Oh and this came up on my Facebook feed --
From North Carolina:
During an unscheduled discussion of Confederate statues and memorials at the commissioners meeting Monday, several commissioners stood firm in opposition of the removal of statues in communities across the country.
Republican commissioner Tim Sutton, a chartered member of the Sons of the Confederacy, then alluded to his family once owning slaves, as first reported in the Times News.
“I am not ashamed of my great-grandfather. He did what he did,” he said. “It is my understanding that when he died ... that some guys on the farm, you can call them slaves if you want to, but I would just call them workers, that they raised a good bit of my family.
Oh and his grand-dad gave them land, so that makes it better. Too bad he couldn't have given them some facsimile of human rights, at least not before 1964.
Slavery's a thing of the past, of course. Right? Not so fast. From the introduction to Moore and Patel's new book:
The International Labor Organization found than there were nearly 21 million people in forced labor in 2012, of whom 2.2 million were in labor forced upon them by the state (prison work) or rebel military groups. Of the remaining 18.7 million, 4.5 million were involved in commercial sexual exploitation and 14.2 million in forced economic exploitation.90 For comparison, 12.5 million Africans were enslaved and transported through the Middle Passage. (30)
So, yeah, it's not so visible, and it didn't quite keep up with global increases in human population, but it's still there. I'm sure they're just "workers," that's all.
Question for the doubters: would you have found out this guy's complete disdain for human rights so swiftly if there had been no discussion of Confederate statues?
But, yeah, don't just pull the statues down. Put 'em in museums. While you're at it, maybe this Tim Sutton guy can live in a museum, too?
Comments
Making the case for their removal well done that man [Sutton].
Jeebus.
Sure dude, just workers after all.
Did your grand dad pay them for their service? No? But he fed them and housed them so hey, all's good, amirite? And hey, when he had to whip them to get them to work, why, he was just doing his duty as an employer, got it. Jesus, the fucking willful stupidity in remarks like that. Of course he cannot help what his family did in the past, but the adamant refusal to even condemn it is so typically fucking American, is it not? Rationalize it all away and then go shopping, the American Way!
Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur
The slavery wasn't that bad crowd, assholes one and all
The novel, then movie
"Gone With The Wind" probably did more to fictionalize and glamorize the "peculiar institution" of slavery than any Klan meeting or stump speech of hate. Overnight, slavemasters became a benevolent and kind lot, simply looking out for those poor, dimwitted "darkies" who could never have gotten through life on their own. Leni Reifenstahl couldn't have done any better.
"Just call me Hillbilly Dem(exit)."
-H/T to Wavey Davey
Yeah, and now
We are the poor dimwitted little people who couldn't get through life on our own.
The wealth AND the attitude are still in place.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Predates GWTW
DW Griffith did much to popularize the same "plantation mentality" in Birth of a Nation - and that was one of his less offensive follies in making that movie.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
Were these "workers"
allowed to leave and move to another town or state and start anew? If the answer is NO, they were NOT WORKERS - THEY WERE SLAVES! Did anyone mention that to the dickhead?
"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11
Maybe I've just hit a saturation level
But I can't seem to get worked up over the remove or not remove debate. As a history major, there was a time when Civil War revisionism and the legacy of slavery used to make me apoplectic. But I have a difficult time now prioritizing my outrage beyond watching our global resources being fought over by megalomaniacal sociopaths and a military junta that is quietly taking over our country while useless idiots dress their babies in baby gap camouflage jackets. I have a difficult time watching the Insurance and Pharma industries wage a genocidal war of attrition through heathcare commodification, and ticking off the time towards unsustainability when all the scientist's predictions come true and we finally run out of air to breath and clean water to drink.
I'm sorry. As worthy as this debate might be, I just ain't got no bandwidth left.
There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier
I'm with you.
And sadly, as cynical as I've become, this is the actual point. Whip everyone into a frenzy over any- and every- thing that might divide us, so that we have zero energy left to combat the things you mention.
I have recently decided that "outrage" (and its various declensions) no longer holds any meaning. According to the MSM and users of social media, everything these days is "outrageous." Saw a headline today: "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."
I give up.
I'm 57 & was appalled at Ronnie Ray-Gun
when I was 20 in 1980. Ray-Gun announced for President at some Mississippi fair & blathered about 'states rights', Lee Atewater pulled Willie Horton on Dud-kakis. (google "lee atewater n_____ n_____ n_____"
How many of you dear readers were adults when HOPE '92 was inaugurated or HOPE '08 was inaugurated? It was ... dancing in the streets ... and then, and then, and then ...
Heil Herr Trump is a fascist, is an embarrassment, is an idiot, blah blah blah. Has there been a year since 1980 when more people knew more about the Super Bowl contestants than who to vote for in a primary? I'm waaaaaay past MY limit of what I'm taking responsibility for.
rmm.
But then I sigh; and, with a piece of scripture,
Tell them that God bids us do good for evil:
And thus I clothe my naked villany
With old odd ends stolen out of holy writ;
Right up there with Ben Carson's idiocy.
Slaves were 'workers'? Jesus H. Christ.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
Tim Sutton should be enslaved
And the more vocal neo-nazis should be put in ghettos.
ok snark
Beware the bullshit factories.
I think it would be funny --
if we started a Museum of Bigotry. We could collect Confederate statues and memorabilia, explaining their roles in Jim Crow and institutional racism in tasteful plaques, and have a real live neo-Confederate eating lunch on display every day at noon (protecting the neo-Confederate with a visible "no laughing" sign on the museum walls...)
'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill
you can call them slaves if
Yeah, I'll call them slaves cause...they were slaves. They weren't free, they couldn't choose their own employer. They were slaves.
It's like calling the mass slaughter of innocent civilians a humanitarian war... oh wait, we do that already.
@Strife Delivery
They were people owned by more powerful people, in the country terming itself a democracy, with guaranteed equal rights, treatment and opportunity to all... with a start like that, one could see where pathology would flourish among those ruthless enough to obsessively seek ever-increasing wealth and power to the great cost of others...
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Hm, “owned” (or “pwned”) is modern youth & gamer slang for
soundly defeating one’s opponent and winning.
I guess what that says about us is, subconsciously, even today among kids, winning = enslaving.
@lotlizard
In more primitive times, slave-taking from conquered areas was quite common, although there was generally a chance of eventually joining the victor's tribe/becoming a freedman/citizen. But this was not typically based entirely on skin-colour differences or other identifying differences where the basic humanity of those enslaved due to 'the fortunes of war' was denied in 'justification' of this.
The US PTB are dragging us back to a very primitive time indeed, with also often falsely arrested/kidnapped slave labour in prison-camps and expanding from there... farewell habeas corpus - you stood in the way of pragmatically progressing fascism maximizing profiteering upon the corpse of the greed-slaughtered Golden Goose in the US.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.