Posted on 09/14/2019 1:59:15 PM PDT by RoosterRedux
“Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.”
I’ve been struggling with that sentence — the opening statement of the introductory essay to the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project on the legacy of slavery in America — for a few weeks now.
It’s a very strange formulation. How can an enduring “ideal” — like, say, freedom or equality — be “false” at one point in history and true in another? You could of course say that the ideals of universal equality and individual liberty in the Declaration of Independence were belied and contradicted in 1776 by the unconscionable fact of widespread slavery, but that’s very different than saying that the ideals themselves were false. (They were, in fact, the most revolutionary leap forward for human freedom in history.) You could say the ideals, though admirable and true, were not realized fully in fact at the time, and that it took centuries and an insanely bloody civil war to bring about their fruition. But that would be conventional wisdom — or simply the central theme of President Barack Obama’s vision of the arc of justice in the unfolding of the United States.
No, in its ambitious and often excellent 1619 Project, the New York Times wants to do more than that. So it insists that the very ideals were false from the get-go — and tells us this before anything else. Even though those ideals eventually led to the emancipation of slaves and the slow, uneven and incomplete attempt to realize racial equality over the succeeding centuries, they were still “false when they were written.” America was not founded in defense of liberty and equality against monarchy, while hypocritically ignoring the massive question of slavery. It was founded in defense of slavery and white supremacy...
(Excerpt) Read more at nymag.com ...
Nothing has changed.
The last paragraph of the article is on target:
“Who would ever want to immigrate to such a vile and oppressive place? But it is extremely telling that this is not merely aired in the paper of record (as it should be), but that it is aggressively presented as objective reality. That’s propaganda, directed, as we now know, from the very top — and now being marched through the entire educational system to achieve a specific end. To present a truth as the truth is, in fact, a deception. And it is hard to trust a paper engaged in trying to deceive its readers in order for its radical reporters and weak editors to transform the world.”
I’d say they’ve graduated to radicalism.
They don't just take anti-American positions on this or that issue any more.
They flat out deny the legitimacy of the USA as a nation.
I'm diagnosing butt hurt over losing Cold War, compounded by the realization that they never really did control minds.
Trump's victory + the internet is what pinned down that last part.
Their credo:
Death to an America where Trump could be elected!
And to think, all of this, the complete unraveling of the Left and their being exposed for all to see for the evil they are at their core has been done by one man.
Donald J Trump!
I’d say that the New York Times graduated to activism with Walter Duranty.
The NYT is swallowing poison and waiting for Trump to die.
You nailed it.
The Gray Lady was never up, she has been a communist whore, flat on her back spreading her legs for any pseudo intellectual waving a red flag. One only need to remember the Pulitzer Prize for the lies about Stalin’s bitter harvest!
I love it when the light bulb finally goes on in some people. The problem is all the damage they do on the way to a-ha.
They were more true even with slavery than they are among the baby killing and socialism loving Left.
It’s better to be hated by the likes of the people at the slimes than ever be acceptable to them. They are the enemy right there with the whole DNC.
The guy thinks with his genatalia. Which is too bad, because he was once a good writer.
BAZINGA!!
Individual rights are objective moral principles that are absolute. And they are violated by one means only: by the initiation of physical force. They are God-given and also validated by reality + reason, which means they were true when written, and they are still true.
“Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.”
I guess allegiance to the flag and “to the republic for which it stands” has died, or never existed, for many so-called Americans.
It is time to identify, list and disseminate the names, titles and employers of all such unAmerican actors.
The NYT has not abandoned liberalism - they have merely embraced the rapidly changing nature of a loose set of precepts identified with what is known as the current form of liberalism as it exists in the second decade of the 21st Century.
Nothing at all like the “liberal” policies held up by John F. Kennedy and George McGovern in the middle part of the 20th Century, yet the NYT behaves as if nothing has changed.
They are trying to be Orwellian when they no longer control the information flow or the government...
It isn’t working...
They want an end to free speech, free expression, free association, and the private ownership of firearms, and to create uniform laws in all the individual states among other goals. Just look around - they want to confiscate weapons, they label membership in some groups “terrorism” and common political ideology as “racism” they have “anti-free speech/safe zones” on college campuses. They even have re-instituted segregation along racial, sex, and sexual preference
They think one of the ways to achieve these goals is by convincing people that the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are founded on a big lie, ergo, they must be false.
I never see the words “All men are created equal” and think that it does not apply to Blacks or to women. I concede that perhaps some women and some African Americans may view it differently but that is the problem; not the phrase itself. It applies to everyone. The pursuit of happiness applies to everyone. The Bill of Rights applies to everyone. Whatever flaws our forebears possessed is irrelevant to the ideals as stated today. To teach otherwise is insidious and destructive but this is why they are all out pushing “racism” and “reparations” and “1619” - they are trying to rewrite and reframe history to suit their political agenda. To argue that a truth is a falsehood because the author of the truth was flawed in other ways is an ad hominem logical fallacy.
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