PC Gone Too Far

No one is arguing this. Could we bring this multi-post misrepresentation to an end? You must be saying to yourself, "So many things to misrepresent, so little time." Make your life easier, let a few go. Asking readers to characterize people for holding views that you're misrepresenting? Good show! Nobody here is advocating what you describe here, and especially do not agree with the Texas textbooks described in your link. Good grief, it just doesn't stop.Your time would be better spent arguing against views actually expressed.--Percy

If you can't find something to argue with, then just spin what someone wrote into something disagreeable. They'll surely respond to correct you, and now you've got someone to argue with.

That doesn't contradict what I said, and the abduction of the children of non-slaves isn't only in custody issues. In some areas of the world, it was a common source of slaves (the Ottoman Empire was one). It is also done for adoption, now illegally but not always so, and for forced marriage, as well as the rare cases of rape/murder, which are probably the most harrowing.Most of the accounts of individual American slaves that I've read do not include they themselves being sold away from their parents or having their own children sold away or being raped or being regularly or severely punished, although all those things were far more likely than they were for non-slaves. Even in one particular slave system in one country, there is not a standard experience, let alone for slavery as a whole throughout history. There are different people with different lives, not non-people. If you're using a term in a way that differs from the standard dictionary definition, you should have made it clear. The phrase "cultural genocide" is used, but I think "culturecide" (still rare) would be much better.There are forms slavery that don't involve significant loss of culture, both when it happens within ethnic groups and between different ones. Sometimes a conquered culture exists as a slave group amongst the conquerors with cultural independence (Hebrews in Egypt, for example).Culturecide certainly wasn't the motive for transatlantic slavery, but considerable rapid cultural change was inevitable, and some of it (conversion to Christianity for example) would certainly have been pressed or forced at times. The slaves ended up as English speaking Christians, but lots that related to western Africa remained, and some does today. The slaves evolved a interesting and vital culture which ended up being very influential in America and the world. We wouldn't be the same without them! You couldn't be more wrong. Even culturecide is not an inevitable part of it. My Saxon ancestors enslaved each other happily without culturecide!Actually, you've said that slavery is similar to genocide earlier in the thread, so it's interesting to see that it has now become genocide. Why don't you write to the dictionaries and tell them they should be treating the words as synonyms instead of something completely different, as they currently do? I pointed out that your claim is very different. The [unsupported] claim that other people perceived a similarity between their lives and an afterlife is not the same as the claim that slavery is actually similar to genocide, or that you think so.As for your question, I've no idea what effect being dispatched to an afterlife would have on a society. Perhaps you should ask an expert, like Faith. No. You were claiming that their lives were like death, which no life is, and now you seem to be claiming that they perceived their lives as being like Hell, a claim about the perception of others that you haven't supported.As I pointed out above, there's no standard slave experience, and the southern slaves were many individuals with many different life stories, and many different perceptions of their variable circumstances.Edited by bluegenes, : tpyos

In short, just another "Don't" lesson.

Actually, I did not accuse anyone of holding such a view. That text was lifted from a school textbook on slavery and I provided a reference for that expression.What I am finding here is a desire to sanitize history masked as "putting history into perspective, or judging folks in their time and place, where such time and place excludes even contemporary views which also judge the same folks harshly.Folks who enslaved folks, regardless of whether those folks were in Africa or the US, did immense harm to an entire race of folk for their own personal gain. That's the sum total of what slavery was about. Folks who were complicit in that operation have earned whatever harsh judgment they have gotten. If those folks are your heroes, then you are the one who owes an explanation of why that might be.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

That's a misrepresentation? Really?I'll ask you here whether the Southern slave owners were evil? Was Jefferson Davis owning of slaves evil or not evil? Is it not the case that a primary reason for the founding of the confederacy was the desire to continue an evil practice; namely slavery?Or are you going to continue to tell me that evil is not in your vocabulary and that you are hesitant to even label those folks morally wrong.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

What's the point of all the moralizing against a practice that was just about universal in the world, and still is outside the west, as if you are somehow above such things yourself, as if you wouldn't have been just as pro-slavery as anybody else under the right circumstances? It doesn't make it less evil to recognize that fact but it ought to make your argument a little less condemnatory of persons. Any of us could have been a Nazi under the right circumstances, including you. That doesn't make it less evil, it just means making moral distinctions between individuals of this fallen human race can be disgustingly self-righteously prissy and pharisaical. And I say this as someone who is for severe punishment of crimes by individuals.I just saw the film "Railway Man" on Netflix, about a WWII British POW of the Japanese, and all through it I wondered how people -- the Japanese in this case -- could ever be that cruel to other human beings. And I understand the film whitewashed the reality. (At least it did get across to me that waterboarding really is torture, which all the self-righteous posturing at EvC failed to do), but there was far worse than waterboarding they did to the English prisoners. The film wasn't all that great in my opinion, but the true story it was based on is very touching. The most amazing and important thing is that the Japanese officer responsible for the torture of this Englishman, the "railway man," sincerely repented of his crimes after the war, after seeing that his government had been lying to him. He met with the ex-prisoner and they became friends. His remorse seemed truly genuine.I understand that's not really the topic here, the topic is whether a nation should remember its dead if that seems to commemorate an evil ideology that did harm to human beings. I don't know if human beings can live with permanent condemnation of a former ideology. Germany seems to be doing it I guess. Did Japan ever fully repent? I don't know exactly how to solve this problem. On the one hand it seems it's only human to remember those who died serving their country, on the other it seems there should be some public remorse shown even in those memorials for the inhumane ideology. I just keep coming back to the position that we're all fallen and guilt is a heavy load to bear. Not all have the grace of that Japanese officer to truly repent. However this problem should be resolved, though, I think you are being a self-righteous know-it-all prig about it. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I googled the word "evil" in Percy's posts in this thread. I'll just quote the first of many instances: In other words, nobody should be judged as evil for doing evil deeds. Their evil deeds should only be compared with the evil deeds of the other people around them.

You're still not making any point.

Anything you directly do in the name of your country, you are directly responsible for. "I was only following orders," is not a valid excuse.

So you're saying that selling a slave's children was okay? Or selling a father away from his children? Or selling siblings to different buyers so they'll never see each other again? If I mean literally, I'll say literally. Hence the comparison between slavery and death. Slavery is in many ways equivalent to death, therefore slavery is in many ways equivalent to genocide.

Huh? Murder isn't a standard experience either but we still consider it a bad thing. We are talking about a specific example of slavery here - slavery of Africans and their descendants in the United States before 1865. Surely you've heard phrases such as, "Give me liberty or give me death," or, "Live free or die." The comparison between loss of freedom and death isn't something I made up.

I actually agree with a lot of what you wrote for once. However: By the time of the US civil war, slavery was banned throughout Europe (except the Ottoman Empire), in every independent American country except Brazil and the US, and in large portions of the European empires, so it was already on the way out. Slavery is now illegal everywhere. It still exists, certainly, but it still exists in the West, as well. Thankfully it is today rare almost everywhere; it is clearly not universal.

Interesting question. What if I suggested to you that in the right circumstance you might be a Jesuit. Would that end your long standing judgment of those folks?If I become pro-slavery under the "right circumstances" then I would be embracing evil. But many folks in those times did nothing of the sort. So it is easier to judge me that it is to judge any slaver. I see. That's right, that officer was remorseful and repented of his sins after his country lost the war. That puts him miles ahead of folks that did not learn such lessons even after getting the dog crap beat out of them. Nice story. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

This is an example of the kind of justification that I find morally bankrupt. Nobody was forced to enslave anyone other than via circumstances of their own making. These folks understood that their own lives, families, and economic situations were way more important than was the family of any darky, so they did whatever the $#%$ they wanted to do to maintain their cheap supply of labor. So quite naturally the value of children increased. Dehumanizing Africans made enslaving them more palatable. Can we also say that Southerners were forced to dehumanize Africans as a measure of salvaging their own consciences? I suppose we could...What you are saying when you use the term 'forced' is akin to a person murdering his parents and then asking the court to take mercy on an orphan.Beyond that, what you say here is not even historically accurate. Chattel slavery, under which the children pf slaves were automatically slaves (with some exceptions for cases where the mom was white) was practiced in the colonies well before the ending of the international slave trade. The actual dates I've seen for the start of the practice are all in the sixteenth century. Yes, the practice of separating families did get worse as the slave trade dried up, but that is in part because of the immense profits that folks in those border states could generate by selling the off spring of slaves. Eventually, even the deep South folks (SC and GA) had enough slaves to make profits by selling slaves to folks further west. In addition, selling slaves south and west had the benefit of making escape much more difficult. And God forbid a slave escape, stealing wealth from his former owner.The result of all that was yet another reason for Southern slave holders to want even more new territories for slavery. But "forced"? well, yeah, with some scare quotes that at least hint at the real circumstance.And to nitpick just a bit, the Constitution as adopted included a ban on any US attempts to ban the slave trade prior to 1808, so perhaps you can revise your estimate of when the slave trade ended. It was within months of the date allowed by the constitution.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.