Posted on 01/15/2015 10:05:46 AM PST by Sean_Anthony
In Paradise Lost Satan says that he'd rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. I think that pretty much sums up slavery or freedom. I personally cannot imagine any situation, no matter how bad, that wouldn't be preferable to being someone's property. Can you?
Actually you don’t know one way are the other, there is a reason that even liberal blacks sometimes come to thank God for their ancestors being purchased by someone that moved them from African slavery to American slavery.
As someone who has never known slavery, of course I cannot imagine being held against my will and it would be a false equivalency to compare our lifetime of moving freely to those that mostly didn’t know anything of the sort. I would rather not compare apples to oranges.
There was no concept of freedom in tropical Africa
Still isn’t much
You should read actual published slave interviews conducted by WPA in 30s with surviving slaves
It’s educational
Africa wasn’t Roots anymore than Appalachia is Deliverance
It was a rough place
Lots of injustice in early 1800s by our sensitive barometer
I wonder what tropical Africa would be like today if never touched by whites or any other non negro?
Bucolic
Idyllic
What about America. Only Amerindians
We live in weak foolish times puffed up with a moral superiority over past injustice we never earned
Which is why Islam is on the move while we hand wring
Slavery in the North America is the best thing that ever happened to the blacks who live here descended from slaves
If not there is nothing keeping them from returning to the Congo river basin anymore so than I’m encumbered from returning to Great Britain
So bye
Excellent response!
All I can do is speak for me. And you can speak for yourself. What circumstances would make you want to be a slave?
My understanding is most Africans who wound up being shipped to the Americas as slaves were not slaves before being abducted. They were in control of their own lives for the most part. And they didn't volunteer for slavery. It was forced upon them. I'm sure that, given a choice, they'd have declined the opportunity. Any rational person would.
You have to search high and low to find it-—the victors really do write the history books-—but it’s a plain fact that blacks were viewed as subhuman by Northerners. The lives of blacks were made miserable in the northern states.
Nor was slavery completely extinct there by the time of the Civil War. I believe New Jersey still had a few slaves in 1865.
Every time I see this self-righteous preening and condemnation of the South as the devil, I keep all of that in mind.
If I don’t respond for a while, it’s because I’m leaving to run some errands. I’ll be back later.
Actually I have read a lot of them. Not all, but a lot. And I admit that many spoke of kind masters and decent treatment, far more than those who spoke of cruel masters and bad conditions. Many spoke of tough times they faced after being freed. But in all the ones I read I don't recall a single person ever saying that they wished they were still a slave.
It was a rough place
It was their home. Why wouldn't that be preferable to being someone's property?
We live in weak foolish times puffed up with a moral superiority over past injustice we never earned
We're talking about 150-plus years ago so where it the relevance?
Why do you want to change the subject?
OK. I don't recall any of those liberal blacks who are glad their ancestors were brought here wishing that they were a slave.
Better?
Exactly.
Why is it relevant today for you and others here to harp on Dixie like you do?
Great question
But let me be clear
If you want an honest appraisal of how blacks and other minorities behave and think and where they come from I’m your man
I’ll go toe to toe
Few here will
They are scared
Which is why you’re side wins the culture war
Again, why do you want to change the subject? Now you want to start talking about people desiring to become slaves.
Are you drinking are something?
Where is the relevance to any of these theories on what others would have preferred in another time, when the subject of the thread is Robert E. Lee, with an aside swipe at Obama for his Al Sharpton relationship?
Robert E. Lee freed his own slaves, but he expressed an opinion, based on more accurate information on his times than anyone here can possibly pretend to have. His opinion deserves respect; his nobility of character was acknowledged as much by those he fought against in the War, as by his own men.
No one here is advocating slavery; and neither did Lee. Most of us, here, know enough about history to realize the absurdity of throwing "slavery" into discussions not really relevant to it. That absurdity can be illustrated by some salient facts from human history. Just about every people had a period--usually a very extensive period--when much of the physical labor was done by folk in some form of bondage; whether by bondsmen, employed by the Patriarchs & Kings in the Old Testament; serfs employed throughout the feudal eras in Europe & Asia; or slaves in Africa & the Americas.
History is also replete with evidence of the heroism of some of those bondsmen, serfs & slaves. People need to get over allowing themselves to be played by demagogues (such as Obama) and scoundrels such as Sharpton, who seize every grievance they can exploit, to promote ongoing hatred over events that took place long before anyone now living could possibly testify in any evidentiary hearing as to what exactly was true about those events, which could be translated into some form of ongoing grievance.
Frankly, some of this speculation is a libel against the Southern Negro, most of whom remained loyal to the Old South during the War in which Robert E. Lee defended Virginia and her people--all of her people, including some who owed their status as free men to his kindness. (On this point, consider an educated, highly honorable witness, who was alive in the era, Booker T. Washington; himself, perhaps the greatest true champion of the American Negro in American History.)
William Flax
Do you fret so over the treatment of Indians by whites
Morality wise in my view it was far worse
Honestly.
Do you wax and point fingers about Wounded Knee or Sand Creek and all the rest the same as you do slavery and I assume Jim Crow
The culture of this nation is now poisoned utterly by victim hood and white demonization and southerners are obviously lowest hanging fruit in this climate
Try to resist
I know it makes one feel morally preeminent and appears like it’s any easy way to win arguments
But victim culture and the demonization of whites and western civilization in general as the bogeyman.....yes..,,the negro slave trade and colonization both
Enables our enemies
Hell they do it too and use it against us
So think about it
Glad to see you standing up for your heritage. The fact that almost every time, someone honors a genuine American hero, here, those conditioned by what I lave labelled an Academic/Media complex, have to try to divert the discussion into some form of apologetic hand-wringing over events, only marginally--at best--related to the subject, needs to be addressed.
Why should we bother with letting them distract us? Because they epitomize the fallacious analysis that has undermined the pride of our rooted population in the cultural achievements that have made the America we were born in possible in the first place.
As you understand very well, the frothy injection of disparagement for American role models, reflects the same conditioning of the susceptible, which made the election of Obama--at best only an accidental American--possible in the first place.
William Flax
Since slavery was also an accepted practice in much of Africa (and remains so in certain African countries to this day), I don't see your point, unless you want to claim that poverty and slavery of blacks in the Confederacy was so much worse than poverty and slavery in Africa.
I’m no fanboi of REL but I agree that it is tantamount to slander to mention him in the same breath as sharpton.
Did you read what went before? He didn’t think abolition should be accomplished through war.
True, but have you ever noticed how much you are taxed? We pay more tax than the serfs did during the Middle Ages. To the extent you are taxed by force, you are owned.
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