1619 Propaganda

[Newman]

Holy Mother of God this election cycle will be almost unendurable. On top of the Firefox recommended list this morning was this from Vox, by Karen Turner and Jessica Machado:

5 things people still get wrong about slavery
We asked historians to debunk slavery’s greatest myths.

If they'd stayed awake in class the first time, we'd be spared a lot of time and trouble.

The authors take at face value the significance of 1619 in their opening paragraph,

In August 1619, the first ship with “20 and odd” enslaved Africans arrived on the shores of Virginia. Four hundred years later, we look back at this moment as the start of an enduring relationship between the founding of the United States and the unconscionable exploitation of the enslaved.

getting their ritual Expression of Moral Outrage in quickly, "Nazis are bad," or here, "unconscionable exploitation of the enslaved."

The writers cite the NY Times Magazine piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones, and move quickly to drinking Kool-Aid.

Yet centuries later, the lasting impact of slavery continues to be minimized and myths continue to flourish.

"Minimized"? Their following paragraph hints at their revisionist take on history and current affairs, but it's more fun to see what the "5 Myths" are, that they will try so hard to debunk, with the help of Historians!

1) The myth that slaves never rebelled

Who the hell believes that? If that were remotely true, Corey Booker would have a different nickname.

2) The myth that house slaves had it better than field slaves

The trick here is to focus on the sexual exploitation of enslaved women to balance the awfulness of field work. Of course not all house slaves were women. (And sexual abuse was not limited to house slaves.) Never mind that.

In significant ways house slaves had it better, but it was slavery, and slavery is very bad.

3) The myth that abolition was the end of racism

Here's another one that makes you ask, Who the hell believes that?

So it turns out that you do, if you don't support Reparations.

Recently, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a familiar variant of this myth when he said he opposed reparations “for something that happened 150 years ago.” To the Kentucky Republican, a descendant of enslavers, slavery simply was, and then it just wasn’t, as though the battlefield had leveled the playing field when it came to race.

The absence of a direct quote supporting their "myth" is conspicuous.

4) The myth that history class taught us everything we needed to know about slavery

It obviously didn't teach these two authoresses anything, so they have a point.

5) The myth that slavery doesn’t exist today

Heads up, Adam and other white supremacists!

Modern slavery is—ready?—mass incarceration!!

One of the greatest myths about slavery is that it ended. In fact, it evolved into its modern form: mass incarceration.

Lord have mercy. I refer them back to their 4th Myth.

They go on to write, "for those of us who study the early history of mass incarceration in America," it's the same, a mirror image.

Today, labor exploitation, the denial of human dignity and the right to citizenship, family separation, and violent punishment define our criminal justice system in ways that mirror slavery.

"Prison slavery":

Hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people work. According to a 2017 report published by the Prison Policy Initiative, “the average of the minimum daily wages paid to incarcerated workers for non-industry prison jobs is now 86 cents.” Those assigned to work for state-owned businesses (correctional industries) earn between 33 cents and $1.41 per hour. In 2018, incarcerated Americans held a nationwide strike to end “prison slavery.” In a list of demands, striking individuals called for “all persons imprisoned in any place of detention under United States jurisdiction” to be “paid the prevailing wage in their state or territory for their labor.”

I dimly recall an effort to unionize jailbirds once upon a time. Some court threw it out.

This Vox malarkey should be thrown out, too.

Walter E. Williams has a short essay, a chaser, as it were, that can help clear your help after chewing through the Vox claptrap. Williams also tees off from the Nikole Hannah-Jones NYT piece.

Beginning of US Slavery

[Lady Marva]

Those "mass incarcerated slaves" sure as heck don't pick cotton in the unairconditioned outdoors on any hot summers day. Nor do they do house slave work, dusting or polishing furniture. Mostly what do they do? Watch TV which didn't exist in slave days.

[phillygirl]

Those "mass incarcerated slaves" sure as heck don't pick cotton in the unairconditioned outdoors on any hot summers day. Nor do they do house slave work, dusting or polishing furniture. Mostly what do they do? Watch TV which didn't exist in slave days.

So it's kind of like being at your house??

[Newman]

Writers Karen Turner and Jessica Machado might get a little more mileage out of their "Prison Slavery" nonsense if they'd compared it to indentured servitude, which typical had a time limit attached.

But that would spoil everything for the SJW activists, since indentured servants in those colonial days were mostly white people.

And that's definitely not what they want.

[Norm dePlume]

1) The myth that slaves never rebelled

Who the hell believes that? If that were remotely true, Corey Booker would have a different nickname.

Well, there was Kanye with his ""When you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years?! That sounds like a choice."

[Newman]

Again with the slow, long-term subversion.

Children in All 50 States Being Taught Revolutionary War Was Fought To Promote Slavery

The New York Times’ 1619 Project — a curriculum that makes the fantastical claim that a primary cause of the Revolutionary War was the colonists’ desire to protect slavery — has been adopted in 3,500 classrooms across all 50 states.

For this reason, some of the nation’s most renowned historians have called for The Times to correct this and other factual errors.

The Pulitzer Center, which is partnering with The Times to promote The 1619 Project, recounted in its 2019 annual report, “Good journalism, innovative educational resources, and deep community engagement are absolutely essential to bridging the divisions that threaten to rip our democracy apart. It is this belief that has driven the Pulitzer Center for the last 14 years.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones, The Times’ lead writer on the project, argued in her introductory essay to it, “The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’

“But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst.”

A nearby thread about the 1619 Project contains some discussion of the issue, amidst puerile snarks and irrelevant brickbats.

But the education bureaucracy moves ahead, and what you get is NOT a nuanced discussion of the conflict between slavery and equality, or notice of inexorable change,

The reporter is honest enough to admit that slavery in America predated the nation’s founding by over 150 years.
Do you think we should be proud of our nation's founding?
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However, she alleges by 1776, Britain “had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution.”

There were calls to abolish slavery, which “would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South,” Hannah-Jones wrote.

Slavery was abolished in Great Britain in 1833 — over a half-century after the founding of the United States.

Also working completely against Hannah-Jones’ narrative is the fact that almost all the states north of the Mason-Dixon Line had voted to abolish slavery by the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783.

By 1804, all the Northern states had passed legislation ending slavery.

but propaganda, aimed at the political issues now current. The author here, Randy DeSoto, spends a lot of space, by internet standards, laying out the facts:

The preposterous notion that protecting slavery was one of the “primary” reasons the American Colonies declared independence is not supported by the documentary evidence from the period, either, as my research for my book “We Hold These Truths” made clear.

Any middle school history student should be taught that the Stamp Act in 1765, followed by the Declaratory Act in 1766, were what began rallying colonists against Mother England.

In the Declaratory Act, Parliament claimed the legislative body held “full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America … in all cases whatsoever.”

The rallying cry in the Colonies became, “No taxation without representation.”

Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, made the case against King George III and Parliament in his 1774 essay “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” pointing to Britain’s tax and trade policies toward the Colonies, the decision to suspend the New York legislature and the imposition of martial law in Massachusetts as unjust acts that must be opposed.

Thomas Paine, in his widely read political pamphlet “Common Sense,” published in January 1776, did not list a fear that Great Britain would end slavery in the Colonies as a reason for declaring independence.

Over 500,000 copies of the pamphlet were published just three months after its release at a time when the entire population of the 13 Colonies was only 4 million at most.

Paine was an abolitionist who wrote the preamble to Pennsylvania’s abolition act in 1780 (during the heart of the Revolutionary War), which freed 6,000 slaves in the state, according to History.com.

The Declaration of Independence itself, which lists dozens of grievances the Colonies had against the king and Parliament, makes just a passing reference to slavery by pointing to England’s efforts to “excite domestic insurrections.”

Jefferson’s original draft submitted to the Continental Congress included a condemnation of the king’s support for the African slave trade, writing it was a violation of the “most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”

This language was struck from the Declaration’s final text out of deference to South Carolina and Georgia, which wanted to continue the African slave trade, according to the Claremont Institute’s Founding.com.

“The British had encouraged slave and Indian revolts against the colonists,” the institute reported. “For example, in 1775, [British Governor] Lord Dunmore of Virginia, swore to members of the Virginia House of Burgesses that if ‘any Injury or insult were offered to himself’ he would ‘declare Freedom to the Slaves, and reduce the City of Williamsburg to Ashes.'”

So the issue for the British rulers in America wasn’t really a desire to free to slaves, but to wreak havoc in the rebellious Colonies.

Some of the nation’s top historians sent a letter to The New York Times in December taking The 1619 Project to task for claiming that protecting slavery was a primary cause of the Revolution.

Among the signers of the letter were Princeton University American history professor emeritus James McPherson, Brown University history professor emeritus Gordon Wood and Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz.

McPherson is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Battle Cry Freedom: The Civil War Era,” while Wood won the Pulitzer Prize for his work “The Radicalism of the American Revolution.”

Wilentz was a Pulitzer finalist for his book, “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln.”

So by Pulitzer’s estimation, these historians know what they are talking about when it comes to American history.

In their letter to The Times, the academics applauded The 1619 Project’s desire “to address the enduring centrality of slavery and racism to our history.”

“Nevertheless, we are dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it,” they wrote.

But the curriculum, lesson plans and guides, all roll down from the pedagogical mountaintop into the classroom and into the heads of our children.

[Billy Jingo]

Protecting slavery? Pffft. It was the British attempt to halt the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the native population.

[Newman]

Protecting slavery? Pffft. It was the British attempt to halt the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the native population.

Absolutely.



In fact the whole British Empire thing you may have heard about was a noble attempt to protect native peoples around the globe.

[Gingersnap]

Lily white Christians and Christian sympathizers (agnostic or not) ended slavery both here and abroad. Black/brown people had no interest in ending the slave trade as groups (individuals did). Africa and the Middle East still has slaves. Muslims still enslave infidels.

There is no "black" population in the Middle East because the women taken were sexual slaves and their children eventually became servants and still later married into the population as free people. The men all died or were killed since they were put to work in mines and galleys where the average lifespan was three years. There were no slave families.

There's no "white" population either despite over a million whites being captured and enslaved for the same reasons.

Slavery is a default human condition where ever there is enough surplus food to maintain it.

Asians did it. Black Africans did it. White Africans did it. Whites did it to each other as "indigenous" tribes did it to their own people if enough food was available. Everybody still does it to women on the sly.

It was those distasteful, prudish white Christians who eventually convinced everybody that slavery was wrong. Wrong for religious reasons, not for practical reasons. Practically, it was working out great for some.

[Newman]

Stop the presses!!

The headline is Breitbart's:

Pulitzer Prize to New York Times Essay Falsely Claiming American Revolution Was Fought to Preserve Slavery

The 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary was awarded Monday to Nikole Hannah-Jones for an essay in the New York Times that falsely claimed the American Revolution was fought primarily to protect slavery.

The essay, titled “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true,” launched the Times‘ controversial 1619 project.

I'm shocked. Probably the easiest prize since Obama's Nobel.

[Gingersnap]

The NYT has quite the track record for getting prestigious prizes for false reporting. Sort of a tradition for them.

Just ask the Kulaks.

[Lady Marva]

So it's kind of like being at your house??

Aren't you supposed to be a lawyer? Don't know anything about life in a prison? Not much understanding do you have.

[Celeste Chalfonte]

Writers Karen Turner and Jessica Machado might get a little more mileage out of their "Prison Slavery" nonsense if they'd compared it to indentured servitude, which typical had a time limit attached.

But that would spoil everything for the SJW activists, since indentured servants in those colonial days were mostly white people.

And that's definitely not what they want.

I see a couple of flaws with the basic premise. Even out in the free world, if someone receives room and board as a condition of employment, the fair market value of that is counted as income (for tax and other relevant purposes, such as workers' comp wage basis and disability or unemployment benefits). About the minimum you're going to pay in the Bay Area, for example, for a shared room with shared shower facilities, is $800/month. I don't know what it costs the prison system to feed an inmate, but let's use the SNAP benefit for one person as an estimate: $195/month. So, already, every inmate gets about $12,000/year for doing nothing at all.

Without counting the value of free medical and dental care, that's $5.77/hour, assuming a 40-hour week, which I doubt is the rule, but let's go with it. So they're all "making" at least $6.59 - $7.18/hour. Which is more than most of them are worth, I'm sure, and they don't have to worry about putting gas in the car, insurance (ok, they're scumbags, so they probably didn't worry about that on the outside either), clothing/uniforms, or any other incidentals of employment.

Plus, there's a real easy and practically certain (allowing for the occasional miscarriage of justice) way to avoid this "indentured servitude": don't fucking commit crimes!

[Gingersnap]

I see a couple of flaws with the basic premise. Even out in the free world, if someone receives room and board as a condition of employment, the fair market value of that is counted as income (for tax and other relevant purposes, such as workers' comp wage basis and disability or unemployment benefits). About the minimum you're going to pay in the Bay Area, for example, for a shared room with shared shower facilities, is $800/month. I don't know what it costs the prison system to feed an inmate, but let's use the SNAP benefit for one person as an estimate: $195/month. So, already, every inmate gets about $12,000/year for doing nothing at all.

Without counting the value of free medical and dental care, that's $5.77/hour, assuming a 40-hour week, which I doubt is the rule, but let's go with it. So they're all "making" at least $6.59 - $7.18/hour. Which is more than most of them are worth, I'm sure, and they don't have to worry about putting gas in the car, insurance (ok, they're scumbags, so they probably didn't worry about that on the outside either), clothing/uniforms, or any other incidentals of employment.

Plus, there's a real easy and practically certain (allowing for the occasional miscarriage of justice) way to avoid this "indentured servitude": don't fucking commit crimes!

The other thing is that in most situations where work is available, it's a privilege, not a compulsion. Prison is extremely boring - that's the number one complaint over food or crowding. There are only so many jobs available where that is a possibility and they are highly valued by prisoners. The pay is not the real issue, it's breaking up the tedium and making the time go faster. The only "work" prisoners are compelled to perform is keeping their cells/pods picked up and clean, changing their own sheets, and putting their laundry and food trays where they belong.

This is hardly 'Cool Hand Luke' territory.

All that ended in the 60s and 70s when people sued jails and prisons for unfair labor competition. That ended the kickbacks and exclusionary deals prison officials used to have and ensured that inmates would go insane with boredom in a lot of places.

[Lady Marva]

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Easy to guess, without even the link.
This woman is black.