After Slavery, Servitude
| AR Articles on American History |
|---|
| Abraham Lincoln and the Problem of Slavery (May 1991) |
| Forgotten Black Voices (Sep. 1993) |
| Selma to Montgomery, 30 Years Later (May 1995) |
| “A Troublesome Presence” (Aug. 1998) |
| Race and the American Identity (Dec. 1998) |
| Search AmRen.com for American History |
| More news stories on American History |
{snip}
The Journal-Constitution last week assembled a remarkable group to discuss a remarkable book: “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II.”
The new book documents a South unknown to many—a place in which white sheriffs, politicians and businessmen got rich by enslaving thousands of black men for decades after emancipation. The process was simple and evil: Black men were arrested on a pretext, shunted through a rigged system and then chained like animals and sent to work off their sentences or debts in coal mines and steel mills and on plantations.
{snip}
A ‘devastating’ look back
“At times, as I read different books, I have to pull away, because it makes me angry. And even now I can feel it—it’s not I-want-to-kill-the-white-man type angry—it’s why don’t we use history to learn from? On both sides? There are blacks who don’t want to use it, and there are whites who just want to omit it, as if it didn’t exist. We don’t use our history wisely.”
—Bill Rembert, high school teacher, Covington
{snip}
Book reveals ‘terrible human costs’
These are excerpts from a discussion of the book “Slavery by Another Name,” by Douglas A. Blackmon, involving the author, the AJC’s Jay Bookman and 15 readers who visited the paper recently for a kind of “book club” conversation.
TRAGIC CONNECTIONS
In February 1920, the book reports, federal investigators visited the Jasper County farm of John S. Williams to ask him about charges made by an escaped worker that Williams was enslaving black men. A week later, the book says, Williams either participated in or presided over the murders of 11 leased convicts to conceal the slavery on his farm. His great-granddaughter, Susan Burnore, a recently retired IBM executive who lives in metro Atlanta, attended the AJC’s discussion last week. Among her comments:
My great-grandfather was John S. Williams, who is pages 360 through 364 in Mr. Blackmon’s book. He was one of the most egregious individual users of the peonage [system]. I grew up knowing that my great-grandfather—he died before I was born—had died in prison, and that he had died in prison for murdering a black man. But that’s really the only truth that I knew. My family, of course, had a, no pun intended, whitewashed version of it that made it sound as if he wasn’t really such a bad guy, he was just doing what was accepted at the time. So that’s the story I heard, and it was always: “Well, things were different then, and he was a good man, and we just have to overlook that.” Then, about 10 years ago, this book came out, “Lay This Body Down.” … It’s just one very sad story. But the thing that makes it historically significant, and this absolutely shocked me, John S. Williams became the first white man to be convicted of murdering a black man since Reconstruction. That was in 1921. There was not another such conviction until 1960-something.
{snip}
Laura Lester, a retired elementary school principal and graduate student.
In 1833, my great-great-grandfather bought 10,000 acres—”bought”—from the Cherokees [in Polk County, Ga.]. I can remember seeing it as a child visiting, that farmland was divided up—my mother and all her brothers and sisters inherited some of that 10,000 acres. I could never, ever recover from the fact that they had hundred-year-old shacks that African-American families were living in when I was a child, doing sharecropping.
Not only was the land literally stolen from the Cherokees. All the wealth that was derived from it was stolen from these African-American sharecropping families. They were paid absolutely nothing, just given the hundred-year-old shacks to live in and a mule to plow. So the history as it is reconstructed for me is such firm evidence that the present wealth of [many] whites in the South still derives from slave labor.
{snip}
REPARATIONS
Marty Duren is a Southern Baptist pastor in Buford.
I don’t know about any of the other white folks here. There’s a lone echo of slavery in my family that I know of. My great-great—some number of greats—grandfather was killed by one of his slaves. I’ve always felt that he probably deserved it. . . . The whole concept of reparations is so misunderstood. Nobody knows where the money would come from, nobody knows who would get the money. There is so little clarity as to how that would be effected, it disallows serious conversation as to whether it can happen or not.
Muhammad Yungai is a writer and activist in Atlanta.
What you just said is reflective of what I was saying earlier: Most white people don’t have any idea what’s going on in the black community. I’ve been involved in various groups, been involved in N’COBRA—the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. There is a very detailed, reasonable, laid-out plan by many black thinkers and scholars about reparations, where the money would come from, who it would go to. And it’s not necessarily just money. One of the ideas was to take people coming out of prison and train and re-educate them and reintegrate them back into society.
Douglas A. Blackmon.
[European courts were turning aside cases in which German companies were sued for their roles in Nazi Germany. Blackmon notes that the U.S. passed a law in the late 1990s enabling those plaintiffs to file their cases in American courts.]
Any company that could be connected to something like that and also had operations in the United States could be sued in American courts.
And so an avenue was created by America for raising all these issues, even though—as leaped out at me—we’re a country that has never been willing to open such avenues for our own citizens about our own conduct.
And so I just sort of said: “Well, gee, what would happen if we looked at ourselves through the same lens that we insist other countries look at themselves through?”
CRIMINAL JUSTICE
Muhammad Yungai.
Right now, one out of nine black men are somehow involved in the criminal justice system. And it’s not just because there are a bunch of black criminals running in the streets. As we read in the book, the goal posts change. This is not against the law, but if a black man does it, all of a sudden it is against the law. And then, poor, powerless people don’t have any recourse when they go to court. Sometimes, when I’m joking with people, I say, “You’ve got about the same chance as a black man in Mississippi in 1930.” Because when you walk into that courtroom, you are automatically guilty. A lot of that was carried on today.
{snip}
BLACK FAMILIES
{snip}
Excerpts from reviews of Blackmon’s ‘Slavery’
These are excerpts from two reviews of “Slavery by Another Name”—one from the New York Times Book Review, and one that ran in AJC’s Arts & Books section last Sunday.
From the Times’ Janet Maslin:
Author Douglas A. Blackmon eviscerates one of our schoolchildren’s most basic assumptions: that slavery in America ended with the Civil War. Blackmon unearths shocking evidence that the practice persisted well into the 20th century. [Maslin complains that the book starts slowly, speculating about an enslaved man about whom few records exist.]
But as soon as it gets to more verifiable material, “Slavery by Another Name” becomes relentless and fascinating. It exposes what has been a mostly unexplored aspect of American history (though there have been dissertations and a few books from academic presses). It creates a broad racial, economic, cultural and political backdrop for events that have haunted Mr. Blackmon and will now haunt us all. And it need not exaggerate the hellish details of intense racial strife.
{snip}
From Steve Suitts, for the Journal-Constitution:
The genius of Blackmon’s book is that it illuminates both the real human tragedy and the profoundly corrupting nature of the Old South slavery as it transformed to establish a New South social order.
The book, nonetheless, suffers occasionally from more ambitions than it can deliver. In portraying legal enslavement through personal stories, the book jumps a little too much from place to place, story to story, back and forth in time with a multitude of characters, digressions and family members. Among other things, the reader must keep up with “who is who” among almost 40 members of the Cottenham family (spelled three different ways).
In giving real flesh and blood to its narrative, “Slavery by Another Name” appears in a few places to go beyond its sources in describing personal characteristics and motives based only on bare-bones government and census records. The book’s subtitle also overreaches since, in fact, the work analyzes patterns of enslavement only through the 1920s, not to World War II.
(Posted on April 25, 2008)
Comments
This book is written by a racist black african Mugabe type. Black racist africans kill, rape, racially cleanse, steal, loot, and rob from white people. What the black african racists do to us is a type of genocide. They have racially cleansed us out of most parts of Atlanta and many other cities around the USA. Yet none of their silent but racist black african civil rights leaders have ever marched for the civil rights of any of the 250,000 black on white killings in the USA since MLK marched on DC. What is written above is a Hitlerian lie. It is whites who need to organize, march, and demand reparations from the black african racists who oppress us. And God yelled “Amen” brother.
Posted by Elrey Jones at 6:39 PM on April 25
What a nauseating piece of white guilt! I feel sorry for the woman who feels that her inheiritance was stolen from the Cherokee and stolen from the black sharecroppers. If these fools want to pay reparations then they can go ahead and make it out of their pocket, leave mine alone.
Posted by Spartan24 at 7:07 PM on April 25
Diversity is just a one-way deal where white men are evil, everyone else is good, and anyone who might object is a ‘Nazi’.
Posted by I should have taken the blue pill. . . at 7:36 PM on April 25
The problem with this is the same problem the black nationalist movement has today when they call racist the fact that so many blacks are in prison.
Those people are guilty. Not guilty of minor crimes. No. Guilty of heinously evil crimes, often motivated by racist hate.
If most white people knew the truth, blacks would no longer be welcome within our country or the western world.
Posted by at 8:35 PM on April 25
“What a nauseating piece of white guilt! I feel sorry for the woman who feels that her inheritance was stolen from the Cherokee and stolen from the black sharecroppers. If these fools want to pay reparations then they can go ahead and make it out of their pocket, leave mine alone.”
You said it. These people can cry because, well, they can. Their ancestors were too busy working, taming the land and building the legacy that would allow these people to stand around feeling guilty and being critical.
Posted by idareya at 8:37 PM on April 25
Anonymous wrote:
The problem with this is the same problem the black nationalist movement has today when they call racist the fact that so many blacks are in prison
What they forget is that blacks tend to live in black jurisdictions, that have black (or white liberal) judges, prosecutors, and juries. Plus Federal civil rights laws virtually guarantee that black criminal defendants will have at least one black on the jury that hears their trial. Put all this together, and you see that black criminals have a lot of wind to their backs in the criminal justice system. Therefore, a black thug really has to do something serious in order to get sent to prison. Even with all this “wind to their backs,” blacks still are a disproportionate percentage of state prison populations. If there was a truly fair system, there would be even more in prison.
The Federal system is a little different, because criminal juries aren’t restricted to the geographical area of the crime. A black thug who is strung up for a Federal crime that he commits in (e.g.) St. Louis City will have jurors from all over eastern Missouri. A state trial in St. Louis City has jurors only from majority black St. Louis City.
Posted by Question Diversity at 9:21 PM on April 25
Maybe slavery in the 20th century was still their better option.
I don’t agree with slavery after it was outlawed; but for some, living a life of servitude might still have been all they knew.
Some who are homeless would rather be homeless. (The people that I worked with in downtown Atlanta told me this many times.)
Some who can’t make it in this life commit small crimes to be better taken care of in prison.
But, no amount of reparation would ever be enough for the blacks. Their hatred against whites will forever linger.
Posted by at 9:45 PM on April 25
The one important construct that black supremacists fail to grasp is their own major flaws which they see as positive.
Posted by Lars at 11:38 PM on April 25
I beleive the title says it all. “After slavery servitude”, for whites, forever.
Posted by The Old Sage at 12:06 AM on April 26
If Martin Luther King were alive today, how can he explain the behavior of 21st-century blacks?
Where is the courage of a man to admit his wrongdoing? Where is the responsibility of a man to provide for a woman and child? Where is the duty of a man to serve as a law-abiding and tax-paying citizen of society?
If making excuses was an Olympic sport, which race will win the gold medal?
Posted by at 12:38 AM on April 26
History is full of tears. Most every other ethnic group gets over it and moves on. The Jews of Europe suffered a far worse fate than the slaves did in WW2: they were simply exterminated. Still very few Jews today go around talking endlessly about the evil Germans, or spend their time trying to shake down todays Germans.
At some point you have to let it go to have a decent life. The past is past, which is why it is history not present. For whatever reason American Blacks seem unable and unwilling to live in the present and prefer to remember the time of their servitude and enslavement. It’s unfortunate as it is holding them back from achievment and happiness.
Posted by Zane at 1:55 AM on April 26
My wife’s grandfather was a sharecropper , most of my great uncles were sharecroppers . My dad who grew up fatherless during the Depression helped them by plowing fields with a mule . A lot of whites in the South were share croppers from the end of the WBTS till the end of WW2 .There wasn’t a lot of industry here .During this time frame prosperity was rare in the South . That was the logic behind Larry Bell’s decision to build his aircraft plant in Marietta in the forties . At that time Georgia had one if not the lowest per capita incomes in the nation . My parents, my wifes parents , aunts and uncles all grew up in little more than shacks in which you could see the cats, dogs and chickens underneath the house through the cracks in the floor , they all picked cotton .If they lived in white columned mansions , they usually had been turned into complexes , multiple families living in them . I lived in one for while in the 50s .It was a lot like the movie , Places in the Heart . Did the blacks have it worse ? Probably , it was largely demanded of them to find their success within their own community . The whites had their own problems . The point is , until after WW2 , prosperity was not the norm in the South . It begin to show up here and there in the 50’s and by the 60s the blacks were demanding their piece of a pie that was still pitifully small . This article is just more South-hating propaganda . The generation of blacks raised on it will hate whites , especially Southern whites even more . And will direct their anger and violence at whites even more . It never ends.
Posted by Palmetto Reb at 4:02 AM on April 26
Looks like someone is sniffing around for another reason for slave reparations by claiming slavery existed to within the last generation or two.
Posted by Cliff Yablonski at 7:50 AM on April 26
There is some truth to this. However, what’s left out is the reason for all this coming about. After the war, blacks were just laying about living off freedmans bureau handouts (sound familiar). They were also carrying on something awful. Something had to be done to stop their malicious behavior. So the White southerners did what they had to do.
On the other hand, today, blacks just can’t be controlled because they absolutely don’t belong in this society. Time has moved beyond their capabilities. They’re either on welfare or in an Affirmative Action jobs that sustain the illusion that they can do productive work. Even that old saying about blacks knowing “their place” doesn’t fit anymore because there’s just not any place for them here anymore.
Sad situation.
Tom Iron…
Posted by Tom Iron... at 8:29 AM on April 26
Sounds like blacks complaining once again. The vast majority of people throughout history in civilised nations led lives filled with wretched poverty and had just enough resources to get food and a roof over their heads.
And of course we are treated to the obligatory story of a white who mistreated/murdered blacks. If we applied the same standards that are applied to whites as to blacks, then inside every black is the vicious sadist cannibal Idi Amin waiting to emerge.
Posted by ODDL at 11:04 AM on April 26
“Still very few Jews today go around talking endlessly about the evil Germans, or spend their time trying to shake down todays Germans”.
You’re entitled to your own belief system, but my reading material tells me the exact opposite of what you say. In Germany and twelve other countries it’s even illegal to simply deny that the Holocaust existed.
Posted by at 11:57 AM on April 26
“…because it makes me angry. And even now I can feel it—it’s not I-want-to-kill-the-white-man type angry—it’s why don’t we use history to learn from?”
—Bill Rembert, high school teacher, Covington
Anybody else catch this one? I guess this type of “angry” is common enough in blacks for this guy to casually use in his off-the-remarks, and expect any other black person to fully understand where he’s coming from. It’s truly been an interesting year in revealing how much violent hatred they really harbor towards Whites.
And to think Jeremiah Wright sat there during that interview the other night and complained his remarks were taken out of context.
Posted by ZKR at 1:40 PM on April 26
It never stops… Have you guys been to Washington DC in the past 40 years? Its full of blacks who have been sitting around bitching and living off the government since the Civil War started. Stop crying, we don’t give a damn what happened in the past and neither should you. Wake up America and demand that people accept responsibility for their own actions and quit facilitating this culture of racial spoils. Either we can move into the future as a multi-racial meritocracy or its time to break up this county by race. Say NO to using Affirmative Action, government hiring programs and a thousand other ways to promote minorities at the expense of the white majority. Say NO to second class status for whites.
Posted by Enough at 1:46 PM on April 26
I have long suspected that the real reason why the U.S. Government decided to abolish slavery was because a business-minded person finally prevailed upon them that a more efficient means of enticing work from slaves would be to free them. After all, slavery, in and of itself, was a very messy affair from a business perspective. Freeing the slaves solved many problems by shifting the onus of personal responsibility from master to slave. It also resulted in a more willing workforce.
I always seriously doubted that slaves were freed out of some noble sense of enlightenment on the part of government. This article adds significant support to my beliefs.
I suspect that the natural racial discord in western civilization is purposefully exacerbated by the government and large corporations as subterfuge. I perceive that the multicultural model is a clever ruse to keep the the focus of the lower and middle classes preoccupied so they will not pose a significant threat to the uppers.
As anecdotal support for my beliefs, I point to the fact that the element of trust in our society, primarily between White males, has been effectively eliminated. We have multiculturalism to thank for that, as Liberal researcher Robert Putnam observed last year.
I can see no other logical reason(s) why the most intelligent of decision makers would choose to insist on a multicultural model, or keeping Blacks in the United States, or allowing illegal aliens to overrun the country. As Jared Taylor often points out, no one can cite a single reason why diversity or multiculturalism are “strengths”.
Posted by at 6:37 PM on April 26
Just more racist propaganda from the Atlanta Journal. Palmetto Reb’s post above gives a more accurate history. Except for textile mills, industry in the South was nil, and agriculture provided the most jobs.
Posted by SandyCSA at 9:05 PM on April 26
“European courts were turning aside cases in which German companies were sued for their roles in Nazi Germany. Blackmon notes that the U.S. passed a law in the late 1990s enabling those plaintiffs to file their cases in American courts.]Any company that could be connected to something like that and also had operations in the United States could be sued in American courts.
And so an avenue was created by America for raising all these issues, even though—as leaped out at me—we’re a country that has never been willing to open such avenues for our own citizens about our own conduct.And so I just sort of said: “Well, gee, what would happen if we looked at ourselves through the same lens that we insist other countries look at themselves through?””
And therein lies the Real Reason for this whole cameraderie between blacks and those who ran and established the NAACP, back when.
A HATRED FOR THE WHITE MAN.
Dr. Kevin MacDonald’s works are becoming seminal in importance as source documents for this fight for racial reality; for when those ‘deniers’ refuse to acknowledge the created differences in IQ; long-term vs. immediate gratification behavior patterns in blacks vs. whites; widely disproportionate modern crime stats between whites and blacks; (both of which patterns imply inherent, genetic predispositions to differences in morality between Anglos and non)
We can, and MUST, DISMISS AS UTTERLY FUTILE, the RHETORIC by this and other authors, and all the breast-beating by hysterical feminine types (whether male or female!) and look at REALITY- blacks were inferior in intellect, morality, sustainable long-term behaviors (as we read, IF we read between the lines, even in the upkeep and maintenance of land/houses they farmed and lived in!).
And thus, if we do not realize that Blacks today are STILL serving a ‘Massa’* *(meaning the Federal Gov’t. and/or Liberal messiah complex types), we Anglos MIGHT be tempted to think that they (blacks) would have ‘risen to their full potential’ if only they had been ‘empowered.’
But those WITH full potential DID- look at Carver, DuBois, Powell, Sowell, etc. Just as in white societies, there are those intellects that are going to rise to the top, however adverse (or because of adversity?) the circumstances.
But because we post-moderns believe that the Almighty is ‘wrong’ in giving Whites a superior genetic endowment, (as witness IQ, and the record of Western Civ!) authors such as this want to ‘play god,’ in telling us that it is/was ‘wrong’ to have countenanced slavery, and treated malefactors as such!
Sorry, not buying that false coin any longer. Just like the Federal Reserve’s empty promises of a stable money, I want the Gold Bullion of a White society ruling and governing the masses, who cannot even control their bestial urges, WAY OVER a ‘brave new world’ of supposed ‘equality,’ Jefferson misquotes notwithstanding.
Posted by Fr. John at 8:47 AM on April 27
The History Channel had a propaganda program pushing this line too. But the fact is WHITE prisoners, not just black, were on prison chain gangs, doing community work, rather than sitting in a prison cell.
Posted by at 10:36 PM on April 27
The only “servants” in modern America are whites, who are being lied to about their “history” and about modern politics and society, and led to give everything about themselves, their time, efforts, money, their heritage, culture, to minorities, who contribute nothing but anti-white hatred in return.
Posted by Student at 11:51 AM on April 28
Even today, prisons are allowed to put inmates to work. When I was inside, I variously worked in the machine shop (not too bad), the chow hall (not fun, as my shift was 04:00 to noon) and on groundskeeping (quite pleasant, as I was working outside, and as long as I looked busy, the guards left me alone.) I earned twelve cents an hour.
A fit inmate who desn’t want to work is free to refuse, at which point he goes straight to solitary and loses a bunch of priviledges, including some time off for good behavior.
It costs quite a lot to keep someone incarcerated, and if prisons couldn’t use inmate work at massively discounted rates, the taxpayers would have to make up the difference. Additionally, it keeps the inmates busy, so they’re less apt to get into fights.
What this whiner seems to want to ignore is that these guys weren’t innocent men dragged away from their homes. An alert policeman can always find someone to arrest; all he has to do is keep his eyes open, and back then, cops walked beats on foot,rather than cruising around in cars. They got to know who the local troublemakers on their beats were, so they knew who to watch. Blackmon also seems content to ignore the fact that prison life a century and more ago was rougher everywhere in the world than it is now. Cry me a river, Mr. Blackmon.
Posted by Michael C. Scot at 4:30 PM on April 28
Slavery was despicable. The entire charade damn near literally destroyed America once and it’s quite likely it will get around to finishing the job sooner or later. Slavery was an instrument of class warfare by the wealthy Whites against poor Whites in the South. My blood pressure problems start to act up when I have to listen to working class Whites engage in apologetics for that exercise in exploitation.
I wonder if the working class Whites who are left in 2151 will vigorously defend America’s current usage of illegal immigrants to undermine the White working class wage with disenfranchised alien invaders.
Posted by Wikitopian at 4:45 PM on April 28
I have long suspected that the real reason why the U.S. Government decided to abolish slavery was because a business-minded person finally prevailed upon them that a more efficient means of enticing work from slaves would be to free them. After all, slavery, in and of itself, was a very messy affair from a business perspective. Freeing the slaves solved many problems by shifting the onus of personal responsibility from master to slave. It also resulted in a more willing workforce. I always seriously doubted that slaves were freed out of some noble sense of enlightenment on the part of government.
Posted by at 6:37 PM
………………………………………..
I heartily agree with the above and have long felt the same. When you look at history, there have always been, in every country, various systems devised for getting the work done. They went under many different names: serfdom, peasantry, slavery, sharecropping, wage slavery, industrial slavery, etc.
The fact is that civilization is an unnatural thing and constant labor is required to sustain it. The more civilization we have, the greater the amount of work that is necessary to keep it going. In intensely developed economic systems and large cities, it is not possible just to catch a fish and pick some fruits off the trees. We have to work constantly in order to live. And systems are devised to make us work. You can call the workers whatever you want, slaves or whatever, but the fact remains the same: that most of us are bound all our lives to a deadening existence of work. Like any “slaves”, we have no choice.
Black slaves in America existed for a (relatively) brief period of history within that syatem known as slavery. Whites were also compelled to work through other means. But they ALL had to work. For blacks to imagine that they were the only ones who suffered or who had it hard is self-centered whining and is non-historical nonsense. But worse, those who feed them this racist propaganda have sinister motives of their own.
Posted by ghw at 2:51 AM on April 29
Exactly right, Wikitopian. Slavery was a form of agricultural labor arbitrage aimed at working whites. As such, it was intended to keep wages low the same way the employment of illegal aliens and H-1b visa-holders is done today.
Slavery actually retarded economic and industrial development in the south. First, by providing a huge quantity of workers who did not have to be paid, it forced down wages for free men, except in more dangerous occupations in which a slaveowner would not risk his investment. Second, by tying up investment capital that could have been spent on production machinery, as was done up north, it doomed the south to crippling industrial inferiority during the War Between the States. Lastly, it drove white immigrants to settle in the north, where wages were better. In 1860, the USA had a population of some 40 million, while the CSA had half that, not all of whom, of course were white. The better-educated ones who were not wealthy, in particular would have had better opportunities up north, which probably helps explain the plethora of new types of weapons the north was able to develop during the war: ironclads with guns mounted in turrets, rifled breechloading cannon, repeating rifles (the Spencer came as an extremely unpleasant suprise when used by Union cavalry). The famous Gatling gun just missed the war. Brilliantly-led men, no matter how brave can not stand up to overwhelming firepower, as the French learned in 1914 and the Germans in 1944-45.
The War Between the States should really be thought of as a war to decide who would profit from the development of the US west. Would it be the northern industrialist robber barons, or the southern planter robber barons? As usual, the little guys just got to pay the bill, usually when wagon-loads of corpses and severed arms and legs were hauled off after the battles, but not always. Both governments took grotesque liberties with the constitution. Lincoln revoked Habeus Corpus rights, though the US Constitution gave him no legal authority to do so. I believe one of the innocent men locked up with no charges being filed against him was a US Supreme Court judge who objected. Both nations instituted both income taxes and conscription, for the first time in US history. Both nations ignored the medical, sanitary and nutritional needs of POWs. Andersonville was not particularly exceptional. It was a national tragedy, and the US really is probably dying of it, my use of the politically non-loaded term for it notwithstanding.
Labor shortages often spur economic development. The European Renaissance was in large part the result of the Bubonic Plague outbreak. There was still plenty of specie in circulation, and still plenty of farmland, but with 1/3 of the population of Europe dead, there was a serious labor shortage. Things got better not only for the rural farmers, but for the burghers, who began to very aggressively assert their rights agsinst the aristocracy. The end result of that was the Enlightenment and then the industrial revolution.
Posted by Michael C. Scot at 5:43 PM on April 29
“Still very few Jews today go around talking endlessly about the evil Germans, or spend their time trying to shake down todays Germans”.
Baloney. They’ve been doing exactly that very thing for a number of years, and not just to the Germans. Unearned profits from Holohoax-based extortion of banks, insurance companies, corporations and governments have, in fact, been staggering, numbering thus far into the billions. And they’re not done yet. And as far as the first claim goes, Jews NEVER, EVER shut up about the Third Reich, WWII, the repeatedly disproven Holohoax, etc. Watch any TV or attend school lately? The White world is literally INUNDATED with this nonsense!
You’re entitled to your own belief system, but my reading material tells me the exact opposite of what you say. In Germany and twelve other countries it’s even illegal to simply deny that the Holocaust existed.
Or even lightly question any aspect of it, no matter how bizarre, ridiculous and easily disprovable the claim. The truth NEVER requires legal enforcement to get people to believe it. It is simply observable fact. If it takes the force of law to make you believe it, it’s obviously a lie (egalitarianism, “diversity is strength”, etc). Freedom of speech = access to the truth. Official censorship = forced belief in a lie/denial of the truth. Which is why it’s always practiced in Communist/Marxist-run countries (not in the highly Christian Third Reich) and Jews who always lead the charge to run roughshod over free speech rights in every White country. They (and the rest of their fellow non-Whites) have an awful lot to lose if the average Caucasian really starts doing his homework for a change instead of just drinking the Kool-Aid…
Posted by at 4:55 PM on May 2
The War Between the States should really be thought of as a war to decide who would profit from the development of the US west.
Actually, it was the Communist takeover of the United States, the practice run for 1917. The new government hasn’t followed the Constitution since Lincoln took office in 1861, the REAL reason for the “Civil” War. Every move they’ve made since has been in furtherance of the Marxist agenda of 1848. Ever notice that we have fought many wars since (including the current one) and not one of them have been in defense of the United States or its interests (although that is always the excuse given)? Every one of them have been fomented by members of an alien sub-race and have only served their purposes, not ours (or benefitted any Caucasian anywhere in any way, but has murdered hundreds of millions of them). Only non-White aliens benefit from dead Whites and no freedom.
Posted by at 5:24 PM on May 2
“Actually, it was the Communist takeover of the United States, the practice run for 1917. The new government hasn’t followed the Constitution since Lincoln took office in 1861, the REAL reason for the “Civil” War. Every move they’ve made since has been in furtherance of the Marxist agenda of 1848.”
………………..
So it has! That’s an extremely provocative comment. I had never thought of it that way. Thank you for the insight.
Lincoln established an undeclared but virtual dictatorship in which disagreement was not allowed, dissenters were imprisoned, and civil liberties were suspended. No wonder Marx liked it. He hoped this would be the beginning of his worldwide workers’ revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat. I believe that he also served as correspondent for an American newspaper. It’s a fact that Karl Marx favored Lincoln and was intensely interested in the American Civil War. [As was all of Europe btw. America’s war served as a tutorial for the Franco-Prussian War five years later, leading to France’s crushing defeat and Germany’s unification under Bismark. A youthful Count von Zeppelin was sent here as a military observer for the Prussian government. He passed an idle year in Minneapolis (Ft.Snelling) experimenting with surveillance balloons, which eventually led to Germany’s great Zeppelin dirigibles. It’s no coincidence that the capital of North Dakota was named “Bismark” in 1873, (when it was railhead of the Northern Pacific Railroad, being financed by German investors).]
Posted by ghw at 5:07 PM on May 3
” Official censorship..practiced…not in the highly Christian Third Reich…” (Posted by at 4:55 PM on May 2)
I was delighted to read all of your post, except for this one point, which I believe is mistaken.
I believe the first occupants of Dachau, in fact, were the German communists, whom the Third Reich was by no means willing to leave free to proclaim their doctrine!
Posted by H. Dumpty at 11:45 PM on May 3
I can’t speak for the book, but this article exhibits the mathematical illiteracy that plagues so many arguments.
Even granting many of the premises involved, roughly what PERCENTAGE of black men during this era got swept up, innocently, in the ordeal described?
Seventy percent? Three percent? Possibly the book gives some indication, but the article does not, as if it is of no importance to the argument.
Posted by H. Dumpty at 1:45 AM on May 4
“I believe the first occupants of Dachau, in fact, were the German communists, whom the Third Reich was by no means willing to leave free to proclaim their doctrine!”
With all respect to Mr. Dumpty, I must midly disagree with his premise, although he may be factually correct.
The Communists did not restrict themselves merely to “proclaiming their doctrine”. They were not some kind of literary group holding peaceful discussions in a tearoom. They were violent and disruptive and refused to allow others to meet or to campaign peacefully. Violence was part and parcel of Bolshevism’s strategy, and unless Germany wanted to go down the bloody path of Russia, it had to control them. Germany acted in self-defense. Since the Bolvheviks conceeded to others no such “freedom to proclaim their doctrine”, they were entitled to none themselves.
Posted by browser at 4:11 PM on May 5