Hattip Neo_Prodigy:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/23/tea-party-tennessee-textbooks-slavery_n_1224157.html

It's predictable that the Freedom Party, purely about balancing the budget and promoting freedom decides that the best way to promote freedom is to rehabilitate the parasitical idle, effete, rapist evil institution of slavery. There is no possible means for this to be acceptable in modern society. There is no sunny side to an institution soaked in bloodshed, which had no concept whatsoever of consent. There is no possible means to rehabilitate an institution that treated human beings from cradle to grave as not human beings, but the legal and moral equivalent of VCRs. And there is no reason in any variant of Heaven or Hell for Southern white people to romanticize and whitewash the institution that broke the South, that ruined it, that kept it a miserable dirt-poor wretched hive of racist bitter clingers who nostalgized a catastrophic lost war. Slavery retarded the South's growth, it ensured that Southern whites *accepted* that the most fundamental building bloc of society is that some humans are not human, and to treat them with whips that make their back a sinister artistic pattern on top of that.

There is no reason whatsoever in 2013 for this to be acceptable. The only thing that it proves is that the conservatarian definition of 'liberty' in the United States, at least, has plenty of room to approve of slavery, and racially based slavery at that. Even in the 2010s, 150 years after that institution drowned in the blood it called up to preserve itself.

Comments

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

"The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn't existed, to everybody -- not all equally instantly -- and it was their progress that we need to look at"

Sounds horrible. I'm thinking most of what you're complaining about has to do with the Texas Board of Education.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

"They voted down a motion that requires students to be taught about the terrorism brought about by the Ku Klux Klan and what they did to ethnic and racial minorities, but they turn around and pass a provision that requires the teaching of the violence of the Black Panther Party."

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

Who's "they"?

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

http://www.therevisionariesmovie.com/

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Rush Limbaugh: “If Any Race Of People Should Not Have Guilt About Slavery, It’s Caucasians” (http://www.clutchmagonline.com/2013/07/rush-limbaugh-if-any-race-of-people-should-not-have-guilt-about-slavery-its-caucasians/)

Except that Americans were slower to drop the institution than most of the rest of the world.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Another classic mouth-dump from Rushbo.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Perfection!

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

Slower?

It took about 90 years. How quickly did the British do it?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Right-Wingers always accept responsibility when it's someone else's fault.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Bullshit Rush (http://www.nps.gov/ethnography/aah/aaheritage/histContextsD.htm), as if caucasians were not profiting from south american trade. And the scale was horrifyingly huge (http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/slave04.htm).

Suddenly, succession is not a bad idea

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

I really am ready for the country to ditch these back water corn pone states and move on. Let Mexico absorb them.

Re: Suddenly, succession is not a bad idea

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

[aviv-b.livejournal.com]

I'll help them pack. The idea that white children have to be protected from the truth of their forefathers' behaviors makes me want to puke.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

What's a succession?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It's SECESSION.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Well written, I enjoyed your rant.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

http://www.therevisionariesmovie.com/

I knew those knuckledraggers wouldn't stop at just science. History seems an obvious target:

“Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals the fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such as world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.” ― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

I'm confused, are you suggesting revisionism is a bad thing? It can get used badly, but you combat it the same way you combat junk science.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

As silly as it is, I would posit that it's a reactionary silliness. The other equally silly side is the one that says because the founders owned slaves, that invalidates everything they touched and every idea they ever had, without further examination, should be undone. Scrap everything and start from scratch. Some of the things I've heard you say over the years have made me think at times you might belong to the latter yourself. For rich white slaveowners writing them, I still love me some fourth amendment with a side of 1st 2nd and 5th, among most of the others, and I can argue with reason why I think they're worth keeping, as they touch on some rather timeless issues people have had between them and their respective authority of choice. They weren't gods or prophets. They were mortal, flawed human beings, who once upon a time had some really great ideas on government.

Both the lionizing and the demonizing camps need to take a powder, and recognize that humanity more often than not produces people that contain the propensity for great good and great evil often in the same body. It's unromantic and pragmatic, but we can't have that now, can we? No. Both camps must heretofore continue reacting to their polar opposite, to make sure that pragmatic views of history remain anathema. And I blame any and all contributors on both sides for it being that way.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) David Irving considers himself a reaction to propaganda, too. I don't give a damn what he or they consider themselves.

2) At the very least it requires a serious look at how the Founders worked with their ideas in practice, as opposed to theory. I mean let's face it, saying we can only look at what they wrote and not what they did is a purely myopic way of looking at them. It retains the Demigod myth without any serious look at them as human beings.

3) Northern Founders *did* abolish slavery and *were* consistent. This means that technically not all of them *did* think that way. What the Northern Founders did wrongly was accept the idea that the Southern ones' moral cowardice was acceptable.

4) And no, actually, they failed the first time and kicked the can down the road until they ran into a buzzsaw. The prevailing idea of the Southerners was that the USA would be a giant Ruritania.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I don't know anyone who actually believes "The other equally silly side is the one that says because the founders owned slaves, that invalidates everything they touched and every idea they ever had, without further examination, should be undone."

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

This is not only wrong and dangerous to paint over our history of slavery but it is anti-American as well. Anti-American in that our founders emphasized the human nature of my country's leaders, the whole point of the American government was that our Presidents were not kings. They didn't have a divine right to rule, they were not supposed to accept gifts, they were supposed to be treated as equal to the rest of the American citizenship - and equality that fortunately is now more proper and more shared by women and people of color (though we do have a long way to go).

So why do we need to white wash our early American founders? What do they become when all their flaws are taken away? Do they become god-kings?

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

I posted this as a response, but it got eaten, and I can't remember where it was...

As part of a course I used to teach we used to get kids to rate different people from 0-10, mother, family, Australians, Aboriginals, migrants, refugees, muslims. Then we'd take kids out to the grave of the former Ngurungaeta of the Wurundjeri (like a Chief, but that's not the right description, of the indigenous people of Melbourne) and talk about the genocide and stolen generation. The guy I did it with's grandfather was an SS officer at an extermination camp. We would have a big talk about a) getting caught up in the spirit of the time and b) how you don't have to feel guilt about something to think it was horrible and it should never happen again. This idea that we have to feel personally ashamed and responsible for the actions of our forefathers is unhelpful, because it makes people deny that things ever happened. The main point of the activity, however, was to ask the kids "how could someone do that", leading them to the answer because they thought of them as less than human. We would then lead them in to "are there any people we treat as less than human now?" This would then bring home to the many, many kids who put down a 0 for refugees and/or Muslims at the start of the day that maybe they might be dehumanising them, and that that might make them OK with supporting policies that future generations will see for the human rights violations that they are.

Single most powerful thing I've done as a teacher.

[geezer-also.livejournal.com]

" how you don't have to feel guilt "

But see, in this country you DO have to feel guilt, or you are a racist. (of course that's if you are white, and probably only males). I'm pretty sure that is another thing you can credit (or blame) my generation for :D

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]