This Juneteenth, Read 'The Real History of Slavery'

frontpagemag.com ^ | 6/17/2019 | Robert Maranto

[rktman]

For that reason, I commemorate Juneteenth by re-reading Thomas Sowell’s classic essay, “The Real History of Slavery,” written in part to debunk popular misconceptions spread by the likes of Alex Haley’s Roots. A part of his collection of mainly original essays in Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Sowell's essay teaches politically incorrect lessons no longer taught in higher education or pop culture.

First, slavery impoverished rather than built societies, by stigmatizing work and thrift while exalting as role models a slave-owning leisure class. In some respects, slave owners were like Hollywood stars, widely envied, and notorious for their conspicuous consumption and reckless disregard of others. Within places as distinct as China, Brazil, the Middle East, and America, locales with high concentrations of slaves were the poorest and most backward.

Second, Sowell shows that despite claims of a kinder, gentler slavery in non-European societies, “how human beings treat other human beings when they have unbridled power over them is seldom a pretty story or even a decent story, regardless of the color of the people involved.”

[rktman]

Hmmm. Surely Thomas Sowell did a little research on the subject to try to get the story correct. Libs will not embrace these words true or not.

[Bonemaker]

[wfu_deacons]

“American abolition came in 1865 when on June 19, soon dubbed Juneteenth, Union General Gordon Granger freed the last enslaved Africans in Texas.”

There were still slaves in border states that were not freed until the 13th Constitutional Amendment was ratified.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

After Mohammad Mahad defeated Gordon at Khartoum, human trafficking again went untroubled until British soldiers returned, among them a young Winston Churchill. Under British pressure, Sudan eventually formally abolished slavery, though informally it exists there to this day.

. . . President Obama, who removed a bust (in fairness, one of two) of Winston Churchill from the White House, probably never learned at Harvard that Churchill fought slavery in traditional Sudan, Nazi Germany, and Communist Russia.

[Steve Schulin]

An audiobook-style version of that chapter of Dr. Sowell’s book is freely available at http://snip.ly/qm431m

[miss marmelstein]

I now live in an area where almost all of the African-Americans are direct descendants of slaves. A lot of them own property where the old plantations were. One of my friends is planning on building a B&B on this property for tourists. I have a white friend who still hangs on to his beautiful old plantation home out on Selma highway.

Living close to history!

[DesertRhino]

In a way he’s right. But he does go a little over the top in giving Britain credit for ending slavery in the world. Britain did not like slavery in the new world harvesting cotton and cane.
However, at that moment all of India was basically enslaved under the Brits to pick cotton, tea, and opium. A coolie was just as much a slave as anyone in the south. The Brits had a lot of high minded talk, but as they sent the Royal Navy to interdict slave ships on the high seas, they didn’t sent the RN to free Indian or Chinese coolies.

The Brit abolition movement was largely economic warfare against the USA. However, Sewell was right that slavery does not produce wealth. The slaveholding areas on America were economically backwards by every measure compared to the north as the civil war started. Miles of rail, every kind of measurable output, steel, exports, textiles, population, average income, you name it.
Slavery held the southern economy back. Sewell nailed that.

[fishtank]

Bump bttt

http://juneteenth.com/