Tuesday, October 2, 2007

ONE STEP BACK: KNEW IT COULDN'T LAST TOO LONG...


One big F'ing swoosh back. I had finally gotten one of those things that was bothering me out of my head when I finally decided to read the essay Michael Medved wrote about slavery. Why did I do that?

Below are some excepts and a link to the full essay. Read and get back to me with your thoughts. Length is not an issue I want to read it all. I need to reread the essay and let it swoosh around a bit more in my head before I can even begin to write a response.

"In short, politically correct assumptions about America’s entanglement with slavery lack any sense of depth, perspective or context. As with so many other persistent lies about this fortunate land, the unthinking indictment of the United States as uniquely blameworthy for an evil institution ignores the fact that the record of previous generations provides some basis for pride as well as guilt. "

That wonderful paragraph ends a long diatribe about how America should be more proud than ashamed of her legacy of slavery.

“Unfortunately, the current mania for exaggerating America’s culpability for the horrors of slavery bears no more connection to reality than the old, discredited tendency to deny that the U.S. bore any blame at all. No, it’s not true that the “peculiar institution” featured kind-hearted, paternalistic masters and happy, dancing field-hands, any more than it’s true that America displayed unparalleled barbarity or enjoyed disproportionate benefit from kidnapping and exploiting innocent Africans.”

"By definition, the crime of genocide requires the deliberate slaughter of a specific group of people; slavers invariably preferred oppressing and exploiting live Africans rather than murdering them en masse. Here, the popular, facile comparisons between slavery and the Holocaust quickly break down: the Nazis occasionally benefited from the slave labor of their victims, but the ultimate purpose of facilities like Auschwitz involved mass death, not profit or productivity. For slave owners and slave dealers in the New World, however, death of your human property cost you money, just as the death of your domestic animals would cause financial damage. And as with their horses and cows, slave owners took pride and care in breeding as many new slaves as possible. "

But wait there is more. Here he argues that the real victims of the slave trade were the slave traders:

"Historians agree that hundreds of thousands, and probably millions of slaves perished over the course of 300 years during the rigors of the “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic Ocean. Estimates remain inevitably imprecise, but range as high as one third of the slave “cargo” who perished from disease or overcrowding during transport from Africa. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean."

"NO SLAVE TRADERS WANTED TO SEE THIS LEVEL OF DEADLY SUFFERING"?

Full essay here

GVG
~we're the warriors they write epics about~

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