Posted on 01/02/2019 1:17:56 PM PST by SeekAndFind
My New Year’s wish for the coming year is for more of my fellow Americans and others to learn some basic history and try to get a grip on reality. Someone who writes for The New York Times under the name of Michelle Alexander wrote a column published last week, “Who Deserves Citizenship?”
One of her choice sentences: “But for slavery, genocide, and colonization, we would not be the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world — in fact, our nation would not even exist.” Hmm. Both North and South America were colonized by European countries that practiced slavery, and the United States was not the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery.
What many now call genocide of the Native American people was rarely a deliberate policy of the colonizers. The American Indians had no immunity against many diseases that the Europeans inadvertently brought with them — most notably smallpox. But many other diseases — such as measles, not normally fatal to Europeans — proved to be so to the Native Americans. The death toll was horrendous — but again, largely as a result of ignorance. The understanding of germs was still several hundred years away.
No one knows how many people lived in the Americas when Columbus arrived. Most estimates have it in single or low double-digit millions. What is more widely agreed is that there were only about 600,000 left in North America by 1650, meaning that perhaps as many as 90 percent of the pre-Columbus population had perished. By the time the English colonists began to settle in Virginia and New England, most of the mass death had already occurred. The Europeans were no strangers to mass death events. The plague in the 1300s in Europe killed an estimated third of the population.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Africa and have trained a significant number of officers from different African countries. It never ceases to amaze me how their understanding of the slavery issue differs so greatly from that of Americans, particularly white liberals and the race baiters who profit from the racism industry. One friend took me to the remains of an old slave camp on the coast of Mozambique and told me, “This is as far as the Dutch and British came. Tribes from further inland brought and sold slaves captured from other tribes to the slave traders.”
“Both North and South America were colonized by European countries that practiced slavery, and the United States was not the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery.”
Not to mention basically the entirety of the Caribbean where most indigenous peoples were wiped out completely.
Slavery was why the south lost the war. With ‘free ‘cheap labor they never expanded their production capabilities and were outproduced during the war.
Not to mention that some slave owners were black themselves (albeit a very small portion of the total).
And one knows that those who came learned from those here already and those here learned from the newcomers.
There was not as much exploitation then as there is now by the big corporations, the globalists, idiots who propagandize and the illegal aliens.
Yep. We in California know that trick all too well.
Well sure, if you call 200 million dollars per year (in 1860) dollars, a "drag" on the economy. Slavery was paying for the vast bulk of Federal government because all of those tariffs came from importing European goods in exchange for American exports, 75-85% of which were produced by slaves at that time.
bkmk
Spain.
Seriously, all that slave mined gold and silver made Spain hugely rich.
I have been told by numerous people that vestiges of this system still operate in Mexico today. People who have much experience living in Mexico have informed me that all of the wealthy and upper caste are light skinned, mostly Spanish descendents. Most of their popular actors and their ruling class government officials all tend to be light skinned.
From what I have read of their history, status was obtained by claiming Spanish ancestry.
I think being outnumbered four to one had something to do with it.
My impression was that Diamond says that people or cultures don’t influence their path to greatness or insignificance, it is geography that does this. He also seems to be saying that individuals cannot influence their path, that only the State can be a counterweight to the large forces of geography.
It rubs me the wrong way.
I also readily admit that part of my hostility towards him and his work is likely due to a knee-jerk revulsion of the leftist embrace of his ideas.
There were Christian organizations which sent Africans back to Africa. They bought land in Africa for them, and created a nation called Liberia. The capital is Monrovia (named for James Monroe.) They created a form of govt for it that is based on our own. Liberia, like many African nations, is facing a lot of turmoil now, but it has been a more peaceful and prosperous nation than most of Africa. It has an interesting history, there are videos on YouTube that you might enjoy. I am dredging up what I learned in high school over 50 years ago, and I am quite fuzzy on the details so I hope the few facts I wrote down here, are not misremembered. I do not think that any free black Americans were forced to go back, but they were given passage and financial help if they wanted to go. Some did, some didn’t. I think they did buy slaves freshly taken from Africa, and then took them to Liberia. However, as free men and women, and then gave them help in Liberia to become productive citizens.
Slavery is incredibly inefficient component of an economic system it is factored into, and when placed alongside a capitalist system, it cannot complete. Back then, and with an agricultural based economy, that was probably the only thing keeping it going.
Enslavement of another human being is a cultural phenomenon that has been with the human race since before history was even kept. The institution is rooted in the assertion of power and dominance of one person, or one tribe, over another.
Since the person was already under domination, why not make use of that arrangement, and have the subjugated one produce some useful service for the master? A strange psychology sets in here, in which the service may be performed, but it will be sullen and slow-walked, not particularly productive for either the master or the slave. But it was tolerated, because it also fit another less-illuminated but very powerful urge, the need of some to be dominated, and the need by others to dominate.
This frequently resulted in severe physical punishment, in addition to verbal abuse and deliberate withholding of access to relief of physiological needs, like eating or sleeping, or other body functions. Needless to say, whole tomes have been written regarding the study of this aspect of psychology, none of which is beneficial to good mental hygiene.
A bold experiment, in which maybe persons are NOT kept in bondage for a specified term, or for life, except as a just punishment for really severe transgressions against the civil order of society, was undertaken within the past few hundred years, spread wider and wider as the world became more enlightened. This new experimental reorganization of societal norms did not spread evenly and everywhere, by any means, but where it was tried and the lessons learned were applied, productivity burst forth beyond the wildest dreams of even those who were philosophically opposed to the very institution of slavery.
This new-found wellspring of prosperity did manage to frighten some number of the old classes that had most benefited from the institution of human bondage, and most of the warfare over the recent couple of hundred years was an attempt, however futile, to put that genie back in the bottle. And sometimes, the stopper was put back in, if only for a time, by mass genocides and assertion of what was at first overwhelming show of force in governmental decisions and on the battlefield.
There is slavery afoot in the world today, and we know where most of it comes from and is fueled by. One of the great curses of mankind is the imagined belief that an absolute, tyrannical form of “equality” must be enforced upon everybody, or at least for most people, with only a lone chosen few at the top (often self-selected) provides all the guidance and leadership needed to make things function “efficiently”. This command-and-control type of organization of society is known by many names, but almost every one of them boils down to some definition of socialism. I leave it to you to name them, but any thinking person knows of those of which I speak.
The failure to rid the world of this wrong-headedness comes down to failure to implement means by which successive generations keep and expand the process of critical thinking as it relates to how they themselves and their neighbors interact.
1. Do not offend purposely.
2. Do not be too easily offended.
3. Where there is conflict, resolve it through negotiation and compromise, coming up with a solution satisfactory to both sides.
4. Do not keep fighting the same battles over and over.
All seems very simple, but it is like applying the Golden Rule, and living by the Ten Commandments. Much harder to do than it first appears, as exceptions keep cropping up all the time, and people DO become truculent and intransigent.
But at the time, it was a big money maker.
how is it that Mexico and other nations, in South America, did not become wealthy?
On paper, Mexico with its natural resources should still be wealthy. But its culture, politics and traditions vs ours have left them in the dust.
What "new ideas" are a bunch of uneducated, unwashed, non-English-speaking invaders going to bring to our technologically advanced society? And what does "new energy" even mean?? If it means constructive, positive affirmation, I guess I don't see it happening. I see a lot of discontent, anger, class jealousy, and demands for change that benefit the illegals but don't do a damned thing for America.
A lot of the gold and silver was already mined when the conquistadors got there. They may have STOLEN it, or at least traded it for trinkets, but they didn't enslave the natives to mine it. Unlike in the Caribbean islands, where they DID makes slaves of the natives to produce sugar cane and tobacco.
You’re s’posed to buy the sales pitch, not exam what’s really going on.
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