I generally ignore Glenn Beck, but I think I need to respond to his latest outrage. He was trying to say that Obama’s health care reforms are going to basically enslave people by making them paying higher premiums. Then he said this:
The President is exactly right when he said ’slaves sitting around the campfire didn’t know when slavery was going to end, but they knew that it would. And it took a long time to end slavery.’ yes it did. But it also took a long time to start slavery.
And it started small, and it started with seemingly innocent ideas. And then a little court order here, and a court order there and a little regulation here and a little more regulation there. And before we knew it, America had slavery.
It didn’t come over in a ship to begin with, as an evil slave trade. The government began to regulate things because the people needed answers and needed solutions. It started in a court room then it went to the legislatures. That’s how slavery began. And it took a long time to enslave an entire race of people, and convince another race of people that they were somehow or another, less than them. But it can be done.
Even a brief view of the Wikipedia page for the Atlantic Slave Trade will make it obvious that Glenn Beck is very wrong.
In some ways, slavery has always been with us. It still exists in some places, like Sudan. So, it’s kind of strange for Beck to say that slavery began with a court order. But, even when we consider slavery only in the context of Colonial America, Beck doesn’t make any sense. African-American slavery began because African kings paid for European goods by selling their own slaves. Those slaves were paid for with tropical fruits, molasses, rum, cotton, and tobacco, which were sent back to Europe. It was a triangular system of trade. The Europeans sold processed goods and bought agricultural products, the Africans sold manpower and bought processed goods, and the Americans sold agricultural products and bought manpower.
And the Americans only bought African manpower because plentiful and cheap land made it easy for European settlers to move quickly into land ownership and the Native peoples tended to die from Old World diseases when put to work as slaves.
Slavery existed in the New World even before the importation of Africans. And Africans were brought here specifically to be slaves.
What Beck might be referring to is the system that evolved that gradually differentiated African slaves from all other slaves. In the beginning, slaves and indentured servants were able to win their freedom after a period of service. But, over time, African-Americans lost that right in the South of this country. Then white slavery withered away completely, leaving a system in the 19th-Century of exclusively black slavery.
But, regardless, blacks were brought here as slaves in order to be slaves. It’s probably easiest to understand this history by reading about the Haitian Revolution, because it contains all the components of what went on here, but in a very compressed timetable.
no less than Condi Rice called slavery- America’s Birth Defect – That it was in the DNA of this country.
Black folk were slaves in this country for damn near 150 years BEFORE the found of the republic. I’d say slavery was as American as apple pie. his racist ass can have his own opinions, but the FACT that Africans were brought here in the 1600’s CANNOT be debated.
If I am generous, I give him credit for understanding that exclusively black slavery (for life) did basically evolve through various legislative acts and court decisions. But slavery itself existed long before that. And blacks were brought here on ships to be slaves. What he’s referring to isn’t slavery itself but the way the country developed 19th-Century slavery so that only blacks were enslaved and they had no hope of earning their freedom.
But innocent ideas? The evil didn’t originate on ships?
It’s just a continuation of his ill-conceived effort to claim the Civil Rights Movement for the Klan.
Does he even give any specifics as to what the fuck he’s talking about? I don’t even know what court order “here and there” he’s talking about. Other than Plessy vs. Ferguson and Dred Scott vs. Sanford, which to my knowledge took place 75 years after the country was founded, which had slavery well before 1787, can anyone follow his logic and enlighten me as to what historical event he’s hyperbolically referring? The whole entire country was founded upon a 3/5th compromise, dammit.
They’re called slave codes.
I knew of those, but I mean, really? “Little innocent idea?” Lol, the dude’s a bigger huckster than I had imagined.
Those “little court orders” Beck is yakking about?
Brown vs. Board of Education
Loving vs. Virginia
Civil Rights acts of 1866, 1871, 1875, 1957, 1960, 1964, 1968 and 1991
…and in particular the court orders to enforce these judicial decisions and acts of Congress, including the use of federal troops.
I’m trying to imagine a balancing example, in which someone from the left offers an utterly preposterous misreading of history–on his or her own network TV show–that conveniently verifies their worldview while negating both common sense and historical fact.
And I’m failing. Completely. Maybe some of the excuses some ’50s US communists still made for Stalin. But that was (then) recent history, and they never, ever had that kind of platform. Or audience.
Che Guevara apologists?
Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck in Right Wing Radio Duck
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfuwNU0jsk0&feature=player_embedded
“What Beck might be referring to is the system that evolved that gradually differentiated African slaves from all other slaves.”
What Beck is actually referring to is the fever in his brain. Stop trying to make sense of the senseless. He is just causing words to come out of his mouth to fill the TV time he has. Beck knows less American history than your cat.
Some Southern history. Virginia was settled beginning in 1607 by the English. Within a few years they were granting land by headright; the size of the grant depended on the number of people you pledged to bring to Virginia to settle. Aspiring landowners met their headright quotas in several ways: recruitment in exchange for passage; indentured servitude for a period of seven years in exchange for passage; taking prisoners (generally debt prisoners). By the time the Pilgims landed at Plymouth Rock, the Virginians had tried unsuccessfully to enslave the local Indians; they escaped into the forest and blended into the local tribes that were their relatives. And in 1619, had purchased the first African slaves from a Dutch trading ship. At first the Africans were treated no different legally than indentured servants.
By the 1630s, there were special slave laws preventing ownership of property by slaves, curtailing marriage with non-slaves. And on and on and on through the 1670s. In the 1670s, the settlement of Carolina reduplicated many of these Virginia laws. Slavery was now assumed to be the way you worked the land, either for the tobacco of Virginia or the rice and indigo of South Carolina.
In 1676 during Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, there occurred the first major slave revolt. Afterwards, plantations were turned into private work camps, private gulags if you will. Security was a major issue.
After American Revolution, there was a brief period of loosening of enforcement and even voluntary manumission. Both the Baptist (ironically) and Methodist (also ironically) churches advocated manumission and treatment of “Negroes” as equal human beings. Few of the laity followed this religious practice. The Haitian Revolution slowed this down. After the invention of the cotton gin and the opening up of the “Old Southwest” – Alabama, Mississippi, Baptist deacons and Methodist bishops alike owned slaves.
In 1830, the Nat Turner Insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, hardened attitudes toward slavery across the South. From then until the Civil War, the rhetoric of Southern newspapers became more fearful, more insistent, and more shrill — finally advocating secession.
So slavery was built into the design of the Virginia and Carolina colonies from the outset. The only question at the beginning was who exactly was to be enslaved. The answer not surprisingly was the people who looked different from the indigenous people and the settlers–easier to capture fugitives. And the existing Atlantic slave trade with the Spanish and Portuguese proved an adequate source of supply, especially after the English themselves moved to supplying the American colonies. And New England began its own fleet of slave ships.
On the other hand, from the beginning of the controversy with mother England, the colonists used the metaphor of slavery and liberty as often as they used the terms tyranny and liberty. And much of Beck’s ranting is proof-texting and citing the scripture of the “Founding Fathers”. It really is about creating a self-conscious civil religion that conflates the American civil religion (Founding Fathers, founding documents, holidays, rituals, flag) with a moralistic, pietistic, neo-Calvinist branch of Christianity. Actual history doesn’t matter as much as belief, just as actual history of the Great Flood, or the Exodus doesn’t matter as much as the belief. Or the actual birth location of Barack Obama doesn’t matter as much as the belief that he is foreign.
Baptist – not ironic; almost all protestant denominations later split over the issue of slavery.
There were resolutions in the 1790s of Baptist conventions and Methodist conferences in Virginia advocating manumission of slaves owned by their members.
When denominations split, they split along sectional lines that were only partially bridged. The Southern Baptist Convention remains split from other Baptist conventions. And the Southern Baptist Convention evangelized its Southernness as much as its Christianity in the rest of the country, especially in Southern California. And it was only after World War II that Methodists unified with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. And only 1964 that Methodists unified with the black churches that segregated into the Methodist Church, Central Jurisdiction (C.M.E churches).
Virginia Methodists, very impressive! , Methodism was founded with a human rights slant to it and though there are texts that contradict each other in the New Testament re: slavery, principal texts (in the genuine writings of Paul) oppose it. Especially important is the issue of a Christian owning slaves, even if the question of slavery in general is not addressed. The slaveowners really had to bend the text out of shape to get it to say what they want, or else only read a couple verses total and ignore the rest (which is what they did). Where ecclesiastical authority came in slave”owning” as property rights was supported.
The interesting thing about Bacon’s rebellion was that it was a rebellion of poor whites and blacks against rich people. The rich people were freaked out and used their power to really hammer in the race-thing so the two groups would never unite against them again.
Beck wants to be a cult-ish leader like an L. Ron Hubbard. He already sells what passes for knowledge and his insight. There will always be something more to buy in order to get to the Ultimate Truth. It’ll be a more steady income than that of a mere entertainer.
The history of slavery to Beck is irrelevant. The word ‘slavery’ to his Teabagger listeners, who have already proved they skipped all their history classes and aren’t to this day interested in picking up a book, is a tool to conjure up reparations in his story of how a Black man is step by step going to turn the tables on whites and make them the slaves. The sheer audacity of his lie is only matched by the people who hang on his every word.
Blacks made the best slaves, that’s why there brought.
When the Columbian exchange happened, the endemic diseases killed the natives. Also if they ran away they could blend into the population. Northern Euros also died pretty quick. Southern Euros did a bit better but not much. North Africans did better still but Sub-Saharan Africans did the best. They’d been dealing with the diseases at a far more intense level than the North Africans and others so they were the most disease resistant. They all stuck out in the population. Thus, slavery. The racial ideas involved in the Reconquista play a part, but I think that the rational was overwhelmingly economic and biological and it was only later when the slavers needed to justify themselves that they latched on to race.
I’m sorry, this makes no sense at all. slave and corvee labor in Latin America, Mexico and Central America was primarily indigenous. Intellectual developments in post enlightenment Europe played into the development of the concept of race. it’s a big topic
Nothing you said contradicts my point. By the end of the 16th Century Spain had banned slavery of the indigenous population. Now slavery by other names did continue in some areas and that’s not say other brutalization happened. But even if what you said is true (and it probably is on sheer numbers) that doesn’t change the fact that Sub-saharan Africans made better slaves because they lasted longer even if there were fewer of them.
Racism is a big topic, but it is simply undeniable that racism had some roots in the Reconquista. To have darker skin meant you probably had more Berber blood in you (since Berbers did most of the fighting for Al-Andalus) and that meant you had Muslims in your family tree. Now obviously it’s not the exact same concept as we deal with today, but it was one of the seeds.