non-surprisingly the same people often venerate the history of both. smdh.
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i’m not much a student of history. from my vantage point, that sentiment seems suspect for two reasons.
first, there were people in the us who didn’t treat animals as badly as they treated some slaves; so, there was true malice. yes, that malice was supported by the the law of the land, and you can’t technically have criminality without breaking written law: but people were knowingly perpetrating phyiscal harm for nothing more than financial gain.
second, and perhaps more importantly, there were people in the states ( and elsewhere ) loudly decrying the actions of american slaveholders. these people changed laws to end it. these people through direct action subverted it.
we can ascribe american slavery to “culture” just as - on a different moral scale – we could culture to climate denialism - but, it papers over the actions of individuals into the hodgepodge of statistics.
my feeling is, “culture” is hindsight: the result of the behavior we notice and can categorize.
masses of people can help explain why individual behavior becomes normalized, but it doesn’t ( and didn’t ) excuse it.
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Financial gain was part of it, not all of it. After all, that doesn’t explain strong support for the institution from whites who didn’t own slaves. White identity was fundamentally grounded in the belief in black inferiority, a belief that also justified slavery. Abolishing slavery and asserting black equality was a blow to the collective white (supremacist) identity. Many signs today demonstrate that the collective white identity has yet to fully adjust to its own claims that it accepts a relatively new (in historical terms) racial egalitarianism.
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[quote=“Max_Blancke, post:47, topic:92335”]
I hate to wade into this, but I think you are expressing a political opinion, rather than relating accurate history.[/quote]
I don’t think it’s possible to do the latter without the former. We can’t convey the image of the past to present day people without comparing and contrasting, at least implicitly. So, I will accept that criticism with a shrug.
But disregarding that, thank you for pointing out something: there is an ancient example of slavery that I’d agree was probably just as bad as American color-line slavery - helotry in ancient Sparta. The Helots were not called slaves by the Spartans, and even in ancient times other Greeks argued whether they were technically slaves or not*, but according to most ancient authors their situation was much worse than that of slaves in the other Greek poleis like Athens, Corinth or Rhodes. Like American slaves, they were born unfree, died that way, were kept ignorant by force of law, during most eras had essentially no rights, and had almost no chance of escape, since they were easily found. I knew all this, but hadn’t put the facts together until you mentioned it - thank you!
[quote=“Max_Blancke, post:47, topic:92335”]
…none of this is intended to minimize the horrors of slavery in the new world. I just don’t understand the need to make it worse than other historic incidents of slavery. I would imagine that being worked to death in a cotton field in Georgia is not a measurably worse life than being worked to death in a silver mine in Laurium.[/quote]
Being worked to death was certainly not the worst thing that ever happened to a slave, and was probably one of the better outcomes for slaves in the Roman lead mines**, Louisiana brothels, or Turkish galleasses. Free men work themselves to death all the time, after all. But I don’t have any need to make American slavery worse than many other peculiar institutions; I simply recognize from my study of history that it was - although in the future I will be careful to point out that ancient Sparta managed to compete in the same league! So again thank you for that.
If you list all the worst aspects of every other form of slavery, historically, you will find that American slaves and (during some periods, according to some authors) Spartan Helots were subject to all of them. Thus, while not attempting to downplay the hardships of any other slaves, I’m still more than willing to say that these peoples had it worse than any others.
* at least according to Wikipedia. I haven’t read Critias’s fragments.
** Roman slaves in general had a far better lot than American slaves or Spartan Helots, but being sent to the lead mines was understood to be a death sentence. Lead poisoning was well known in the ancient world.*** Cato the Elder recommended selling older family slaves to the lead trade (as a cost control measure, rather than caring for them as they became increasing unable to work) but other Romans considered this evidence of Cato’s harsh and unpleasant character.
*** despite 20th Century American corporate propaganda to the contrary.
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Don’t need to, we haven’t any disagreement. 
I am familiar with @chgoliz not only because she’s a regular here, but also because she was very kind to me when I visited Chicago. I’d have bought her lunch but she had to go to a birthday party. I think her post is a good example of the reactions you will continue to see if you continue to try to categorize hardships you haven’t experienced with the word “real”. It’s not a good choice of word - unless you want to spend the majority of your time explaining what that word means to you!
Sometimes people ask me who my children’s real parents are. I smile and say “I feel pretty real. Do I seem fake to you? Is it the pixels?” Usually after they sputter a bit (sometimes digging the hole quite a bit deeper!) I’ll take pity on them and teach them a few new ways to express themselves that don’t stigmatize and disrespect my children*. “This one’s biological or genetic parents are/were… &etc.”
That’s your categorization, which I’d disagree with rather strongly. I seem to remember there are plenty of examples of debt slavery and wage slavery that include rape and torture, so you’re making a pointless nonpoint as soon as you choose to use a sloppy and subjective word like “real”. Communication is a matter of choosing the right words to convey meaning accurately, and you do it very well twice in the sentence I just quoted - “debt slavery” and “wage slavery” are pretty meaningful, in a way that “real slavery” just isn’t.
Anyway, I’m not trying to jump on your head. Far from it! I’m just explaining to you why your head’s likely to get jumped on. You’re treating a subjective word as though it were objective, so naturally you are saying many different things to different people; you really can’t avoid offending some of them. It’s what happens.
That’s what I thought, and I one hundred percent agree with you. I would very much like to remediate the lingering effects of slavery in the USA - mostly because I’m American, and I want America to be better. I’d like to see my tax dollars used to provide massively increased educational and economic opportunities in the inner cities and (especially!) the Deep South, and I tend to focus on that. But absolutely we shouldn’t consider our moral obligation greater than that of other nations that still practice slavery today (such as various oil states in the Middle East and Africa).
I have opposed nearly every war America’s fought in my lifetime, but I’m not a Quaker. I’d support the hell out of any war that was fought with a specific objective of permanently ending slavery.
* Who are, typically, standing right there in hearing range.
EDIT: Sorry about the double wall’o’text, everyone. Didn’t have time to make it shorter.
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There are a lot of people who seem to have the need to hinge their political beliefs on the basic evilness of western, or American civilization. The slavery issue is just one of many. I think it is a relatively common belief that ancient or classical slavery was more humane than New World slavery, and even that Caribbean and South American slavery was more humane than Southern North American slavery. What it seems to come down to is that historically, some classes of slaves had less horrible experiences than others, across all historical eras and geography. The reverse is also accurate. In most cases that I have studied, any time a large increase in the number of available slaves was recorded, the relative cost and value of an individual slave dropped, and treatment of slaves worsened. This was true in 1st century AD Rome, and particularly true in the ancient Islamic world.
One grim aspect of slavery that I am not aware of in the modern New World was the mass sacrifice of slaves for religious purposes. But once again, I am not trying to minimize anyone’s experiences.
A related issue is warfare. You would be amazed at how many people, even those who teach the subject at university level, believe strongly that warfare in the ancient world and tribal societies was purely ritualistic, and that warfare with the goal of killing or subjugation large numbers of the enemy was a western, Christian innovation. To someone in my field, that is as absurd as “evil humours” disease theory is to a virologist.
But both ideas are about shaping one’s understanding of history to conform with that person’s political beliefs.
But to address your first sentence, there are things that happened in the past. Through Archaeology and other fields, we can often determine what happened, what resources were used, and often why the participants were motivated to play the part they did in what happened. This can be done without the application of our own bias and experience to the process, though not always without difficulty. We can also interpret the known facts for modern audiences, but those processes should be well defined and separated from our objective findings.
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The point of bringing up the enslavement of African people in North America isn’t to debate whether they had it better or worse than people who were enslaved by other civilizations thousands of years ago. The point is that the practice played a major role in shaping the social structure of the United States TODAY.
Maybe some of my ancestors were enslaved by the ancient Romans or Assyrians or whatever; I don’t know. But I do know that the last few hundred years of American history go a long way toward explaining why people who look like me have had a very different experience than people whose ancestors came here (or more often were brought here) from subsaharan Africa.
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Don’t worry, I ain’t one of the above. 
Now, if you want to say my political beliefs hinge on an appreciation of the basic stupidity and vileness of humanity, I may be a pretty good target for that. At least on my bad days. But I like to think that American civilization is reaching for eudaimonia. If we could just stop destroying the environment we require in order to thrive, I’d be quite optimistic about western civilization!
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This is a very distorted perspective, for several reasons. Let’s do the math.
(1) 1865 - 1620 = 245, not 265. Of course, you can get earlier starting dates for slavery by including American countries other than the USA. The earliest (non-aboriginal) slavery in the Americas was Columbus’s own kingdom on Hispaniola, which began in 1501. But he didn’t start importing black people until about 20 years later, when he had just about wiped out the aboriginal population of the island.
(2) By 1789, the northern states had abolished slavery. Give us partial credit for that period.
(3) Segregation did not begin right after 1865. In fact, there were a few years of very good race relations, until 1876 when Chief Justice Roger Taney made a dirty deal with Rutherford B. Hayes. Taney allowed the result of a crooked election to stand, and in return, Hayes pulled out the federal troops that made it possible for blacks to safely vote in the South.
Even then, the federal government did not segregate until Woodrow Wilson ordered it in 1913.
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Except for the constant terrorism campaign aimed at African Americans and Republics in the south… sure. The end of reconstruction was also due to white northerners being sick of the unrest in the south as the former slave owners tried to murder their way back into power and they won. From, there, it was a pretty steady race to the bottom and as African Americans fled in the early 20th century, they were also met by forms of segregation like redlining.
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“Why doesn’t anyone ever want to talk about the egregious human rights violations that WEREN’T taking place?”
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Cruelty is not limited to slavery. The flogging of soldiers, sailors and apprentices was also common. That continued after slavery.
There will always be people with malice. Financial gain isn’t relevant because it would then be too easy to excuse the cruelties in primitive economies. It also ignores that slavery frequently ends when the economies become less primitive.
The South had a much more primitive economy. It’s only natural that they’d lag behind. You’re thinking in too short a time frame anyway. It takes longer than that to change a society around.
I don’t excuse the bad things that happened after slavery. I’m saying these other bad things are not slavery. My other point is that they’re not always sins unique to America. Slavery was brutal in Africa for almost a thousand years before they started exporting their slaves.
It’s a point because slavery was real, enduring, and deeply institutionalized.
Fine. Sarah Palin was jumped on for comparing the national debt to slavery. I already said these “terms have their uses in hyperbole” but her critics acted as though she meant real slavery.
That’s been happening for over fifty years. I’d say it doesn’t work that way, but you could say it hasn’t been done tried properly, and you’d be partially correct. (One of history’s ironies is that Nixon cared more about poor people than LBJ and his followers did.)
In other words, you never will support a war that is only secondarily fought to end slavery. That’s actually a very common position, and could be understood by remembering that leaders could abandon the secondary rationale. The British went into WWII to defend Poland. It ended with Poland torn in half, the other half going to one of the original aggressors, and then the remainder under that aggressor’s thumb. On the other hand, the U.S. went to fight communists in Vietnam, left after a sham peace agreement, and then refused to help when the war restarted. Later, that ostensibly communist Vietnam would be sending us products from the workers’ paradise of Nike sweatshops.
The South might have worked out better without the Civil War. But we sought peace with communist North Korea, and that country remains both a basketcase and a threat.
Fortunately, some people will fight anyway.
Except, of course, that slavery still exists. [quote=“Ion, post:74, topic:92335”]
The South had a much more primitive economy. It’s only natural that they’d lag behind.
[/quote]
Except of course, that the re invigoration of slavery in the early 19th century happened due to a technological innovation. And the American south dominated the global cotton market, despite being “primitive” in nature… [quote=“Ion, post:74, topic:92335”]
I’m saying these other bad things are not slavery.
[/quote]
That’s a matter up for debate… as Killer Mike has pointed out, slavery was never prohibited with regards to prison labor. [quote=“Ion, post:74, topic:92335”]
That’s been happening for over fifty years.
[/quote]
LOL! No.[quote=“Ion, post:74, topic:92335”]
Later, that ostensibly communist Vietnam would be sending us products from the workers’ paradise of Nike sweatshops.
[/quote]
As Vietnam was being reintegrated into the global markets AFTER the end of the Cold War, when the second and third world markets were eliminated. [quote=“Ion, post:74, topic:92335”]
The South might have worked out better without the Civil War.
[/quote]
LOL! No.
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Amazing how many disciples of the Free Market overlook that little detail. When the cotton gin made it possible to process cotton more efficiently it didn’t lead to huge numbers of cotton growers freeing their extra slaves, it lead to an INCREASE in demand for slaves so the cotton fields could produce enough to keep up with the growing industry.
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The Civil War was first and foremost about slavery. The South did not have a single major grievance against the North that did not relate directly or indirectly to slavery. Anyone who claims different is engaging in revisionism.
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And might even be a closet neo-confederate…
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It was still primitive compared to the North.
They were still sweatshops. The workers paradise was always a fraud.
Yes, but the U.S. rarely gets credit for that.
But my bottom line is, the people who can’t oppose slavery today would not have fought slavery in the 19th century.
And #BringBackOurGirls isn’t enough.
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