I am well aware people back then considered Native Americans and slaves as lesser people. I just did not recall it was mentioned in the DOI.
People like to think the American Revolution was a popular movement to resist the tyranny of monarchy, but if you look at the list of things they were aggrieved about, the biggest complaints were being prohibited from confiscating more native land, and having to pay taxes for the common defense. It was just your basic reactionary bullshit tax protest/land grab.
The outcome was a governing document that enshrined the concept of one man/one vote and then promptly transferred black people’s vote to white people at a 3/5th exchange rate.
We can celebrate the ideals that some were trying to achieve, and parts of that form of government that were innovative at the time, but we need to admit that the whole thing was conceived as a land/labor grab to shaft native and black people to the point of absolute subjugation.
The long list of complaints was intended to show justification for the rebellion and gain aid from European nations. Though it’s absolutely true there was plenty of racism back then, saying, “Hey, the king has incited indigenous peoples who don’t want us pushing them off the lands they’ve occupied for millennia” wasn’t going to do that. (And the claim was exaggerated at best.) That’s not to try to justify the use of the term “savages” but to add a little context.
The justification and the context is right there in the text.
Either that was true, or it was false. Either it was justified, or it was unjustified. Either way, attaching the word ‘savages’ to it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
And likewise, a certain modern-day currently incumbent politician, whose views are quite popular in certain circles, has advocated killing terrorists (not a bad idea in itself) but also all their families as well. 200 years from now (and in fact, even right now) some will say that sounds awfully “savage” of us.
People keep rewriting the past because they’re too lazy to understand history.
The DoI was never meant to be a noble statement of democratic ideals. It was purely a propaganda piece, a long, elegantly written analog to a series of Trump tweets. The purpose was the same: to rile the base and demonize the opposition.
Stop thinking about it as something written to start off an elementary school hagiographic textbook. It was an article of war, inked in poison, insulting as any public high-level missive could be at that time. It was low-minded, not high-minded.
We started believing our own propaganda. No wonder we’re going to hell in a handbasket.
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase;22033541We started believing our own propaganda. No wonder we’re going to hell in a handbasket.[/QUOTE]
One of my long term maxims is “Never believe your own propaganda.” And yet it seems that all politicians do.
The Constitution didn’t enshrine one-man one-vote. The Reps were to be elected on the franchise in each state. Property conditions were common at that time, even for the more representative lower houses in the state Assemblies.
And neither the Senate nor the Prez was elected on a universal male franchise.
Senators were elected by state legislators until the 17th ammendment was passed in 1913. That was certainly not one man one vote for senators.
Ben Franklin warned that Germans were the most anti-assimilation danger to American unity. He was mostly right till WWI “patriotism” forced rapid name-changes.
They’ll be back in fashion soon enough as part of anti-obesity marketing campaigns.
When around 4 July the DoI is read on-air or tweeted in sequence, enraged right-wingers denounce it as damned socialism or, more recently, anti-Trumpian. Substitute the name of this POTUS for that British king and see how it rings.