Posted on 12/08/2013 10:02:57 AM PST by PeaRidge
We are hearing a multitude of broadcasts, blogs, and stories about Mandela. Hosts fill their alloted time with stories of Mandela, and cannot help but slip into comparisons with modern politicians. It is also appropriate to compare him with our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln, who faced some of the very same challenges as Mr. Mandela.
Which merely indicates that wars have become less destructive, contrary to the popular POV.
The 30 Years War resulted in the deaths of 25% to 40% of Germans, with some provinces upwards of 75%.
Most Chinese changes of the Mandate of Heaven (one dynasty succeeding another) in the last 2000+ years resulted in death rates of 50% to 75%, usually over a few decades.
The Wars of the Three Kingdoms in 1600s Britain and Ireland resulted in the deaths of an estimated 10% of the English, 20% of the Scots, and 30% of the Irish.
The French and others had religious civil wars with similar death rates.
It is estimated that almost 300,000 CSA soldiers died, let's round up to that number. Add in the 50,000 claimed civilian deaths, almost all of whom were in the South for the obvious reason that's where the fighting was.
350,000 is around 3.8% of the 9M prewar population of the seceding states.
Most if not all seceding states showed an increase in population from the 1860 census to that of 1870.
U.S. population was much lower back then
25% of southern white men killed in the civil war. that is no walk in the park .and they didn't have modern weapons.of course Obama would send tanks against the people in the South like Clinton did in Waco. Obama would send the army to machine gun southerners
How many Northerners (Americans) did Jeff Davis kill?
You would be well served to read some history instead of the Lost Cause mythology you have obviously swallowed hook, line and sinker.
Let's discuss it then.
Blacks in South Africa under Apartheid were not slaves. They could not be sold down the river never to see their families again. Their children belonged to them, not to some 'master.' They could work for wages wherever they could be hired. They were free to move about the country or even to leave the country if they chose. They could own property and that property was respected. They were allowed to learn to read and write.
Mandela v Lincoln? Wrong analogy.
Apartheid treated blacks in South Africa very similar to how blacks in the most of the Southern US were treated for 100 years after the Civil War. They were not allowed to participate in the political process. They were denied equal rights in a number of spheres such as housing, employment and educational opportunities. They were denied equal protection under the law. But they were not chattel slaves.
Mandela v M.L. King? I can see their struggles as similar but what Mandela fought against was nothing like the institution of slavery that Lincoln opposed and apparently you would have supported.
I do not think you have any idea what I support.
History alert!
Near the end of the war, Lincoln freed the southern slaves.
This was long after secession, long after the war began, long after there were no southern states in congress.
The last American slaves to be freed were in New Jersey.
I have read it many times. Now tell us professor, how could Lincoln have Constitutionally freed slaves via executive order in states that were not in rebellion?
It appears you only have a superficial (or perhaps selective) knowledge of both history and of the Constitution.
New Jersey had a total of 18 permanent apprentices in 1860. All other former slaves had been turned into apprentices, served their 7 years, and freed. Their children were born free. That example was available to the slave state if they ever wanted to free their slaves. Those 18 were very old family retainers by the time of the civil war.
The pretended secession was of no legal meaning. The insurrection failed. the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves from the time of its issue to the rest of the war as the US Army covered the south in various offensives.
By contrast, the pretended confederates captured persons of african descent and reenslaved them, a war crime when they did that to US soldiers of African descent. That war crime led to the breakdown of the POW exchange agreement. Suprise suprise! the slave power didn’t keep their agreement.
What mercy and restraint was shown by the victorious US government. I would have been tempted to string up all pretended confederate officials, and military officials over colonel. Their deluded soldiers should have seen the inside of a POW camp as a warning to be more careful of who they elect in the future.
Grant and Sherman were too merciful for that. Sherman was so merciful that the terms he proposed were rejected by the US government, and terms essentially identical to those of Grant were substituted.
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Apartheid was not similar to southern slavery. Persons of African heritage, or those deemed ‘colored’ had representation and a system of laws. Different laws applied to different people based on their legal status.
In the racist republic there was no system of legal rape, legal private torture, and legal kidnapping by private parties as was the case in the US antebellum slave states.
A genealogist tracked the children of a famous Zulu woman. One of her descendants was Pieter Botha, leader of the oxcart wing of the Nationalist (Afrikaner) Party. That meant legally he, (and probably many others) were legally colored, making the racist republic illegitimate by even its own laws. After that, the Nationalist Party decided to pack it in, and hold the elections that installed Mandela. Mandela did not bring democracy to SA, that was the old racist republic and its horribly compromised leadership. Mandela avoided, for the time being, the blood bath that could have been the outcome of a different path during democracy.
Mandela should properly not be compared to President Lincoln, but rather to Presidents Andrew Johnson and Grant, to implemented the mercy on the insurrection that Mandela implemented on the leaders and foot soldiers of the insurrection.
I don’t think myself so good a man as to have that much mercy in me.
Following is an editorial from the Pittsburgh Tribune Review that echos your point.
Nelson Mandela: The real legacy
Few of the encomia about Nelson Mandela deal honestly and forthrightly, if at all, with the dubious background of the former South African president and slayer of apartheid. But had they, an even more remarkable portrait of the man would be painted. For his transformation was a true reclamation.
Mr. Mandela, 95, died on Thursday. And the tributes quickly poured in for the man who did so much to end blanket racial segregation and who helped to set the standard for free and just democratic black rule on an African continent so dominated by henchmen and thugs.
But few care to recall — and virtually no editorials mentioned — that for most of his life, Mandela was not only a Marxist who revered Lenin and Stalin but also was a terrorist. He abandoned efforts for peaceful change in favor of guerrilla tactics and sabotage. And that's what led to his trial, conviction and life prison sentence in the 1960s.
He emerged from prison 27 years later as a changed man in a changed country. Mandela became South Africa's leader in its first free presidential election four years later, seeking unity instead of exacting revenge, and served a single term before retiring.
But most media's failure to detail the full history of Mandela's Marxist past actually diminish the man and his achievements. Through his words and deeds, he renounced Marxism and terrorism, learning, albeit late in life, that such ideologies were merely recipes for another form of tyranny no more acceptable than apartheid.
That's the true legacy of Nelson Mandela — one that exposes as fraudulent the kind of failed “progressivism” to which so many of his Fourth Estate admirers continue to cling.
Source: http://triblive.com/opinion/editorials/5206848-74/mandela-nelson-editorials#axzz2n06DLqUa
(From WIKI)>>> The New Jersey state legislature was the last in the North to abolish slavery, passing a law in 1804 for its gradual abolition. When in 1846 New Jersey abolished slavery, it qualified it by redefining former slaves as apprentices who in reality continued to be “apprenticed for life” to their owners.
Slavery did not truly end in the state until it was ended nationally in 1865 after the American Civil War and passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.
Yes, some were still permanent apprentices. The 1860 census gives the count of 18 for those in that state.
The rest were free. Since the 18 PAs had been permanent apprentices roughly since 1804 they were all pretty old in 1860. Here is the question: Would a permanent apprentice be in theory subject to the Fugitive Slave Laws? I think so, if modeled on the constitutional phrase “owing service or labor”
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