the world in it. Stang even insists capitalism eliminates racism (as long as it’s “pure” capitalism, which he doesn’t define). His “reasoning” is that a competitive economy makes hiring the “best man” imperative for profit and success, and makes racism against one’s own interest, and a mere personal “pathology” which anyone else can ignore. If, say, Jackie Robinson was just one more in a long line of major league baseball players in the first half of the 20th century who happened to have African ancestry, this argument might hold some water; but sadly, no. Since capitalism is all about making money and profit, things like the opium trade, the slave trade, and slavery itself embody extreme forms of capitalism far better than communism. He even attempts to pick apart some writings by Dr Martin Luther King, presuming to know King’s “true” thoughts, and criticizing King for being against profit; King thought profit should not be the “sole” motive in economics; since the drug and slave trade belong to amoral profit-seekers, that makes sense. Not for Stang, though.
Toward the end, Stang quotes, without realizing the irony of his doing so, persons who complain of smear campaigns based on innuendo and repetition, even as he endlessly recycles supposedly incriminating factoids (but really hearsay) about various persons and organizations. The Red Scare was a dark chapter in US history because of its working consensus that due process of law and all other legal considerations simply didn’t apply to communists (or anyone associated with them by any number of degrees of separation), which undercut the U.S. principle of being a nation of laws. Stang undercuts himself by quoting various persons who come across as far more reasonable than he does, including those who think people who do well at their jobs should keep them, rather than be fired if any connection to anything remotely communist comes up from their past (which is what Stang advocates), or quoting persons who don’t see community organizing and voter registration as inherently sinister activities (as Stang does).
Stang’s test for whether a source of information is valid is apparently based exclusively on whether it is in line with his own views. Anything that does conform to those views is accurate and trustworthy, regardless of how obscure (such as a report from a Louisiana State subcommittee), questionable (i.e. items from tabloid newspapers) or old (many quotes from the 1910’s and 20’s get used in connection with current events) the source is. Anything that is not in line with the author’s views is worthy of only ridicule, scorn or dismissal (if mentioned at all).
As an aside, Stang wasn't just an apologist for racists by denying the issue while labeling anti-racists communists. Though peripheral to the main theme of the book, he manages to expose himself as misogynist (women have no agency in his world, except in a negative way), homophobic (calling them "Sex perverts", and islamophobic (imaging a dire scenario in which Muslim enclaves being established in the Americas somehow enables a worldwide Muslim takeover). He was both ahead of his time and behind it in being a paranoid, xenophobic ignoramus. One takeaway from the book is that while we see so many of this type of semi-incoherent, alarmist, bellicose, ugly-spirited screeds being published as books today, this is not a new phenomenon; they've been with us for a quite a while.
This book, a condemnation of the civil rights movement as a criminal, traitorous conspiracy, belongs in the trash can of history. Civil Rights activists, Martin Luther King jr. among them, put their livelihoods and lives on the line for their principles, and to get the nation to live up to its own. Many, including King, lost their lives in the struggle. Stang is so obtuse and so lacking in empathy that he fails to comprehend that he’s running interference for the often violent forces that opposed equal protection under the law and equal opportunity for all, which were the actual goals of the civil rights movement. While he avoids the instant annihilation of his credibility by denying that any racial discrimination exists in America (something other contemporary, like-minded writers did not avoid), he nonetheless frequently goes off the deep end in other ways. Late in the book, he imagines that the Birmingham church bombing of 1963 (the only horrific event to which he initially shows a recognizably appropriate human reaction, though still a disturbingly violent one, ironic for someone who constantly denounces violence) was actually done by the same people organizing for civil rights! Logic and history demonstrate otherwise, but for the author, this paranoid and counter-intuitive scenario somehow makes sense, as he imagines activists must organize a violent counterforce to themselves in order to defeat that force. Apparently having no opposition makes winning a contest more difficult? This crowning insult to reason makes a fitting cap for a book full of revoltingly wrongheaded thinking.
The book is so full of flaws in “facts” and the interpretation of them that it would take another book to properly catalog them all; hopefully the passages above are sufficient to warn anyone off this book, unless they are seeking insight into the workings of a bitter and twisted mind. I'd challenge anyone to actually find merit in the views expounded by the author, and not give the book a high rating and a few generic, positive comments, which is too often the case by persons defending indefensible ideological rants in print form.
I should add that I no longer have the book; it gradually disintegrated while I read it, due to poor initial crafting compounded by the effects of age; that seems a fitting metaphor for the writing in the book - under the scrutiny of the reader and the passage of time, it falls to pieces.
I came across this book in a thrift store, and thought it might be an interesting perspective on the events of the mid-1960’s. There was some insight in the book, though almost exclusively into the narrow, vindictive and paranoid mindset of the author. The basic premise of the book is that the entire civil rights struggle is a communist plot to destroy and/or take over America. In support of this hypothesis, the author takes a convoluted, omission-riddled, self-contradictory path through recent history and then-current events. He lays out what, to his own satisfaction at least, is an irrefutable case, though most readers with any historical knowledge or critical thinking skills are likely to feel differently. Throughout, Stang’s condescension and smug tone is repellant. His constant use of phrases like “as we have seen” as ”as has been shown”, even when nothing of the kind has, makes him come across as a stuck-up know-it-all. He’s utterly addicted to adding italics anytime he quotes someone (which he does very frequently) to make the quote sound sinister, or link the reference to some other event, however big a reach that is. Stang is also fond of using the phrase “in other words…” when interpreting a quote from someone he disagrees with, then follows that phrase with very different words indeed, with a meaning far removed from that of the person or publication he’s citing; for example, he takes a quote about protesting policy and declares it’s about seizing and keeping someone else’s property. He likes to definitively declare the inner thoughts of such diverse persons as Martin Luther King jr, President Lyndon Johnson, and a generic communist revolutionary, all very unconvincingly (except perhaps to himself).
The author’s capacity for doubletalk is amazing. He spends much of the early part of the book denouncing any attempt by a colony to seek independence (this was one of the major trends on the world stage at the time the book was written). He casts these “wars of national liberation”, as ridiculous, as the colony had never had a separate national identity under the same name, and because of existing close cultural ties to the colonizing country. He also denounces all independence struggles as an excuse by violent people to commit violence. Fifty pages in, something or someone must have reminded him how the USA began, because he tosses in a comment that the American revolution was “a genuine war of national liberation”. He doesn’t even attempt to explain how it meets the criteria he previously laid out (which it doesn’t). After spending a whole chapter denouncing the New York Times as utterly naïve or actively complicit in covering for communists (apparently the Times thought Mao Tse-Tung, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, wasn’t a communist until he turned out to be one (?!)), he then states that he is in no way impugning the New York Times. After stating that an economy can’t mix capitalist and socialist elements without becoming entirely socialist, he later says that any fully-socialist economy will end up mixed with capitalist elements. Throughout the book he denounces any group addressing racial discrimination as either communist or violently criminal (two categorizes which for him are clearly interchangeable), and amidst that he tosses in that racial discrimination in the U.S. is “tragic”; how can you denounce everyone, individual or group, working on an issue and still acknowledge it’s a legitimate issue? He denounces all attempts at secession within larger countries as communist plots, then denounces the United Nations, a communist tool in his mind, for taking action against secession in the Congo. Stang declares that the right way to deal with exclusion and discrimination is to start one’s own enterprise. Later he scorns the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, formed by Mississippians in response to being excluded from the state’s Democratic party, refuting his own prescription. He praises checks and balance in American government, then condemns an effort (new at the time the book was written), to have oversight panels for police departments. In the concluding chapter of a book that’s all about communism as the source of the nation’s and world’s troubles, he suddenly tosses in that communists are just a “small part” of a bigger “conspiracy” (what?!).
His capacity for omissions is equally incredible. Stang laments the reduction in capitalism in the U.S. since the mid 1920’s, and the loss of potential prosperity thus brought about; (apparently he believes the 1950’s were neither prosperous nor capitalistic) If something happened since the mid-1920’s which could have shaken public faith in unregulated capitalism, such as the great depression, he’s apparently unaware of it. He cites the difficulties encountered by immigrant groups, specifically the negative stereotypes directed at them, and declares they overcame them, wondering why “negroes” would need any extra help to do the same; he seems unaware that none of the groups he cites had to endure centuries of enslavement followed by decades of legally-enforced discrimination. He states that political activists in Mississippi had no right to vote in an election they put together, and is oblivious to the deliberately insurmountable obstacles put between them and voting, such as poll taxes and unpassable “literacy” tests. Stang declares that “no man can make another feel inferior”, and seems unaware that under slavery, and to a similar extent under Jim Crow, persons where given nonstop messages that they were inferior, and those who refused to act inferior were punished with impunity, up to and including murder.
Stang is mired in the red-scare mentality which was most prevalent in the early 1950’s and most memorably embodied by Joe McCarthy. The fight against communism in America, in his mind, remains urgent and perilous. Never mind that by the mid 1960’s the always-small U.S. communist party was nearly extinct, with many of its remaining “members” informants for the FBI. No amount of decimation or infiltration of the communist party by police, and no number of lives or careers sidetracked or ruined through accusations of connections to communists, however old, tangential, or imagined, is enough for Stang. When citing press reports on anything involving some sort of activism, Stang’s chief concern is whether or not the reporters dug around for some communist connection (even for victims in altercations), rather than reporting on the incident itself. The disdain he shows for communists, or anything resembling them, is so hatefully vitriolic in tone that it is disturbingly similar to the way in which neo-nazis , such as William Pierce, would described jews; a secretive, preternaturally effective group utterly dedicated to destruction and evil.
Although his precise worldview is difficult to pin down in the sea of assumptions, innuendo, prejudice, contradiction and omissions, something of a picture begins to emerge toward the end of the book. In the authors view, so far as this reader could discern, the purpose of government is to “control criminals” or “keep criminals off our backs” , not the more standard terminology “prosecute” or “incarcerate” them. Since by “criminals” it becomes clear he means communists, socialists or any leftist (right-wing or conservative dissenters don’t seem to exist for Stang) his model society is evidently one in which government protects business and property owners and quashes anyone who challenges their free reign and economic/political dominance.
Stang basically invents a bag called “communism”, and tries to shove every negative thing in the world into it. Leftism, secession, slavery, racism, violence, efforts at independence, radicalism, civil unrest, and crime, amongst other ills, are treated as though they were the invention of, and sole property of, communists, however long they’ve been with us. By his reasoning, the Confederate States of America would have been a communist effort, representing as it did a convergence of slavery, secession and racism (if he ever mentioned it). Per Stang, racism can only be forced onto a society by an overly powerful, “collectivist” government; apparently that describes the weak state governments of the post-reconstruction southeastern U.S. , forcing Jim Crow laws onto an unwilling populace (?!!).
Conversely, he invents a bag called “capitalism” and tries to put all the positive things in the world in it. Stang even insists capitalism eliminates racism (as long as it’s “pure” capitalism, which he doesn’t define). His “reasoning” is that a competitive economy makes hiring the “best man” imperative for profit and success, and makes racism against one’s own interest, and a mere personal “pathology” which anyone else can ignore. If, say, Jackie Robinson was just one more in a long line of major league baseball players in the first half of the 20th century who happened to have African ancestry, this argument might hold some water; but sadly, no. Since capitalism is all about making money and profit, things like the opium trade, the slave trade, and slavery itself embody extreme forms of capitalism far better than communism. He even attempts to pick apart some writings by Dr Martin Luther King, presuming to know King’s “true” thoughts, and criticizing King for being against profit; King thought profit should not be the “sole” motive in economics; since the drug and slave trade belong to amoral profit-seekers, that makes sense. Not for Stang, though.
Toward the end, Stang quotes, without realizing the irony of his doing so, persons who complain of smear campaigns based on innuendo and repetition, even as he endlessly recycles supposedly incriminating factoids (but really hearsay) about various persons and organizations. The Red Scare was a dark chapter in US history because of its working consensus that due process of law and all other legal considerations simply didn’t apply to communists (or anyone associated with them by any number of degrees of separation), which undercut the U.S. principle of being a nation of laws. Stang undercuts himself by quoting various persons who come across as far more reasonable than he does, including those who think people who do well at their jobs should keep them, rather than be fired if any connection to anything remotely communist comes up from their past (which is what Stang advocates), or quoting persons who don’t see community organizing and voter registration as inherently sinister activities (as Stang does).
Stang’s test for whether a source of information is valid is apparently based exclusively on whether it is in line with his own views. Anything that does conform to those views is accurate and trustworthy, regardless of how obscure (such as a report from a Louisiana State subcommittee), questionable (i.e. items from tabloid newspapers) or old (many quotes from the 1910’s and 20’s get used in connection with current events) the source is. Anything that is not in line with the author’s views is worthy of only ridicule, scorn or dismissal (if mentioned at all).
As an aside, Stang wasn't just an apologist for racists by denying the issue while labeling anti-racists communists. Though peripheral to the main theme of the book, he manages to expose himself as misogynist (women have no agency in his world, except in a negative way), homophobic (calling them "Sex perverts", and islamophobic (imaging a dire scenario in which Muslim enclaves being established in the Americas somehow enables a worldwide Muslim takeover). He was both ahead of his time and behind it in being a paranoid, xenophobic ignoramus. One takeaway from the book is that while we see so many of this type of semi-incoherent, alarmist, bellicose, ugly-spirited screeds being published as books today, this is not a new phenomenon; they've been with us for a quite a while.
This book, a condemnation of the civil rights movement as a criminal, traitorous conspiracy, belongs in the trash can of history. Civil Rights activists, Martin Luther King jr. among them, put their livelihoods and lives on the line for their principles, and to get the nation to live up to its own. Many, including King, lost their lives in the struggle. Stang is so obtuse and so lacking in empathy that he fails to comprehend that he’s running interference for the often violent forces that opposed equal protection under the law and equal opportunity for all, which were the actual goals of the civil rights movement. While he avoids the instant annihilation of his credibility by denying that any racial discrimination exists in America (something other contemporary, like-minded writers did not avoid), he nonetheless frequently goes off the deep end in other ways. Late in the book, he imagines that the Birmingham church bombing of 1963 (the only horrific event to which he initially shows a recognizably appropriate human reaction, though still a disturbingly violent one, ironic for someone who constantly denounces violence) was actually done by the same people organizing for civil rights! Logic and history demonstrate otherwise, but for the author, this paranoid and counter-intuitive scenario somehow makes sense, as he imagines activists must organize a violent counterforce to themselves in order to defeat that force. Apparently having no opposition makes winning a contest more difficult? This crowning insult to reason makes a fitting cap for a book full of revoltingly wrongheaded thinking.
The book is so full of flaws in “facts” and the interpretation of them that it would take another book to properly catalog them all; hopefully the passages above are sufficient to warn anyone off this book, unless they are seeking insight into the workings of a bitter and twisted mind. I'd challenge anyone to actually find merit in the views expounded by the author, and not give the book a high rating and a few generic, positive comments, which is too often the case by persons defending indefensible ideological rants in print form.
I should add that I no longer have the book; it gradually disintegrated while I read it, due to poor initial crafting compounded by the effects of age; that seems a fitting metaphor for the writing in the book - under the scrutiny of the reader and the passage of time, it falls to pieces.
February 10, 2021
This is a fantastic book by an experienced and well-known (at the time) journalist and author. There are hundreds of endnotes, providing the sources of the author's quotations. Those who would call this book "simplistic" are seeing it in hindsight after being miseducated by the public school system and taught to worship "Martin Luther" King, who is a proven fraud and plagiarizer, and who is known to have hired Communists into his organization, and to fire them publicly when discovered, only to rehire them secretly to serve elsewhere.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews