Posted on 02/19/2021 7:49:50 AM PST by ProgressingAmerica
So now they're going to conduct a reparations commission in congress. Where is everybody pointing out that Britain's Empire was the one who brought the slaves here?
The Founders didn't ignore their role across the ocean. Why do we? Shouldn't we do what our Founders did? That's all.
Why is the USA the only country that has to self flagellate for all eternity over slavery? Why not the freed slave who move to Liberia who, upon first landing, enslaved to local population? Is Brazil planning reparations? What about all the Africans who captured and sold Africans? Nope. Just America needs to pay.
Rhetorical question of course.
What swill!
True. I was just using 1776 as a point after which it became an issue independent of England. I suppose 1781 or 1783 could be used. Because imo, attributing slavery in the colonies pre 1776 to what has become the US is inaccurate, the colonies only “control” was whether an individual purchased a slave or not. As another poster noted a couple states attempted to abandon slavery earlier, but were overridden by England.
This is very notable, thank you for this. I doubt it will be a part of the reparations committee though. That committee is all about blame-America even where America isn’t the focus.
Or the Muslims, for that matter.
Georgia was the first colony to ban slavery, but it was eventually forced to allow it because of the relentless soapbox campaign of Glen Beck's favorite religious grifter, George Whitefield, lobbying on behalf of New England puritans.
was his black parent a descendant of an American slave or was he a post slave era immigrant? If he is an immigrant arriving here after 1865, he should not be entitled to any reparations.
And..
Early 1700s the Virginia colonial House of Burgesses, which had a variable attitude about slavery, attempted to outlaw the practice but the British government overruled the attempt.
I wish I could cite the source on this claim but I only recall it from a Patrick Henry biography.
Your choice, which would you pick. Being free man in your own country, or someone’s property in a foreign land. Your choice, raise you children in your country or have the “owner” in a foreign country sell them at his pleasure.
Explain to me the “advantage” of being a slave on a cotton plantation in Mississippi vs being a free person in your own country.
I think we’re in agreement on a basic point. I don’t view slavery as America’s ‘original sin’ that somehow negates all the good our nation has brought to the world.
Our Founders outlawed slavery where they could without destroying the nation in the process. Slavery had been around forever and was the ‘norm’ for the time, but the Founders still looked upon it as morally wrong.
What many overlook is that at the time of the founding (1776 not 1619!) slavery looked to be on its last legs here in America. It just didn’t make economic sense. Then the cotton gin was invented and very quickly someone with lots of slaves could make huge amounts of money in any place where green-seed cotton could be grown. So by the 1830s eliminating slavery in the U.S. was politically impossible.
My point was and is that Great Britain did end slavery in its empire and did actively try to end it around the world and should get some credit for it, in spite of its role earlier.
It’s like the argument that “women didn’t get the right to vote in the U.S. until 1920! What a sexist nation the U.S. was! When the fact is that women got the right to vote here (in most places) far earlier than anywhere else on earth.
This is stupid. Slavery has been illegal in the UK for centuries, now. Makes no sense to keep harping on it. Those who do are doing so for ignoble purposes.
Thanks, my friend.
I think it’s becoming clearer to me that my next open source audiobook is going to need to be focused on the abolitionism that took place right around the time of Independence and prior to it.
Progressives have too strong of an iron grip on history and we must find ways to loosen it.
Kinda. What the Brits did was stop work to stop the African transatlantic slave trade. They had no problem using coolies who were no better than slaves.
It was an economic move by the Brits, not a human right move.
In the immortal words of Kamala Harris’ ancestor and owner of a large plantation in Jamaica upon learning that he would be losing his slaves
“Can I at least get some Irish”. True story.
There was no major society that at one time, did not own slaves. Or to put it in the positive. Every single society of any size went through a very long period of slave ownership. Karl Marx has slavery as one of his inevitable economic stages.
And if your IQ is above 110, its virtually impossible for you to be free of a slave owning ancestor.
In bourgeois society … the past controls the present; in communist society, the present controls the past.The left rewriting history certainly did not originate with Orwell and his books. Certainly an ideology that intends to enslave the entire planet has to blot out the history of the biggest emancipators the planet has ever known.
— Manifesto, chapter 2
I agree, people forget that slavery existed here before the country was founded. What went on afterwards is our responsibility.
Thank you for reminding me of this. I can give you the source.
https://books.google.com/books?id=OKE6AAAAcAAJ&pg=PA456#v=onepage&q&f=false
The King’s veto of colonial abolition moves used the following language:
“upon pain of the highest displeasure, to assent to no law by which the importation of slaves should be in any respect prohibited or obstructed”
How about pointing fingers at Africa. Africans were the sellers.
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