I seriously doubt you could be convinced turkeys have wings if it suited your argument for them not to have them, but if you can’t see the difference in stripping people naked and marching them into a room where after days on a train filled with shit and disease and with people who are suffering the pain of two days of dehydration they are gassed, where they die in such terror and desolation that they left fingermarks on concrete, where after they die walking lice ridden scarecrows of their own people if not their own family come in and unceremoniously toss the naked stiffened bodies of 90 year olds and infants alike into wheelbarrows and then hose down the shit and piss and sick they left behind as the remains are taken to be burned (the one with the hose knowing this will be them soon enough), or of being stripped naked and marched into a big ditch while you hold the hand of a petrified naked child you don’t know and hope against hope that the hand of God or an earthquake or a blue dragon will come and end this nightmare some other way and then the machine gun fire is opened and the brains of the baby held by the woman next to you are now all over your face and you are uninjured by the fire but fall with the rest of the bodies and die from being suffocated by dead bodies while the bulldozer covers you, or wearing a filthy rag across your mouth and nose while you dig up bodies that have been in the ground for a year or more and put your hand into their decomposed remains of their asshole to look for jewels or valuables before moving them into the pile for burning so that the crime will be less obvious if the Allies ever get here- if you think these things are comparable to ANYTHING that doesn’t involve systematic deliberate murder designed to remove millions of people from the Earth- literally to the point of destroying their bodies- you’re simply too fanatical or stupid to analyze anything.
Of course there are similarities between the two events- I could do a 20 page comparison contrast between the public baths under Hadrian and Mt. Rushmore off the top of my head- but ultimately the similarities are superficial. Hitler hated Jews, the South had slaves- they’re not the same thing. The fact that one thing was very bad and another was also very bad doesn’t make them comparable. The insult you glibly deal to the victims and the survivors of the Holocaust to compare it to ANYTHING that doesn’t involve deliberate genocide is simply nauseous.
The Confederacy didn’t pack Africans into ships. This was done by a multinational group of merchants and shippers long before the civil war: Spanish, Turkish, Portuguese, English, American. The slave ships had slowed from a flood to an occasional drip long before the Civil War; the only ones that still came here usually did so because they were blown off course or denied entry to South America because there wasn’t even a market for African slaves in the U.S.- they sold far better in Brazil and Cuba and the vast majority of slaves in 1861 were not even the children or grandchildren of Africans but had American roots longer than those of most of their white contemporaries.
Or about the Irish who died under Cromwell or those who were deported to Caribbean and had higher mortality rates. Or about the Indians who died under British imperialism. Or about the natives in the Americas who were killed and starved and moved further and further west for more than two centuries. Besides which there are lots of estimates of all facets of the slave trade.
But get your eras straight.
It’s what and why you were doing it. I don’t agree with **Sampiro **that it’s as different as apples and uranium, but he’s right that they aren’t identical.
For places like Auschwitz the point was killing people and any work you got out of them beforehand was incidental and not really important.
For slavery the point was getting work out of them and any killing that happened beforehand was incidental and not really important.
Yeah, in both case you’re forcing people to do labor and they’re dying, but the motive is a big difference in those cases. Yes, similar justifications were used to de-humanize people. But there is a difference in thinking that one group is subhuman and only good for manual labor and thinking that they all just need to die.
I see no difference at all. Certainly no difference of any value.
It’s not Godwinizing if it’s on point, and the Nazis are on point when it comes to discussions of moral relativism.
If you’d prefer, I can go back to my question about the treatment of women under Sharia law (which nobody answered). Is it ok to beat a woman to death with rocks for adultery (or less) if you think your religion requires it?
This misses the point that the discussion is about moral relativism, not a direct comparison of cultural pathologies. I bring up the Nazis because they represent a cultural 'normative" taken to the most extreme. My point is to inquire whether there’s any point at all at which we’re allowed to say that a cultural norm is “reasonably” evil, no matter how “normal” it is within a given culture. Is there any point at which cultural norms are no longer a moral defense? Female genital mutilation? Human sacrifice? Cannibalism? Ritual pederasty? Child brides? All these things are, or have been, cultural norms in one part of the world or another. Are all of these things “reasonably” defensible in the context of their culture? If so, which ones? If no, then what differentiates those practices from race based chattel slavery?
Nazi Germany is just an extreme to make a point about moral relativism. I did not intend it to be a direct analogy for the degree of evil (though I think it’s actaully pretty close).
Was separating familes under slavery evil? Absolutely.
Was murdering children while their parents watched or separating families and sending the elderly and the children off to be killed worse? I’m going to have to say yeah on that one, and anybody who disagrees is lying.
Actually, yes, I would. I’d rather be killed myself than have my kid killed, but I’d rather my kid be taken from me than my kid be killed. If the child is alive, there is hope.
This might vary depending on the sort of servitude the child was being sold into. And, of course, I’d much rather kill the slaver.
Why wasn’t there more suicide or infanticide among slaves? In fact to the contrary- they reproduced at higher rates than free black people. There are accounts of parents mercy killing their children in the Holocaust and there was constant suicide, the most common being to walk into electric wire or approach the guards knowing good and well he would kill you.
Slavery was inhuman and evil and, to use Lincoln’s term, “a relic of barbarism”, but it was not 24/7 beatings and rape and starvation and torture. I don’t subscribe to the “they were like members of the family” moonlight and magnolias mythos for a minute, but there are too many first hand accounts to dismiss of slaves who genuinely cared for their masters or described being generally well treated by their masters; have you ever read even one account of a Jewish prisoner who said “The commandant was a decent sort, he gave us enough to eat and always sent a doctor when we were sick”? For those who hated their masters, there was always hope: “A year is long and the king may die, or I may die, or the horse may die, or the horse might fly” if you know that fable.
There’s no question that it was better to be a poor white than a slave (you had legal rights and couldn’t be forcibly separated from your family or raped or beaten without recourse, etc. etc.), but in terms of food and clothing and living conditions and even work load most slaves were no worse off than most poor whites. How would the caloric intake or living conditions or work loads of Jews at most concentration camps or even those in Theresienstadt compare with that of even the bottom 5% of free Germans?
They’re all evils. That doesn’t mean that they’re all self evident evils, or that a person in a society that practices those things would or should naturally know that they are evil, or that a person who does those things intends to do evil.
I’m not sure that ‘generally cared for their masters’ speaks to the nature of the ‘masters’ as much as the nature of the slaves. As for being generally well treated, compared to what? The slaves down the road who were beaten daily, while your daughter was only raped a few times? Or let your 6 yr old work in the big house instead of the fields?
While I’ve always found this kind of equivocation offensive, I do thank you for the history lesson. I have learned some things from what you’ve written here.
Gee, I dunno. Rape might have something to do with this, you think? Women were purchased for breeding, as well as labor. Do you really think it was purely consensual sex that allowed the massa to get his money worth?
This happened all the time during slavery, Sampiro. Its hardly a secret that a great many African deaths occured when they dove overboard the ships, or refused to eat. Whole books have been devoted to the subject of infanticide during slavery as well. It’s weird that you as a so-called historian seem not to appreciate this, when a 10-second search on google should have told you suicide and infanticide among slaves were damn well rampant. Certainly too common enough to suggest that the Holocaust victims had a patent on it.
It is pretty obvious that they aren’t identical. But the motive was not really not vastly different. The Germans and the slaveowners did what they did out of the desire for power and economic domination. It took a great deal of mental gymnastics to allow them to do it, but each group managed.
And call me crazy, but I’d much rather be killed than be treated worse than an animal for the rest of my life. But that’s pretty damn irrelevant. It’s like trying to decide which is worse, having my genitals mutilated but being allowed to live, or being stoned to death. Neither one would be what I’d call conducive to a non-fucked up life, which is all that matters.
You honestly think that children were only conceived by rape for 240 years?
Absolutely true. But we’re talking about the Confederacy, not the slave trade. Only 5% of the slaves brought to the New World even came to America and far less than 5% of those came during the 19th century.
That is about a single case. Thomas Jefferson’s niece Nancy Randolph killed her infant as well, then went on to marry a man with one arm/one leg and four mistresses. By your logic that means that white southern aristocrats were Medeas with amputee polygmaist fetishes, or that because Nat Turner’s men killed women and children all slaves were bloodthirsty savages.
I’m not a historian.
The mass suicides you linked to occurred during the trans-Atlantic slave trade which is not relevant to the Confederate era. (True, since you’ll google it up and act like you found a pretty penny, there was a slave ship that came into the U.S. in the 1860s and the captain was hanged- read the details- that wasn’t normal.) I can go one better than that- it happened with Africans on a South Carolina plantation whose masters thought they were dancing and used to watch them, not knowing that they were warriors and what they were doing was drilling- when they revolted and rebelled several committed suicide, but again- that was well over a century before the era we’re discussing, and at that time slavery was practiced in every part of the colonies yet only the south ever gets their feet held to the fire for it.
The infanticide you mentioned was one case. I would imagine there were many more. There were dozens of women who killed themselves and their children during the Dust Bowl as well.
Which I never claimed. Infanticide was rampant in the ancient world; the defenders of Masada all died by suicide and infanticide. It was however more common in the Holocaust; show me an incident in Confederate era America (let’s back it up to 1850 or so) that was on par with the orthodox communities in Belgium, Russia and Poland who had ceremonies before killing themselves to avoid capture?
You are as always incapable of intelligent or even honest argument.
Neither do I, but I can’t stand silent when there are such asinine claims.
Out of curiosity (this addressed to all, not John Mace [though he may most certainly answer]): is Sherman regarded as a villain outside of the south?
I hate McDonnell’s action- it was deliberately divisive and incendiary- but I’ll be damned sometimes if the amount of ignorance and simplification to the point of nonsense on both sides where history is concerned isn’t sickening.
Obviously if you were to be pulled from wherever you live and work now and shoved into a field and told to harvest cotton then that would be the case- you’d rather die than do it. In such a strange circumstance though I seriously doubt you’d kill yourself; you’d more likely try to get free and find that wormhole.
Were you born a slave on a plantation in the south during the 19th century having never known freedom and raised by people who have never known freedom instead of wherever and whenever you were born then you have absofuckinglutely no way of knowing what you would do any more than I can pretend what I would have done had I been a gay librarian in 1930s Berlin and it’s stupid to speculate unless you’re planning to write a time travel novel. So stop posturing: the fact you view slavery as evil and swear you’d rather die than go through it in 2010 makes you a radical about as much as the fact my mother did white people’s laundry makes me Malcolm X.