Mustachioed Gene Shalit-wannabe Michael Medved, who ran into the loving arms of the rightwing movement years ago after years of doing the thumbs-up, thumbs-down thing as a Hollywood movie reviewer (in other words, the front line in the fight against Isalmofascism), thinks that people have been making too damned big a deal about the U.S. history of slavery, and for too damned long.
The rightwing syndicated radio host and columnist doesn't deny that slavery existed, per se, mind you. And to be fair, he doesn't deny that it was a bad thing. On balance. If you really wanna make an issue of it. If you (sigh!) must. Again.
But, says Medved, in approximately 700,000 words -- it wasn't THAT bad. Come on! And it's time, um certain people got over it. *CoughcoughNEGROEScoughcough.*
Sit back and enjoy the magic, won't you? (More after the flip..)
Medved's article is titled "Six Inconvenient Truths About the U.S. and Slavery." Right off the bat, he's got my interest, because..."inconvenient truth?" What an intriguing, well-turned phrase. If someone wanted to do a documentary about, say, an issue of global importance about an imminent catastrophe, that might make a good title.
Of course, it quickly becomes apparent that Medved thinks that a catastrophe has already occured -- the United States has had to face up to its history of enslaving human beings, in all its detail, and...well, enough already, you P.C. S.O.B.s!!!
Mr. M. apparently thinks the fact that people make a Big Hairy Deal About Slavery is an issue of vital current importance, right along with his recent debunking of the myth that Native Americans could be considered victims of anything called "genocide." Yup, he's fighting the good fight these days, this former studio junket jumper.
(I won't link, because the article is at ClownTownhall.com. But you can find it pretty easily, if you don't mind giving Jonah Goldberg more chalupa money.)
Here's Medved's stirring intro. Please note that the nefarious "Those" are at it again, bashing America! Sometimes referred to as "Some people," these lousy nameless bastards LIVE to see America brought down as low as Fred Thompson's jowls:
Those who want to discredit the United States and to deny our role as history’s most powerful and pre-eminent force for freedom, goodness and human dignity invariably focus on America’s bloody past as a slave-holding nation. Along with the displacement and mistreatment of Native Americans, the enslavement of literally millions of Africans counts as one of our two founding crimes—and an obvious rebuttal to any claims that this Republic truly represents “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” According to America-bashers at home and abroad, open-minded students of our history ought to feel more guilt than pride, and strive for “reparations” or other restitution to overcome the nation’s uniquely cruel, racist and rapacious legacy.
Medved goes on to strain the tensile strength of his mustache as he unleashes a cri du couer against the "current mania for exaggerating America’s culpability for the horrors of slavery" (examples? less than none.)
Here are his pearls of wisdom, nestled in a bed of straw men. In the article, each point is expounded on at length, but I'm wary about copyright violations:
- SLAVERY WAS AN ANCIENT AND UNIVERSAL INSTITUTION, NOT A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN INNOVATION.
- SLAVERY EXISTED ONLY BRIEFLY, AND IN LIMITED LOCALES, IN THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC – INVOLVING ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE OF THE ANCESTORS OF TODAY’S AMERICANS.
- THOUGH BRUTAL, SLAVERY WASN’T GENOCIDAL: LIVE SLAVES WERE VALUABLE BUT DEAD CAPTIVES BROUGHT NO PROFIT.
(more on this one below)
- IT’S NOT TRUE THAT THE U.S. BECAME A WEALTHY NATION THROUGH THE ABUSE OF SLAVE LABOR: THE MOST PROSPEROUS STATES IN THE COUNTRY WERE THOSE THAT FIRST FREED THEIR SLAVES.
- WHILE AMERICA DESERVES NO UNIQUE BLAME FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SLAVERY, THE UNITED STATES MERITS SPECIAL CREDIT FOR ITS RAPID ABOLITION.
- THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT TODAY’S AFRICAN-AMERICANS WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THEIR ANCESTORS HAD REMAINED BEHIND IN AFRICA.
There is an amazing amount wrong with all of these arguments, and I hope you will have at them below.
But I'd like to focus on just two things. One is from point # 3, which continues Medved's obsession with ensuring that nothing involving the murder of dark-skinned people is called a "genocide." Here's part of his elaboration on # 3, a truly stunning statement:
- THOUGH BRUTAL, SLAVERY WASN’T GENOCIDAL: LIVE SLAVES WERE VALUABLE BUT DEAD CAPTIVES BROUGHT NO PROFIT. Historians agree that hundreds of thousands, and probably millions of slaves perished over the course of 300 years during the rigors of the “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic Ocean. Estimates remain inevitably imprecise, but range as high as one third of the slave “cargo” who perished from disease or overcrowding during transport from Africa. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean.
Is there any other way to read this but: it was bad for the slaves, but it was horrfying for the slavers...seeing their profits go down as African deaths went up!? Tell me how this is an unfortunate turn of phrase, and maybe I'll understand, since I can't believe that even Medved is that twisted.
The he goes on to say:
Here, the popular, facile comparisons between slavery and the Holocaust quickly break down: the Nazis occasionally benefited from the slave labor of their victims, but the ultimate purpose of facilities like Auschwitz involved mass death, not profit or productivity. For slave owners and slave dealers in the New World, however, death of your human property cost you money, just as the death of your domestic animals would cause financial damage. And as with their horses and cows, slave owners took pride and care in breeding as many new slaves as possible. Rather than eliminating the slave population, profit-oriented masters wanted to produce as many new, young slaves as they could. This hardly represents a compassionate or decent way to treat your fellow human beings, but it does amount to the very opposite of genocide. As David Brion Davis reports, slave holders in North America developed formidable expertise in keeping their “bondsmen” alive and healthy enough to produce abundant offspring. The British colonists took pride in slaves who “developed an almost unique and rapid rate of population growth, freeing the later United States from a need for further African imports.”
Conclusion by Medved: Slaves were never beaten, raped, murdered, or maltreated in any way. They were valuable property, and people don't just kill their property!
It's also loathsome to pit one horrible genocide against another, especially when the point is, clearly: stop whining about YOUR genocide, you fricking babies, this one was worse!
I think you have to come to "Inconvenient" "Truth" # 6 to really understand why Medved is getting all hot and bothered about the slavery bitcherz-n-moanerz today, in 2007 (....besides the fact that there's so little else going on in the world):
- THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT TODAY’S AFRICAN-AMERICANS WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THEIR ANCESTORS HAD REMAINED BEHIND IN AFRICA. The idea of reparations rests on the notion of making up to the descendants of slaves for the incalculable damage done to their family status and welfare by the enslavement of generations of their ancestors. In theory, reparationists want society to repair the wrongs of the past by putting today’s African-Americans into the sort of situation they would have enjoyed if their forebears hadn’t been kidnapped, sold and transported across the ocean. Unfortunately, to bring American blacks in line with their cousins who the slave-traders left behind in Africa would require a drastic reduction in their wealth, living standards, and economic and political opportunities. No honest observer can deny or dismiss this nation’s long record of racism and injustice, but it’s also obvious that Americans of African descent enjoy vastly greater wealth and human rights of every variety than the citizens of any nation of the Mother Continent. If we sought to erase the impact of slavery on specific black families, we would need to obliterate the spectacular economic progress made by those families (and by US citizens in general) over the last 100 years. In view of the last century of history in Nigeria or Ivory Coast or Sierra Leone or Zimbabwe, could any African American say with confidence that he or she would have fared better had some distant ancestor not been enslaved?
(and SNIP, for copyright worries...wish I could post more of this tripe.)
Astonishing, isn't?
Quite aside from a million other things, it never occurs to Medved to compare African-Americans to other Americans, only to their distant ancestors in Africa, and make the case that African-Americans today got a good deal out of slavery!...acting as if this very same generation of American citizens would now just exist in Africa, in some kind of weird parallel universe, somehow untinged by the genes of the men who raped and impregnated their great-great-great grandmothers.
I love this country dearly. it's my home, and always will be. But to a moral midget like Medved, you can't hold that idea AND the idea that slavery was a massive evil at the same time. It burns out the circuitry. He resorts to what conservatives supposedly decry -- moral relativism, which says hey, it may have been kinda bad, but everyone was doing it! (They weren't, by the way.)
For a shameless dolt like Medved, we can only love America and its promise if we whitewash the truth.
He has so little faith in this country.