Six Inconvenient Logical Fallacies

[meegbear]

So Michael Medved, semi-famous movie reviewer and radio host, who has of late morphed into a weird “Hollywood vs. America” right-wing concern troll, has published an op-ed at Townhall that says that slavery in America just wasn’t as bad as all that. No, seriously.

The entire op-ed is too long to cut and paste here, and a snippet would do it no justice. So for your amusement (or if you read the whole thing, as I did–stay away from sharp objects–revulsion), here are the bullet points upon which Medved makes his case, ironically entitled Six Inconvenient Truths:

1. Slavery was an ancient and universal institution, not a distinctively American innovation.

2. Slavery existed only briefly, and in limited locales, in the history of the republic - involving only a tiny percentage of the ancestors of today’s Americans.

3. Though brutal, slavery wasn’t genocidal: live slaves were valuable but dead captives brought no profit.

4. It’s not true that the U.S. became a wealthy nation through the abuse of slave labor: the most prosperous states in the country were those that first freed their slaves.

5. While America deserves no unique blame for the existence of slavery, the United States merits special credit for its rapid abolition.

6. There is no reason to believe that today’s African Americans would be better off if their ancestors had remained behind in Africa.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the logic of a 29%er. And they wonder why the GOP doesn’t get the African American vote.

Mahablog has more…

-----------------------------

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/10/01/six-inconvenient-logical-fallacies/

[mike_c]

1. and lets not forget how beneficial culling excess native americans must have been...

...for the long term health of their populations, too.

on edit: I realize this is perhaps OT, but it's basically the same logic.

[semillama]

36. Oh, don't worry. Medved also thinks that Native Americans are also whiners

who didn't have it that bad, no Native American genocide (tell that to the Yahi amongst others), etc, etc.

Medved went from film criticism to full-on racism without a pause.

[Goblinmonger]

2. And to think that I serioulsy thought

that I couldn't dislike that guy any more, he comes through with a new low.

[immoderate]

3. Slavery is our greatest national shame. But now there's Iraq...

Medved is a creep.

--IMM

[dysfunctional press]

18. our treatment of the native americans was and is still our greatest national shame...

but slavery runs a very close second.

[immoderate]

28. Fair enough.

I won't argue with that. But the OP is about slavery.

--IMM

[PDenton]

43. just curious but do you have any native American ancestory?

I do.

I tel you what, you guys can be guilt ridden and the Cherokees and Creeks will be laughing with their casino profits all the way to the bank. Yes the Trail of Tears is part of history but all this hand-wringing and America bashing is a bit much.

[Chulanowa]

66. I do, as well.

Half Choctaw.

First off... Casino profits? Good god, man. You know why they have Casinos? Tax-free tobacco? 'Cause they aren't permitted to have anything else. And they have to fight tooth and nail to be allowed these two. The rez is only sovereign so long as it doesn't try to get TOO sovereign - I.e., follow its own laws, build up its economy. Once that starts happening the BIA steps in and starts laying down the restrictions. These two methods of profit are hardly beneficial - They bring a large element of crime in, don't make a lot of profit, and what profit there is winds up in the hands of the tribal "leadership"... Who for some reason always manage to keep a nice ranch-style home while their people are living in mobile homes and drinking from yard spigots.

Second... there is far, far more to this history than just the trail of tears - hell, there's far more to that than just the forced relocation... Such as the subsequent imprisonment and execution of the leaders of the relocated Cherokee after they tried to make the most of what they had in Oklahoma. Maybe it could be all relegated to just history books... is the aftershocks weren't still killing off the native nations, if the United States government didn't still maintain a eugenicist policy towards the Natives. Why hte fuck do you think the Bureau of Indian Affairs is part of the same department that manages moose? And, it bears noting, gets less of the budget of that department than the moose do!

[PDenton]

70. Read "Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation"

I am not actually a Cherokee (not a tribal member or anything remtotely like that) but I have several great grandfathers and great grandmothers that were of mixed descent Cherokee. I did not know about this until the last ten or twelve years, however, because it was sort of a family secret that really only my uncle knew much about. White people of a certain age don't talk about it much in certain parts of Oklahoma as I'm sure you'll know. My grandmother on my other side of the family is different; her only prejudice is towards Indians, and it's really sad because she was very tolerant of black people (of course she called them "coloreds" but several of her older friends were black). She always has been prejudiced against Indians; she can't understand why, in her mind, when she was a kid, Indians would tear toilets out of their reservation houses they were living in. he mind couldn't grasp that hey ,maybe they didn't really care for indoor plumbing, they weren't used to it. And of course she would always be ranting about drunk, lazy Indians if I ever borught it up, so I try to avoid the topic of Indians around her.

Cherokee had slavery, they sometimes practiced token cannabalism (eat somebody's heart, for instance- though I remember reading how some thought this was excessive even before Europeans arrived) , they practiced infantacide and really had no concept of "human rights" as such- you were a member of the tribe or you were a potential slave.

I'm not saying they were particularly "evil", just not the peace loving, New-Age hippie people that the Left sometimes portray them to be. It was interesting to read about how much the culture changed- rather quickly after European contact, and the discovery of writting by Sequoia, suppossedly only by imitating white settlers he saw writing.

All cultures change, it's just a fact of human existence. Europe saw lots and lots of nations rise and fall in the past 1000 years, and some languages or cultures have died out or been absorbed- this process is continuing even today. I think the decimation of Indians was inevitable to a certain extent because it was inadvertant, being due to communicable diseases. Somebody foreign was going to land in the New World looking for a faster way to get to Europe or Asia. As for the military defeats and conquest, well, I think to a certain extent they were not inevitable but some kind of adaptation to the "white man" was inetvitable-. A sufficiently advanced culture is going to tend to alter, absorb or destory whatever it comes into contact. Even relative peaceful contact can lead to cultural change.

[Rage for Order]

77. You should check out the Choctaws in Philadelphia, MS

They started with a casino and have used the profits to finance new business ventures. With sound management, tribes can parlay a successful casino into much more.

http://www.choctaw.org/economics/index.htm

[EstimatedProphet]

4. Well, they've made war a recreation

and torture is now respectable...

I guess it's time for slavery to become fashionable again. I wonder how far we are from human sacrifice being the next 'in' trend.

[truebrit71]

5. With this kind of revisionist sort of bullshit, when will we hear how the Holocaust wasn't THAT bad

...after all...?:eyes:

What a sickening little toad Medved is...

[L. Coyote]

6. Wow, are they going to start feeding and housing the slaves again? Health care maybe?

They bring a better price with good teeth, after all! :sarcasm:

[TahitiNut]

7. Those who revere Property above People seem to think ...

... "some" people (not them, of course) should be glad to be elevated to the status of Property. This is the fundamental corruption of such deification of acquisitiveness. "Greed is good." Appalling.

[Chulanowa]

8. Wow. History must cuase him physical pain...

1) Half-truth. The European powers (including America) turned slavery from a common practice, into an industrialized profit-machine. Yes, slavery existed elsewhere... but nobody else packed a boat so full of captives that they could not move, to sell them on an open market. That is a distinctly European twist to the practice. For other cultures, slavery was far more direct and personal - "I captured you in warfare, you are my servant now." Still wrong, but slightly less of a horrific concept

2) "Of the republic" - Never mind the two centuries before the ratification of the constitution, amirite there, Mustache? Never mind the post-civil war era where "slavery" was retitled "sharecropping" and slave conditions persisted for black Americans until after the Korean war, when soldiers who had fought in an integrated Army discovered that hey, they're people, too. As for limited locales and involvement, sure, if you're limiting your scope of slavery to antebellum plantations, which an unsurprising number of slavery apologists do

3) When you have an institution that dismisses the death of a human being as nothing more than a monetary loss at best because of his race, that systematically destroys all vestiges of that man's culture and heritage while forcibly supplanting your own upon him under threat of death... that is genocide. When you depopulate a large swath of a land in the name of profit, that is genocide. And no, contrary to beliefs, slaves were not expensive. Even after "imports" were banned, it only banned "wild negros" - slaves taken in Africa. Slaves were still freely imported from Latin America and the Caribbean. If your slave died, no problem, just go down to the auction block and pick up a new pound of flesh.

4) Completely false. Unpaid labor made the slave states the wealthiest in the union - even if this prosperity was highly concentrated. In the "free" states, slave conditions persisted in the industrial sector, both among blacks and poor whites. Southern slaves provided the materials for northern slaves to manufacture things from Chinese, Black, Mexican, Irish, and Native slave labor connected the two coasts and built the infrastructure for cross-continental trade. Debt slavery continues to be practiced in America to this very day.

5) No, the United States doesn't deserve "credit" for the institutions of slavery. Portugal, Spain, and the Dutch have far more blood on their hands in the realm of inventing industrialized slavery. As mentioned before, that "rapid abolition" did not take full effect until the 1960's and continues to be ignored in several sectors. Calling it something else doesn't change what it is. The formal "abolition" of slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation only free slaves in the Confederacy - which the Union had no authority over at the time. It in fact specifically omits the northern slave states from emancipation. I would hardly call this "rapid abolition".

6) Given that the ancestors of most of today's African Americans were taken from prosperous West African kingdoms who, prior to the slave boom were rapidly advancing and educating their people, only to be rapidly depopulated and then colonized by the European powers with ease due to the low populations, I would argue that this one is pretty damn false, too. In short, were it not for slavery and subsequent European colonization of the continent, Africa wouldn't have nearly as many problems as it does today. It's the exploitive interference from outside powers that has caused almost every last problem on that continent.

[valerief]

9. He's a whore. He gets paid to say stuff like that. nt

[Deep13]

10. Six facts you fundamentalist, white supremacist bastard!

"1. Slavery was an ancient and universal institution, not a distinctively American innovation."

No, but we made it profitable. Traditionally, slaves were taken in battle from ones enemies or were taken in payment of debt. While still wrong, it often did not approach the level of cruelty that race-based forced labor produced. The invention of the cotton 'gin caused a huge demand for forced labor. Once international slave trading was outlawed in 1800 (or was it 1810?), SC and VA began breeding them to sell domestically. All the while, the Medveds of the 19th century assured all that slavery was sanctified by God because black Africans were descended from Noah's son Ham whose lineage was dammed by God and marked with dark skin.

"2. Slavery existed only briefly, and in limited locales, in the history of the republic - involving only a tiny percentage of the ancestors of today’s Americans."

Over 200 years. From 1620ish (in Jamestown) until 1865. Perhaps longer in the former Spanish parts of the USA. In the South, one person in seven was a slave by the 1850s.

"3. Though brutal, slavery wasn’t genocidal: live slaves were valuable but dead captives brought no profit."

If that ain't polishing a turd, I don't know what is. One may as well say that the holocaust was not genocide because Hitler did not kill every last Jew. Mr. Family Values forgets the brutal conditions under which slaves existed. Family life meant nothing as one was likely to be sold a few times during his or her life leaving parents, children or spouses behind. They were routinely tortured, under-fed, suffering from parasites and raped. Needless to say, they were kept ignorant least they acquire any ability to resist. Most died young. The legacy of this American holocaust still cast a long shadow over our society.

"4. It's not true that the U.S. became a wealthy nation through the abuse of slave labor: the most prosperous states in the country were those that first freed their slaves."

Those states had great sea ports that made fortunes off the transportation of slaves from Africa. Slavery did not enrich the South, but it did support the Southern power structure.

"5. While America deserves no unique blame for the existence of slavery, the United States merits special credit for its rapid abolition."

We did evil. We stopped doing evil, sort of. If I stop hitting you do I deserve special thanks for it? Those who fought for the end of slavery, including many, many freed slaves themselves, are genuine heroes.

"6. There is no reason to believe that today’s African Americans would be better off if their ancestors had remained behind in Africa."

If that happened, then the present descendants would not exist and different descendants would. Anyway, those lynched by the Klan and other victims of racial oppression might disagree with this sweeping and ignorant statement.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

23. Somebody should kidnap Michael Medved...

beat his white ass until he can no longer stand up, then force him to work 12 hours a day at manual labor for no pay. After a six month period (because I'm a generous and enlightened m-therf-cker if ever there was one), we'll allow him a moment to collect his thoughts and decide if MAYBE SLAVERY WASN'T SUCH A FUCKING GOOD TIME!

[yardwork]

52. Twelve hours a day would be less than most slaves worked.

Before dawn to well after sundown - and sometimes all night long - was the norm.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

81. Didn't I SAY I was generous and enlightened?

I find this entire thread absurd. That someone in the 21st Century would find it necessary to defend one of the darkest chapter of American History is simply beyond me.

Genocide of the American Indians? Not so bad when you think about it...

[yardwork]

92. LOL! Yes, but the thread served at least one useful function.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

93. One at a time, amiga...

One at a time!

[Johonny]

38. Yeah

1. This is sort of true. Not only Europe but the Muslim countries in Northern Africa and the middle East also had a large slave trade from west Africa as well. Those countries may have exported even more total slaves from west Africa than the European countries.

2. This really is an obsuring half-truth. Sure today they represent only a small fraction of modern society, but that's thanks to the large influx of immigrants from Europe and an almost total lack of immigration from Africa from 1850-1930s. At the time of the founding of the country the slave population from Africa represented a large fraction of the total US population. There's a reason the south was desperate to have slaves counted in the census. It also wasn't brief as it started not long after 1492 and the discovery of the Americas.

3. Totally false. Spanish slavery wiped out whole populations in central and south America. The import of African slaves drove Native genocide both here and in west Africa.

4. Sort of true. There are a lot of factors that lead to Norths advantage. Two of the biggest were better river systems to allow manufacturing and the weather that kept down malaria and other diseases. Also it's important to remember a large fraction of the Souths wealth was wrapped up in their slaves, who as property were very valuable.

5. Rapid? The slave trade was ended much sooner in other countries and near slave conditions existed long after the civil war in much of the country.

6. Heck there's no reason to believe I wouldn't be better off had my ancestors stayed in Europe. Last time I checked the Euro was doing well. It's hard to take serious any claim that Africa, India and Asia would not be better off today had European colonialism not robbed them of their wealth for 2-4 centuries.

[Blue Belle]

74. Is there any way to recommend a response to a post??

This is one for the greatest page.

[Liberal In Texas]

11. He's had idiotic RW ideas for years, they didn't come "of late". n/t

[PDenton]

12. it would be nice to see real arguements

that are reasoned and not just innuendo or ad hominem attacks.

Honestly he makes some very good arguements. Slavery did not start with the birth of the US and if anything, many of the founders of the country hoped for a day when it would not exist, the Constitution even prohibits the slave trade after 1808.

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say the US didn't profit from slavery at all, but I believe many people overstate its importance to the US's economic developement. The south produced cotton, tobacco, and little else. Only cotton was really dependent on slavery, and was a huge cash crop. But at the same time that depedence on cotton made the South's economy fragile, shallow, and at the mercy of international markets. Most did not own slaves and lived a subsistence existence. After Emancipation, slavery was often replaced with sharecropping, in which both whites and blacks participated, which was virtual slavery or rather serfdom.

[FredScuttle]

14. I weep for whatever educational system

that turned you into a slavery apologist like Mr. Medved.

[PDenton]

16. I'm not apologizing for slavery

The US experience with slavery was not especially unique, however. It did take longer to end slavery in the US than many European countries, but OTOH, slavery is still practiced around the world. There are at least 30 million human slaves globally, most in Africa. Slavery is still practiced in countries like the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Niger, and the Sudan.

Collectively blaming America, white people, or any particular religion for slavery is wrong. It was an ancient evil that existed but has had many detractors throughout history, now it is illegal in the US. I don't see what purpose there is to beat a dead horse. If you want to talk about the social effects that slavery had on African-Americans, that is another thing altogether.

[endarkenment]

20. 1 out of 6 captives died in the middle crossing.

Slavery was essential to the southern plantation economy. While the civil war ended overt slavery, that labor relation was reformulated after reconstruction was abandoned in the 1870s and former slaves essentially become serfs under the sharecropper system, which system persisted until it was no longer needed as mechanical devices replaced human labor in the first third of the 20th century. It is not a history we should be anything but ashamed of. The aparthied system here persisted well into my lifetime.

We are justly blamed for the slave labor system that was established in north america and chartered by our founding documents and continued as overt slave labor until the civil war, long after our european cousins had abolished the practice. Pointing a finger at other nations and systems does not absolve us for our crimes and is a juvenile argument.

The abhorrent argument by medved that african americans are better off for having their ancestors murdered and enslaved is beneath contempt, as is your taking up his arguments as sensible.

[PDenton]

21. some of my ancestors were sharecroppers

On my granfathers side they were all Carolinas and Arkansas sharecroppers or poor yeoman farmers with no money before my grandfathers family moved into Oklahoma soon after it became a state (and they still remained sharecroppers until my grandfather joined the war effort). It is a myth that most sharecroppers were black.

Most of the white population of the South was harmed economicly by slavery because any labor they could produce was devalued. The average Southerner saw no benefit to slavery.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

27. Did granddad get his balls cut off...

for looking at a white woman?

You see, I think his experience of sharecropping was slightly different from an average black man.

[PDenton]

37. I'm not denying that racism is a legacy of slavery

I started this off by saying that Michael Medved is essentialy correct in his facts, though perhaps his tone is callous and doesn't adequately reflect the human tragedy of being rendered a piece of property. If you read the full article, it explains Michael Medved's position and it is not as unreasonable as some have claimed. I don't see how he is rationalizing slavery at all, just stating it was a widespread historical reality and the US is not uniquely guilty.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

49. Guilty, Nonetheless

The point of Medved's article is to downplay the United States' role in the slave trade. As though committing mass murder is more palatable because someone else was doing it, too. If I had the stomach to do it, I would troll through Medved's prior rantings and find several choice articles decrying the "moral relativism" of liberals, and then I would take those articles and roll them up tightly and then jam them up his backside with enough force that dangling modifiers are coming out his nose. Slavery apoligists are sick fucks, and apoligists for slavery apologists are sick fucks who don't have the cojones to be original.

[PDenton]

50. I'm not that familiar with Michael Medved

I know who he is, vaguely, that he's pro-Israel and a social conservative, but honestly I read very little of what he says. I was just evaluating the article on its own merits (and I read it all, unlike some people here). There is very little that is factually incorrect in that article on slavery, though there are several points which could be argued are morally ambiguous (is it better to be the free descendent of slaves in a relatively prosperous country, or poor free men in a country with no human right?- these are somewhat morally grey).

[BlooInBloo]

56. Riiiight.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

60. so as long as we dont turn the situation of african americans in this country as bad as the economic

situation in africa, we are ok?

ofcourse my we he means white folk. as clearly they should be the ones to determine how much racism an inequality should be tolerated

america's new motto: as long as we are 2 degrees above shit, we are doing great!

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

79. Definition of a sick fucker?

Slavery = Morally Grey Area

Slavery is an abomination. It isn't morally grey to kidnap a person, beat that person half to death, and then force that person (and his/her descendants) to work in forced labor for generation. If you have some problem in grasping that, then you are the sickest of sick fuckers.

[endarkenment]

29. The average Southerner saw no benefit to slavery.

No shit. Nor did I state anywhere that all sharecroppers were black. All sharecroppers were essentially serfs, bound to the land by debt.

[Kelly Rupert]

31. Some of my ancestors were slaveowners.

Kept buying slaves with borrowed money. After the war ended, they lost their farm within a decade. That line ended up being de-facto slaves in the coal mines of West Virginia. Funny, the way things get turned around sometimes.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

30. tell me something why are people trying to excuse slavery? is it to justify their correct racist

behavior? or is it for some intellectual purpose. if its to have an intellectual arguments, i have hardly seen any real academic work done it point form.

:eyes:

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

33. Alright, here.

Don't know why you need or want it. Medved sounds like Ahmadinejad. You don't solicit responses to holocaust denial, do you?


"1. Slavery was an ancient and universal institution, not a distinctively American innovation."

So is anti-semitism. The Holocaust isn't lessened because people blamed Jews for the Bubonic plague. And American slavery wasn't any less horrible just because the Ancient Romans kept slaves.

"2. Slavery existed only briefly, and in limited locales, in the history of the republic - involving only a tiny percentage of the ancestors of today’s Americans."

Slavery existed for some seventy years in the United States in the South, parts of the North, and many people went through great pains to extend slavery into the west. Furthermore, it existed well before the Revolution, and its existence had major impacts on the Founding of this country. Furthermore, the legacy of slavery extends to today, e.g. the Jena Six. Few people owned slaves, but thousands would fight to preserve the institution, and millions profited off of it but did nothing to end it.

"3. Though brutal, slavery wasn’t genocidal: live slaves were valuable but dead captives brought no profit."

Slaves were valuable because they worked. That's why slaves who escaped had their feet cut off, so they could still work with their hands. And it very much was genocide. Genocide is not simply the killing of people, but the destruction of whole cultures, many of which were wiped out by slavers, who forbade slaves from talking in their native languages, worship their gods, and so on. And they had little qualms about killing people. To deny it was genocide is, IMO, holocaust denial.

"4. It’s not true that the U.S. became a wealthy nation through the abuse of slave labor: the most prosperous states in the country were those that first freed their slaves."

The entire Southern economy was driven by cotton and tobacco and, I believe, sugar. Hence abuse of slave labor.

"5. While America deserves no unique blame for the existence of slavery, the United States merits special credit for its rapid abolition."

The U.S. abolished slavery long after Western Europe did. Nobody gets special credit for not owning slaves.

"6. There is no reason to believe that today’s African Americans would be better off if their ancestors had remained behind in Africa."

The ends don't justify the means. Modern Israel might not exist if it had not been for the Holocaust, that does not justify the holocaust.

So what on earth do you think are the good arguments?

[La Lioness Priyanka]

34. i suspect you are also doing your best to ignore real arguments. deep13 made some 'real arguments'

[yardwork]

40. Um, no. You clearly don't know much about the history of slavery in the United States.

Many crops - including sugar, rum, tobacco, rice, indigo, lumber, and others - depended on slave labor. Further, industries in the south used slave labor, including mining, munitions, factories, etc.

[me b zola]

41. Like post #8 & post #10?

Why don't reply to one of those posts with "real arguements that are reasoned and not just innuendo or ad hominem attacks"?

[ismnotwasm]

97. Kind of right wing Libertarian-type thinking, there

I hear that shit from my brother who haunts certain websites. We talk. We argue. He tends toward thinking in His Economic terms only, which is 1) one sided to the point of strange, 2) leaves out the Rest of The Story.

The author is a wack job, and it not hard to refute every point he makes. Might take a lot more homework for ya though. I'm not going to do it for you.

[gollygee]

13. I've heard a retired history teacher say the same things

People really believe this garbage. Propaganda works. You can make people believe anything, including that slaves were lucky to be slaves. It's astounding what people will choose to believe.

[PDenton]

17. I wouldn't say people are lucky to be slaves

OTOH, most of the world lives in abject poverty. A billion people are hungry every day. Many African-Americans, in comparison, are fortunate. This isn't to say injustices don't exist but America, all things considered, is hardly the basket case that many African countries are. The US didn't invent Colonialism, after all.

[BlooInBloo]

22. LOLOL!

[TahitiNut]

69. OMG! Barbara Bush has invaded DU! Run for your lives!!

:rofl:

[FredScuttle]

35. TRANSLATION: Hey darkies! Quit yer bitching!

"Yeah, yeah, yeah...your ancestors were brought to this country in chains, abused beyond understanding, families ripped apart, cultures and histories all consigned to the dust bin....get over it! We weren't the only ones doing it and we didn't make the most profit at it!

Count your blessings...instead of facing institutionalized racism on a near-daily basis, you could be lying in some Central African shithole starving to death! Clap louder!"

:sarcasm:

[gollygee]

42. So African Americans are lucky their ancestors were kidnapped, chained up,

transported under horrific conditions, raped, had their families separated, beaten, treated and bought/sold as chattle?

Nice.

[BlooInBloo]

45. Of course, he keeps JUST ENOUGH distance between his statements and yours...

.... to maintain the plausible deniability line. Typical.

[PDenton]

46. what is your point?

they are lucky they are not their ancestors on slave ships... or living in Africa right now. It all comes down to, I suppose, if you are an optimist or a pessimist, if you see a half empty glass or not. You could categorize the African American experience by nothing but pain and suffering, or you could choose to see it in a more balanced perspective.

[FredScuttle]

47. Ah....but are they "lucky" to be ancestors

of generations of people stripped of their freedom and brought to this country in chains?

And what, pray tell, is the "balance" to the Black experience in America beyond pain, suffering, injustice, racism, etc.?

[PDenton]

48. wow

"And what, pray tell, is the "balance" to the Black experience in America beyond pain, suffering, injustice, racism, etc.?"

So let me get this straight, the achievements of African American artists, writers, poets, musicians, scientists, clergy, civic and government leaders... mean nothing in themselves, because they are just overshadowed by the pain of 300 years of enslavement? I think you'ld better double check that.

[FredScuttle]

51. Those achievements you speak of

were accomplished in spite of the Black experience, not because of it.

Oh, to be sure, there is plenty of art we can reference that was directly influenced by 400 years of oppression, but I'm still interested to hear what good this country has done for Blacks that "balances" out the aforementioned 4 centuries of systematic terrorism.

[PDenton]

62. what good has this country done for whites?

Looked around lately? There are plenty of white people, and people of all races, living in poverty and not exactly living the American Dream either. 30 years of rightwing domination hasn't been kind to anybody. I don't know that America has always lived up to its promise for everybody, except the elites who have power and money. But that doesn't negate our ideals or make us an evil country. We shouldn't be pitting races or groups against each other, especially as Democrats. We should start seeking some common ground.

What is the alternative? Have a government run by professors of post-modern textual criticism? Mandatory hand wringing three times a day? I don't think so. Maybe I'm just too much of a moderate Democrat, not liberal or progressive enough, but that's my take on it.

[FredScuttle]

72. "common ground"

typical bullshit spewed by someone who is fortunate enough not to trace their ancestry back to an Atlantic slave ship.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

90. or someone who doesnt care about the poor in general.

[yardwork]

53. "Fair and balanced," huh?

[gollygee]

59. You could choose to re-write history

and ignore the centuries of true and real suffering.

You could, but I won't.

[PDenton]

63. history is important to study

to learn from it, to not repeat the same mistakes. But, too often history is used now days for political ends? The real political agenda here is reparations and affirmative action, right? Why not just come out and say "slavery makes necessary affirmative action/reparations", rather than pussyfooting around the issue and using emotional language, innuendo, and attacks on a persons morality?

I'm against both, if that matters.

[gollygee]

67. I figured out that you're against affirmative action and reparations

because it seems quite obvious that your revised version of history is being used to rationalize that position.

[PDenton]

68. what's my "revised version of history"?

I'm curious to know what you mean by that. It is not so much a question of facts as emphasis, I believe.

Regardless, I'm willing to accept the fact that my opinion is probably not popular on DU, or well understood. I can understand that. It's important to be exposed to different opinions, however.

[yardwork]

54. The United States didn't invent colonialism but we sure embraced it.

I have to say, I think it is really insensitive and just downright rude to suggest that African Americans should be grateful that their ancestors were brutalized. The same people responsible for the Atlantic slave trade are largely responsible for the fact that so many people around the world are hungry today.

It's illogical to dismiss past atrocities - especially ones so institutionalized and long-running as the Atlantic slave trade - simply because atrocities exist today.

Let's look at the root cause of all these atrocities. When we do, we find the same people and the same greedy nasty behavior at the root of them.

[PDenton]

64. the people who supported the atlantic slave trade

are dead. They can't hurt anybody alive today.

[FredScuttle]

73. yet millions benefit from their legacy

or does that not fit in with your ideal of our great country?

[Name removed]

75. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[FredScuttle]

76. Boo fucking hoo

I'm glad to see your latent racism finally creeped up in this thread for us to see. You should move to Jena if you're so longing for "white privilege"

Go ahead and keep blaming black people for your problems....some have made a veritable cottage industry in this country out of it.

[yardwork]

91. Thank you!

Any other racists want to step up to the plate?

[blondeatlast]

55. Are the Iraqis who haven't managed to be blown out of their homes,

made refugees, or survived "fortunate?"

Yeesh. Yuck. I need a Clorox shower. Pass the pumice while you are at it.

[Cronopio]

95. "The US didn't invent Colonialism, after all."

The US didn't invent tyranny either, but many in the US have embraced it. Does that absolve those Americans?

Correct answer: no.

[ismnotwasm]

98. Are you fucking kidding me?

Come over to my neighborhood sometime. I'll show you US poverty that has NO excuse.

[Greyhound]

15. This is always how they work, one little grain of truth surrounded and packed with

lies and more lies based on the other lies. What is really scary is how many people can't think well enough to see though this shit.

[madinmaryland]

19. Olbermann needs to make this guy the worlds worst person!

What a total idiot.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

25. I think he's got a mortal lock on it...

nt

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

80. Update

Tonight's "Worst Person in the World?"

Noneother than Micheal "For God's Sake Go Back to Reviewing Movies" Medved.

You can count on Keith.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

24. You've got to be effing kidding me

That's some of the most disgusting stuff I've ever seen written in the 21st Century.

[Kelly Rupert]

26. His facts are generally correct,

but his spin is atrocious.

1 is certainly true. Slavery was a universal scourge for millennia. However, slavery as practiced in the Americas was somewhat unprecedented in both its scale and its racial underpinnings.

2 is sort of true as well--after all, he deals in comparatives here; all he's really saying is that slavery was not in effect for the majority of the time from 1789 to the current day, and that it was not in practice on every acre of arable land in the nation. This is a gross misrepresentation, though: he words "briefly," "limited," and "tiny" serve only to emotionally minimize the plight of slaves.

3 is true, but irrelevant. Mass slavery, in which an entire race of people spend their entire lives in brutal servitude, is no better than quick execution.

4 is true, sort of. The prosperous textile mills of the Northern states certainly relied on the cheap supply of raw cotton from the South. The United States certainly would have been as wealthy and successful of a nation (if not more so) had it moved to a post-slave economy sooner, but he suggests that Northern states

5 is utterly false. The United States was a powerhouse of slavery (as were the West Indies, of course). Its "rapid abolition" was nothing of the sort.

6 is true, but sort of irrelevant. "Better than the Ivory Coast" is not exactly a high standard we're setting for America, now is it?

[La Lioness Priyanka]

65. america's new motto: if we are 2 degrees above shit we are doing great!

[Cronopio]

96. Ain't moral relativism grand?

"Aha, there's a new low we haven't sunk to yet. Lets feel good about ourselves!"

[La Lioness Priyanka]

32. what is the point of this if it is not an excuse to justify current racism?

it can hardly be for academic purposes since academia typically doesnt occur in point form.

[BlooInBloo]

44. Of course it is only for that reason. Like some in this thread.

[blondeatlast]

58. That's exactly the purpose. So I think we need to ask why the RRR

(as Medved is clearly a vocal part of) would not be putting a sock in Medved?

[NewJeffCT]

84. Trying to sanitize the past

The Right Wingers have been trying to rewrite history for decades now.

Do a google search on "Hitler Leftist" and you'll get over a million hits. Why? Because, a lot of RW types have been busy trying to remake Hitler into a leftist because he led the national SOCIALIST party... (with the emphasis on SOCIALIST)

It's why Ann Coulter wrote a book defending Joe McCarthy and why Michelle Malkin wrote one defending the internment of Japanese during World War 2. In 20-30 years when everybody remaining from WW2 and the McCarthy era have passed away, books like that will be used as examples of both sides of the debate. Nobody will remember the true facts, and other RWers will cite Malkin or Coulter 2nd or 3rd hand as justification for them.

The same with the deification of Reagan since he's left office - trying to put his face on Mt Rushmore, or on the dime, remaming the Washington airport to Reagan National, etc... the Reagans miniseries is taken off the air because of one line that may not have been true.

It's really all about trying to rewrite and reframe history for the long term.

[gollygee]

85. Look upthread a bit

It's being done to rationalize opposition to affirmative action.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

86. yes i know, this is what i mean. we are using this 'revisitionist history'

to continue institutionalized racism

[gollygee]

87. Yes and it's got that same Orwellian spin to it

that so much garbage lately has. It's being done in the name of justice and equality.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

88. its creepy that we as a society find ways to justify racism/slavery.

you think some things would be beyond justification. that we would learn and move on.

like say slavery and the holocaust.

[ismnotwasm]

99. Beyond creepy

Reading some of the things said in this thread is definitely turning my stomach.

[yardwork]

39. Those are appalling lies, and anyone who believes them

should spend a week or two in a library researching primary sources on the history of the Atlantic slave trade.

[6000eliot]

57. Jesus Christ is this guy nuts!

Is there any arguing with this shit?

[Donald Ian Rankin]

61. Some of those make sense, some don't.

1. Slavery was an ancient and universal institution, not a distinctively American innovation.

This is absolutely true; on the other hand, the use of slavery in America did give that institution a significant boost. The African tribes that slaves for America were bought from practiced slavery before that market was created, but on a smaller scale.


2. Slavery existed only briefly, and in limited locales, in the history of the republic - involving only a tiny percentage of the ancestors of today’s Americans.

Completely untrue: Slavery in America began in 1619 or so, and only finished in the 1865; my belief (although I'm not certain) is that it was legal across the US for much of that time.


3. Though brutal, slavery wasn’t genocidal: live slaves were valuable but dead captives brought no profit.

True. Slavery was not genocidal, if that's your idea of strong praise...


4. It’s not true that the U.S. became a wealthy nation through the abuse of slave labor: the most prosperous states in the country were those that first freed their slaves.

I'm fairly sure this one is nonsense, although I don't know the area well enough to respond authoritatively. His logic is certainly flawed - that's not evidence of lack of causation; his conclusion may or may not be. I strongly suspect that it's nonsense, but I can't be totally confident that it is, and I would discount arguments either for or against from anyone but an expert.

But my understanding is certainly that slavery was crucial to the prosperity of the South, which is why they were so opposed to its abolition.


5. While America deserves no unique blame for the existence of slavery, the United States merits special credit for its rapid abolition.

Totally untrue; the US was one of the last Western nations to abolish slavery. Vide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery#National_abolition_dates

I'm not sure it makes sense to blame or praise a nation as a whole for *anything*. It is certainly the case that America's much-praised founding fathers were a bunch of slavedrivers, though (as well as being racist, sexist, anti-semitic bigots, as was pretty much everyone alive at the time).


6. There is no reason to believe that today’s African Americans would be better off if their ancestors had remained behind in Africa.

Sort of true. Today's African Americans wouldn't *exist* if their ancestors had remained in Africa; their parents would have married different people, and there'd be a whole bunch of different people instead of them

It *is* true that today's African-Americans have an average quality of life higher than that of today's Africans. I don't think that "your descendants in a few hundred year's time will have a higher quality of live" is a terribly good reason to enslave someone, though...

[Swamp Rat]

71. k&r

[Pushed To The Left]

78. Pretty insensitive stuff by Medved!

Makes the O'Reilly story look like nothing by comparison!

[WilliamPitt]

82. Yo meeg

Rome?

Egypt?

I have no beef with your intent, and certainly have no argument in favor of slavery (duh).

But I gotta say...

1. Egypt and Rome were dynastic global empires built on slave labor....somewhere between 5,000 and 2,000 years ago. The pyramids? The pillars? The Sphinx? That wasn't aliens. It was, in Egypt, what were called "Hebrews." In Rome, it was basically anyone defeated via conquest and combat. Gladiators weren't volunteers. They were slaves who could fight. Those grand imperial architectural triumphs, Rome's founding of Western-style republican governments, all were built/created/fostered by imperial citizens who had spare time because slaves were doing the heavy lifting and the dying.

2. I quote: "While America deserves no unique blame for the existence of slavery, the United States merits special credit for its rapid abolition."

Slavery was first established on this continent by the Dutch, and then the British. Slaves toiled here 100 years before the name "America" even existed. Here in Boston, we're known for lobster ("lobstah") and baked beans. In the 1700s, the lobsters were fed to prisoners...and the baked beans were shipped to feed slaves in the West Indes.

And yes, America prospered through slavery after the founding, no doubt. I just smell the ironic sneer in the first half of that sentence above, and wanted to address it. "America" was a creation of the Enlightenment, of Locke, of the Stuart Kings, of the Magna Carta, of wealthy land-owners, and of an educated aristocracy who got nuts and decided to create a country founded on life, liberty, pursued happiness, slaughtered natives, free speech, freedom from religion, votes, and Madison-drafted assurances that the money would always prevail.

Good, bad, ugly...and a self-improving entity...or as Lincoln said, a more perfect Union. Bad then, bad now, but better, and with the potential to be better still. That's the genius, and it only took 30,000 years of fucked-up failed governments to get to a place where we make mistakes, and hate, and kill, and suck out loud...but don't have to stay that way, because we can improve and evolve and make more freedom. An old saying: Americans always do the right thing, after they've tried everything else. Indeed.

P.S. Name for me, please, any other nation that sent 600,000 soldiers to their deaths to bring an end to slavery.

There was more to it, of course, but I've read my Bruce Catton, and my Waugh, and Schlesinger, and more Catton (because there's always more Catton, thank God), and Donald, and Hendron, and Lincoln himself...and there was more to it, but a hell of a lot of those 600,000 didn't know that, because they were fighting for Union, which meant freedom, which meant slavery had to be smashed.

America is easy to despise. We're the Undisputed World Heavyweight Champion of genocide, and though I myself owned no slaves and killed no natives, I am part of the seventh generation to enjoy the spoils of that slaughter. This is truth writ large.

But that is also a truth so huge that it requires exacting precision. The blog you've posted means well, but fails that test in the main. Real honesty demands the real facts...or else no worthwhile lesson will ever be learned, and it'll all happen again, sure as sunshine.

:toast:

[TheFarseer]

83. I agreed with him until he got to #2

5. Is especially laughable. We were 2nd to last - with only Brazil behind us - in freeing the slaves.

[Javaman]

89. and once again, it's a white guy that writes this shit. I'm surprised he posed without his hood. nt

[sutz12]

94. Slightly OT, but an interesting corrollary IMO....

The bogus claim that America deserves credit for the "rapid abolition" of slavery is interesting.

America certainly didn't lead there. Note, too, that America is one of the last modern nations to achieve national health care.

Coincidence? Doubtful, since both tenets are based on distortions, lies and half truths and basically support the "rights" of institutions over the rights of individuals.

I recently heard the old canard that "socialized medicine doesn't work." It's right up there with the old "well, the slaves were better off here than in Africa" crap.

:shrug: