Can Anyone See The United States Reacting This Way To Slavery?

The Holocaust and the Middle Passage aren't really comparable, except as two of the most horrifying examples of genocide in human history. But can anyone see the United States ever coping with its role in the Middle Passage the way Germany seems to have done with the Holocaust?

On Monday, Germany’s minister of culture, Bernd Neumann, announced that construction could begin in Berlin on two monuments: one near the Reichstag, to the murdered Gypsies, known here as the Sinti and the Roma; and another not far from the Brandenburg Gate, to gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust.

In November Germany broke ground on the long-delayed Topography of Terror center at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters. And in October, a huge new exhibition opened at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. At the Dachau camp, outside Munich, a new visitor center is set to open this summer. The city of Erfurt is planning a museum dedicated to the crematoriums. There are currently two exhibitions about the role of the German railways in delivering millions to their deaths.

Wednesday is the 75th anniversary of the day Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in Germany, and the occasion has prompted a new round of soul-searching.

“Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame?” asked Avi Primor, the former Israeli ambassador to Germany, at an event in Erfurt on Friday commemorating the Holocaust and the liberation of Auschwitz. “Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility.”

America's unwillingness to cope with the evil of chattel slavery is at least partially responsible for the next century of legalized discrimination and violence against African-Americans. Never has there ever been a sincere and widespread recognition of how awful slavery and reconstruction actually were, and as a result to this day both events are trivialized, most often by conservatives clinging to racist beliefs. South Africa likewise had its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but here in the United States we just try to pretend it wasn't that bad. The philosophical underpinnings of slavery, that black people don't deserve the same rights and respect as white people, persisted long after emancipation.

Freedom, Slavery, And Ron Paul

I didn't realize that white supremacist groups were actually backing Ron Paul.

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (AP) – Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul has received a $500 campaign donation from a white supremacist, and the Texas congressman doesn't plan to return it, an aide said Wednesday.

Don Black, of West Palm Beach, recently made the donation, according to campaign filings. He runs a Web site called Stormfront with the motto, "White Pride World Wide." The site welcomes postings to the "Stormfront White Nationalist Community."

"Dr. Paul stands for freedom, peace, prosperity and inalienable rights. If someone with small ideologies happens to contribute money to Ron, thinking he can influence Ron in any way, he's wasted his money," Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said. "Ron is going to take the money and try to spread the message of freedom."

That's something all right. Just in case you're not clear on Ron "We shouldn't have fought the Civil War" Paul's message of "Freedom":



To which Earl Ofari Hutchinson says:

But the Civil war and the Lincoln jibe needs a response for two reasons. The first is for its idiot read of history. Lincoln as an Illinois Congressman in 1849 proposed a bill for voluntary and gradual emancipation of the slaves in the District of Columbia. Lincoln toyed with the idea of offering compensation to get the slavemasters to go along with it. Congress dominated by Southerners and the slave owners showed absolutely no interest in tqking a government bribe to give up their slaves in D.C. Lincoln didn’t give up the idea. In 1861, Lincoln, now president, dangled the carrot of federal dollars in front of the slave owners in the Border States. He’d pay them $400 per slave to free them. There were no takers. The next year, Lincoln, even arm twisted Congress to pass a resolution providing for payment to the slave owners in the Border States and elsewhere. That went nowhere too.

The slave masters understood something that Paul doesn’t. Slavery was not an aberrant, patchwork system that consigned a few million luckless blacks to hard, unpaid labor. Slavery was a cornerstone of the Southern economy. It wove personal lifestyle, custom, and comfort together for the benefit of the slave owners. Slavery was slyly encoded in articles in the Constitution, protected by court decisions, and bolstered by the full force of federal law (the enforcement of the fugitive slave law). Lincoln had a better chance of dismantling slavery with dollars than Paul has of winning the White House.

The other more compelling reason to take on Paul’s dumb crack is that while the North may have won the war, the South won the peace. No other region has so dominated national politics--the military, the courts, Congress, the White House--as the South. It retooled slavery into a iron clad system of Jim Crow segregation, economic domination, and state government sanctioned violence to maintain power. No amount of money could have changed that.

Why would they want to? When that kind of domination is exactly what they mean when they say "Freedom."

All I know is, they're not talking about my freedom.

MLK Was A Radical, Not A Conservative

I have to admit that I have no idea why conservatives resist all manner of change in society, especially with regard to race, only to attempt to claim credit for such changes decades later. Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson's attempt to claim the mantle of abolition for evangelical Christians is trash history at its worst:

For many conservatives, the birthday of the movement is Nov. 1, 1790 -- the publication date of Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France." Burke described how utopian idealism could lead to the guillotine, just as it later led to the gulag. He rejected the democracy of the mob and argued that social reform, when necessary, should be gradual, cautious and rooted in the habits and traditions of the community.

But there is another strain of conservatism with a birthday three years earlier than Burke's "Reflections." On May 12, 1787, under an English oak on his Holwood Estate, Prime Minister William Pitt pressed a young member of Parliament named William Wilberforce to introduce a bill for the abolition of the slave trade. Wilberforce's research found that the holds of slave ships were, according to one witness, "so covered in blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the (dysentery) that it resembled a slaughterhouse." Enslaved Africans on the ships attempted to starve themselves to death or to jump into the ocean. Wilberforce thought this suffering a good reason for reform.

The only problem is that the act for which Wilberforce is best known, his effort to abolish the slave trade, it decidedly un-Burkean and un-conservative: It is the definition of radical, progressive change, and the very opposite of what Gerson describes as"Burkean" in the first paragraph of his Op-Ed.

Were that the fabrications ended there.

Both Wilberforce and Shaftesbury considered themselves Burkean conservatives; Wilberforce was a friend of Burke's and a fellow opponent of the French revolution's wild-eyed utopianism. Wilberforce and Shaftesbury were gradualists, not radicals. They hated socialism and rejected the perfectibility of man.

But both were also evangelical Christians who believed that all human beings are created in God's image -- and they were deeply offended when that image was degraded or violated. Long before compassionate conservatism got its name, the ideas of compassion and benevolence were central to their political and moral philosophy.

[...]

But the compassionate conservatism of Wilberforce and Shaftesbury is just as old as Burke, and more suited to an American setting. American conservatives, after all, are called upon to conserve a liberal ideal -- that all men are created equal. A conservatism that does not accommodate the "ideology" of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. will seem foreign to most Americans. A concern for the rights of the poor and vulnerable is not simply "theological"; it is a measure of our humanity. And skepticism in this noble cause is not sophistication; it seems more like exhaustion and cynicism.

Maintaining this fairy tale requires that Gerson remain in Britain and not discuss the circumstances of the abolitionist movement in any detail. Religion played just as actively a role in rationalizing and perpetuating slavery as it did in ending it.

In America and the most active and constant abolitionists were not Evangelical Christians, but Quakers. The same is true of Britain.

Quakers had been leading the movement to abolish slavery in Britain for more than a hundred years before Wilberforce was even born.

The largest Evangelical group in the United States, the Southern Baptists, supported slavery right up to its abolition.

Contrary to what Gerson says, an American conservatism that does not embrace Martin Luther King is not "foreign" to Americans, it is the very definition of American conservatism.

Modern American conservatism owes itself not to Burke, but to Barry Goldwater, whose great appeal was his opposition to integration. The conservatives of the 1950s and 1960s were not praising Martin Luther King Jr., they were in complete ideological opposition to him.

In MLK's own words:

On the urgent issue of civil rights, Senator Goldwater represented a philosophy that was morally indefensible and socially suicidal. While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy.

Conservatives have no right to claim King as an ideological ally when fifty years ago the modern Republican Party was built on white resentment of MLK and the goal of integration. Not when in 2007, they can't find a single black lawyer willing to work for the Bush Administration in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

Today in Republican Racism: Michael Medved Defends Slavery

I have to say the recent Republican antagonism against African-Americans is astonishing and surprising. Whether it's skipping debates before black and brown audiences,