Proslavery in 2013
Posted: January 9, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Proslavery, Slavery, The South 3 Comments »Via Brooks Simpson come these luminaries (images at the link):
I am a slave to paying taxes to a corrupt evil tyrannical government so others can sit back and get free phones, free food and such … so slavery is evil in many different forms
I wish I could say I never heard that before, but I get it all the time. Cry us a river and call back when someone sells your children away from you.
Peter from Louisiana
Another guy:
Still waiting for the Bible reference that sez slavery is immoral. The opinion that slavery is eveil is just an opinion. I don’t think it evil. My family owned slaves in 1860. I uphold belief in family tradition.
True enough, the Bible contains no condemnation of slavery. Quite the opposite, it endorses and regulates the system. One of these days I’ll write a post on the details, but I’ll take a common objection right now. Its apologists often insist that the slavery described in the Bible is nothing like the slavery of the antebellum South. They will point to all kinds of restrictions on treating slaves in certain ways for proof. As far as it goes, the text bears that out with one vital exception: all the moderating rules apply only to Jews taken as slaves by other Jews. For anybody else the Bible says essentially “do as thou wilt”. Had Virginia or South Carolina permitted enslaving whites, I don’t doubt they would also have found it in their hearts to require better treatment for them than for black slaves.
As for the rest of that, what does it even mean that he upholds belief in family tradition? Does he think he ought to have slaves today? Does he wish he did? He clearly does not think the institution is wrong. I have trouble processing the concept, but I don’t know how else to read the statement. Apparently he alone of all the humans ever to live has ancestors who made mistakes and did wrong by others.
One more:
Dock a ship at any 3rd world country in 2013 & pass out leaflets in their Native Language with an offer of safety, protection, health care, food & shelter with the full understanding that hard labor will be the only cost to them & their Families. Would this ship return empty?
He left out the bit about how they would never be safe, never be protected, could never leave or change their minds, could be whipped, mutilated, or raped at will, have their families destroyed by being sold to other people, that they agreed for themselves and all their descendants until the end of time, and most fatal to his argument that no one asked to begin with. A trip across the Middle Passage did not commence with buying tickets. It commenced with being stolen from your home.
All of these quotes originate in a Facebook group for “Southern Heritage Preservation“. Like any other large region with a long past (at least in North American white terms) the South has no shortage of history worthy of preservation. From all of that, these three men chose slavery.
Discussion of the war sometimes get branded re-fighting it. Re-fighting the war implies that all parties stopped fighting it at some point, only to later resume. Some people never did.
Sometimes I wonder if people make their own identity out of the ancestors they never knew because they have little in their own lives to be happy about. Then I see people proudly claiming slavery as their heritage and think, “What kind of happiness proxy is THAT? Geez.” So I guess I’m wrong somewhere on that conclusion.
Sean, you’re on the right track. I cannot say exactly what internal motivation drives folks in this direction — and I think whatever it is, is subconscious anyway — but it’s a two-way and cyclical exchange, where the modern person feels boosted by noble ancestry, and them projects back on that long-dead person their own beliefs and values.
As for the institution of slavery, the usual responses are to (1) deny one’s own ancestors had anything to do with it, and/or (2) argue that it really wasn’t an awful or immoral thing, and/or (3) insist that criticism on that account is invalid because it was legal, it was a different time, etc., and/or (4) the “Yankee Empire” has made slaves of us all.
The idea that chattel bondage is fundamentally wrong is inconsistent with what they need to believe about their ancestors, so they will argue — to convince themselves, as much as anyone else — it’s simply irrelevant to their own “heritage.”. That’s the only way to deal with the cognitive dissonance.
I think you’re close. The daily fact of our lives is all about how we have to navigate around other people, make accommodations with them, and so forth. Hell is other people. The bigger the group of other people gets, the more limited we are. Being able to just disregard whole classes of human being is a kind of freedom. It’s not a kind of freedom that you or I necessarily want, but that private life of power has a lot of psychological appeal. The ability to dictate especially the most intimate details of life to another has got to have a positive impact on your sense of self-worth. We can call that a mean, nasty way to look at the world but probably everyone has felt the temptation. I think it’s the only way some people ever see anything. I’ve certainly heard enough complaints about how toleration and pluralism “really” mean domination by some foreign influence that just should not even be considered, whether it’s women, people of different or no religions, people with less money, or people with the “wrong” skin color.
The Yankees took that from them. We stole their mastery of the universe. And for what? A bunch of inferiors. It even shows up in the first guy’s comment: we take from him, through taxes, to give to people he sees as unworthy. It’s an old idea: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_r7sURkxKVvE/S62dfPcf2KI/AAAAAAAAGBs/78Yqt7fgV7Y/s1600/racist+cartoon+1866.jpg