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Author Topic:   A Discussion of the Rationalization of Slavery
Rahvin
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Posts: 4032
Joined: 07-01-2005
Member Rating: 9.2


Message 7 of 50 (543126)
01-15-2010 2:49 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by DevilsAdvocate
01-14-2010 11:25 PM


Hi DA. If white people were pagans who boiled one another for dinner, barbariously tortured one another by scalping, disemboweling alive, sacrificicing their children and wives in fire to their gods, sold their enemies as slaves etc as pagan Native Americans and African blacks practiced, perhaps they too would have no true god to deliver them from their opressive govenments as was the case with the pilgrims.
Amusingly enough, white people did do several of thsoe things.
Drawing and quartering was, in effect, live disembowelment - often while being hanged. It was used as a method of execution in Christian England.
The Bible allows for the capture and sale of enemies, including women and children, as slaves. And of course, white people did keep slaves. Buz is justifying enslavement by whites by saying that "them ni**ers and injuns used to keep slaves, so it's okay."
The inquisition included more than sufficient methods of torture. And while there were typically no human sacrifices made to the gods, Christian Europe did tend to burn people at the stake for not believing in the Christian god. That's really not that different.
Bringing civilization, medicine, and basic human rights to an area is certainly a good thing But you aren't doing that when you're committing genocide (and the treatment of Native Americans cannot be regarded as anything else) or perpetrating the very inhumanities you claim to be curing (ie, slavery).
I mean, really. I bet Buzz would get along just fine with SO and his buddies at Stormfront. I wonder if he's already a card-carrying member of the KKK? I'm going to take extra special pleasure out of sex with my mixed-race atheist girlfriend tonight, just because "polluting" my pure Dutch blood would piss them off.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by DevilsAdvocate, posted 01-14-2010 11:25 PM DevilsAdvocate has not replied

Replies to this message:
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Rahvin
Member
Posts: 4032
Joined: 07-01-2005
Member Rating: 9.2


(1)
Message 20 of 50 (546248)
02-09-2010 2:01 PM
Reply to: Message 10 by Hyroglyphx
02-08-2010 10:19 PM


There are no innocents, only degrees of guilt.
In regards to slavery and manifest destiny I usually only find two kinds of people, and they are at ideological opposite ends. One finds every justification for why early settlers were right to have slaves and to massacre natives because natives were diabolically evil and barbarous, and slaves were just too stupid to know any better like unreasoning animals. The other end paints a picture where the settlers were just diabolically evil and hell bent on raping every last vestige of mother earth, a typical story played out in half of the Walter Disney collection.
The reality is, like it is with most things, probably is a mixture of both sides minus the extremism of each view.
The reality is that there is no discernible "good guys/bad guys" in this scenario. There's smatterings of good and bad in both cultures, just like it is with all people.
Africans enslaved Africans, Asians enslaved Asians, Middle Easterns enslaved Europeans, Europeans enslaved Africans, different tribes among native Americans enslaved each other, so on and so forth thousands upon thousands of years before the time frame being currently discussed in this thread.
So what's the problem here?
The problem is we have revisionist historians who have a role to play and an agenda to defend.
It's not a matter of "revisionist history." It's a matter of making unilatleral judgments ("slavery is bad") regardless of the context.
In the context of slavery in the US, is the enslavement of human beings on the basis of the color of their skin more or less justified if slavery was also practiced in Native American and African cultures?
The answer is no, of course not, for the same reason that killing Jews isn;t made more acceptable by the fact that the Holocaust happened. Whether an act is practiced by others, regardless of popularity, has no inherent effect on whether that act is ethically justified.
History is more complex than how you're portraying it. The answer is not "in the middle of two sides." There aren't even two distinct "sides."
The ethical justification of any act is dependent on its consequences, as compared to the consequences of other actions or no action at all. There are far too many variables involved in this topic to get a clear picture on whether or not a "short-term" evil eventually resulted in a longer-term good.
What we can say is that, regardless of whether slavery was common in other cultures in that era, whether or not being in American after slavery ended (and especially after the civil rights movement) benefited the descendants of African-American slaves, slavery in the US was definitely ethically unjustifiable at the time. It was tantamount to genocide - untold millions died, and the survivors were treated like beasts. For those individuals, the actual slaves and their enslavers, the practice of slavery was undeniably evil, and no matter of religious apologetics ("we're saving the poor heathens' souls!") can change that.
Generations later, life may be better for modern descendants of slaves than if no action were taken. I just don't see how that positive in any way negates the incalculable harm done by American slavery. Not to mention the fact that minorities today still feel the aftereffects of slavery, over a century after it was abolished.
Buzz's original arguments surrounded the barbarism of slavery-era African cultures. He mentioned:
quote:
If white people were pagans who boiled one another for dinner, barbariously tortured one another by scalping, disemboweling alive, sacrificicing their children and wives in fire to their gods, sold their enemies as slaves etc as pagan Native Americans and African blacks practiced, perhaps they too would have no true god to deliver them from their opressive govenments as was the case with the pilgrims.
This is absurd. Partially because Europeans did perform acts of equal barbarity (the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, various brutal and torturous methods of execution such as being drawn and quartered, etc). Buzz is living in a fantasy land where European culture at the time was civilized in comparison. Let's be honest - European culture was "more civilized" only in that there were more organized societies. They were no less brutal and monstrous than any other culture on Earth.
The other reason it's absurd is because it's completely irrelevant. Whether slavery was practiced in African culture is not an excuse for others to engage in the same practice. Whether African culture was "pagan" is irrelevant to the objective fact that millions of African slaves died just on the voyage to the Americas, let alone those who survived the trip to be worked to death. Whether human sacrifice was practiced in Africa is irrelevant when attempting to justify the rape of slave women.
Slavery is the denial of human dignity, the erasure of the self, the removal of self-determination, the absence of human rights, the destruction of cultural and personal identity. It wraps up rape, murder, assault, imprisonment, genocide, and a thousand other sins all into one short word. There is no justification or mitigation for American slavery. Period. Whether some Masters were"nice" while they forced other human beings to work like cattle does not in any way reduce the crime - "benevolent Masters" were in no way innocent, they are simply a little less guilty than the Masters who cut off their slaves' feet when they tried to escape, or raped their women.
This is not revisionist history. This is simple fact. Were African cultures civilized by modern standards? No. Was slavery a "positive?" Certainly not, and anyone who tries to mitigate that in any way (Buz) is ethically reprehensible.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 10 by Hyroglyphx, posted 02-08-2010 10:19 PM Hyroglyphx has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 21 by Hyroglyphx, posted 02-09-2010 3:53 PM Rahvin has not replied

  
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