By Vijay PRASHAD

In 1963, the Trinidadian writer CLR James released a second edition of his classic 1938 study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution.

For the new edition, James wrote an appendix with the suggestive title “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro.” In the opening page of the appendix, he located the twin revolutions of Haiti (1804) and Cuba (1959) in the context of the West Indian islands:

“The people who made them, the problems and the attempts to solve them, are peculiarly West Indian, the product of a peculiar origin and a peculiar history.”

Thrice James uses the word “peculiar,” which emerges from the Latin peculiaris for “private property” (pecu is the Latin word for “cattle,” the essence of ancient property).

Property is at the heart of the origin and history of the modern West Indies. By the end of the 17th century, the European conquistadors and colonialists had massacred the inhabitants of the West Indies. On St. Kitts in 1626, English and French colonialists massacred between 2,000 and 4,000 Caribs — including Chief Tegremond — in the Kalinago genocide, which Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre wrote about in 1654.

Having annihilated the island’s native people, the Europeans brought in African men and women who had been captured and enslaved. What unites the West Indian islands is not language and culture, but the wretchedness of slavery, rooted in an oppressive plantation economy. Both Haiti and Cuba are products of this “peculiarity,” the one being bold enough to break the shackles in 1804 and the other able to follow a century and a half later.

Osmond Watson, Jamaica, “City Life,” 1968.

Today, crisis is the hour in the Caribbean.

On July 7, just outside of Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince, gunmen broke into the home of President Jovenel Moïse, assassinated him in cold blood, and then fled. The country — already wracked by social upheaval sparked by the late president’s policies — has now plunged even deeper into crisis.

Already, Moïse had forcefully extended his presidential mandate beyond his term as the country struggled with the burdens of being dependent on international agencies, trapped by a century-long economic crisis and struck hard by the pandemic. Protests had become commonplace across Haiti as the prices of everything skyrocketed and as no effective government came to the aid of a population in despair.

But Moïse was not killed because of this proximate crisis. More mysterious forces are at work: U.S.-based Haitian religious leaders, narco-traffickers and Colombian mercenaries. This is a saga that is best written as a fictional thriller.

Four days after Moïse’s assassination, Cuba experienced a set of protests from people expressing their frustration with shortages of goods and a recent spike of Covid-19 infections. Within hours of receiving the news that the protests had emerged, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel went to the streets of San Antonio de los Baños, south of Havana, to march with the protestors.

Díaz-Canel and his government reminded the 11 million Cubans that the country has suffered greatly from the six-decade-long illegal U.S. blockade, that it is in the grip of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s 243 additional “coercive measures” and that it will fight off the twin problems of Covid-19 and a debt crisis with its characteristic resolve.

Nonetheless, a malicious social media campaign attempted to use these protests as a sign that the government of Díaz-Canel and the Cuban Revolution should be overthrown.

It was clarified a few days later that this campaign was run from Miami. And from Washington, D.C., the drums of regime change sounded loudly. But they have not found find much of an echo in Cuba. Cuba has its own revolutionary rhythms.

Eduardo Abela, Cuba, “Los Guajiros,” 1938.

In 1804, the Haitian Revolution — a rebellion of the plantation proletariat who struck against the agricultural factories that produced sugar and profit — sent up a flare of freedom across the colonized world. A century and a half later, the Cubans fired their own flare.

The response to each of these revolutions from the fossilized magnates of Paris and Washington was the same: suffocate the stirrings of freedom by indemnities and blockades.

In 1825, the French demanded through force that the Haitians pay 150 million francs for the loss of property (namely human beings). Alone in the Caribbean, the Haitians felt that they had no choice but to pay up, which they did to France (until 1893) and then to the United States (until 1947). The total bill over the 122 years amounts to $21 billion. When Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide tried to recover those billions from France in 2003, he was removed from office by a coup d’état.

After the United States occupied Cuba in 1898, it ran the island like a gangster’s playground. Any attempt by the Cubans to exercise their sovereignty was squashed with terrible force, including invasions by U.S. forces in 1906-1909, 1912, 1917-1922 and 1933.

The United States backed General Fulgencio Batista (1940-1944 and 1952-1959) despite all the evidence of his brutality. After all, Batista protected U.S. interests and U.S. firms owned two-thirds of the country’s sugar industry and almost its entire service sector.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 stands against this wretched history — a history of slavery and imperial domination.

How did the U.S. react? By imposing an economic blockade on the country from Oct. 19, 1960, that lasts to this day and has targeted everything from access to medical supplies, food and financing to barring Cuban imports and coercing third-party countries to do the same. It is a vindictive attack against a people who — like the Haitians — are trying to exercise their sovereignty.

Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez reported that between April 2019 and December 2020, the government lost $9.1 billion due to the blockade ($436 million per month). “At current prices,” he said, “the accumulated damages in six decades amount to over $147.8 billion, and against the price of gold, it amounts to over $1.3 trillion.”

None of this information would be available without the presence of media outlets such as Peoples Dispatch, which celebrates its three-year anniversary this week. We send our warmest greetings to the team and hope that you will bookmark their page to visit it several times a day for world news rooted in people’s struggles.

Bernadette Persaud, Guyana, “Gentlemen Under the Sky (Gulf War),” 1991.

On July 17, tens of thousands of Cubans took to the streets to defend their revolution and demand an end to the U.S. blockade. President Díaz-Canel said that the Cuba of “love, peace, unity, [and] solidarity” had asserted itself.

A few weeks before the most recent attack on Cuba and the assassination in Haiti, the United States armed forces conducted a major military exercise in Guyana called Tradewinds 2021 and another exercise in Panama called Panamax 2021.

Under the authority of the United States, a set of European militaries (France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) — each with colonies in the region — joined Brazil and Canada to conduct Tradewinds with seven Caribbean countries (The Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Dominican Republic, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago). In a show of force, the U.S. demanded that Iran cancel the movement of its ships to Venezuela in June ahead of the U.S.-sponsored military exercise.

The United States is eager to turn the Caribbean into its sea, subordinating the sovereignty of the islands. It was curious that Guyana’s Prime Minister Mark Phillips said that these U.S.-led war games strengthen the “Caribbean regional security system.” What they do, as our recent dossier on U.S. and French military bases in Africa shows, is to subordinate the Caribbean states to U.S. interests. The U.S. is using its increased military presence in Colombia and Guyana to increase pressure on Venezuela.

Elsa Gramcko, Venezuela, “El ojo de la cerradura” or “The Keyhole,” 1964.

Sovereign regionalism is not alien to the Caribbean, which has made four attempts to build a platform: the West Indian Federation (1958-1962), Caribbean Free Trade Association (1965-1973), Caribbean Community (1973-1989), and CARICOM (1989 to the present). What began as an anti-imperialist union has now devolved into a trade association that attempts to better integrate the region into world trade. The politics of the Caribbean are increasingly being drawn into orbit of the U.S. In 2010, the U.S. created the Caribbean Basic Security Initiative, whose agenda is shaped by Washington.

In 2011, our old friend Shridath Ramphal, Guyana’s foreign minister from 1972 to 1975, repeated the words of the great Grenadian radical T. A. Marryshow: “The West Indies must be West Indian’. In his article “Is the West Indies West Indian?,” he insisted that the conscious spelling of ‘The West Indies” with a capitalized “T” in “The” aims to signify the unity of the region. Without unity, the old imperialist pressures will prevail as they often do.

In 1975, the Cuban poet Nancy Morejón published a landmark poem called “Mujer Negra” or “Black Woman.” The poem opens with the terrible trade of human beings by the European colonialists, touches on the war of independence and then settles on the remarkable Cuban Revolution of 1959:

I came down from the Sierra

to put an end to capital and usurer,
to generals and to the bourgeoisie.
Now I exist: only today do we own, do we create.
Nothing is alien to us.
The land is ours.
Ours are the sea and sky,
the magic and vision.
My fellow people, here I see you dance
around the tree we are planting for communism.
Its prodigal wood already resounds.

The land is ours. Sovereignty is ours too. Our destiny is not to live as the subordinate beings of others. That is the message of Morejón and of the Cuban people who are building their sovereign lives, and it is the message of the Haitian people who want to advance their great Revolution of 1804.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research via consortiumnews.com

We ignore uncomfortable truths. The melding of the horrors of slavery with civil rights era lynchings with the killing of George Floyd, all wrapped in the means-what-you-want-it-to-mean of systemic racism, flirts with incitement to violence. It won’t fix anything but falling MSM circulation rates, but that’s sort of the point.

Charles Blow in the NYT writes there is a direct line from disobedient slaves whipped in the 17th century to blacks lynched in the 1950s to George Floyd in 2021, cranked on Fentanyl, dying in restraint after trying to pass a phony $20 bill. America has gone from “the noose to the neck” he writes with as little understanding of anatomy as he has of history. Blow uses all of his high school creative writing class skills to make his lurid case; slave aren’t just whipped, it is black bodies that are punished and defiled. Blow writes of “the flaying of flesh, the human beings torn apart by hounds, the stiff bodies dangling from the stiff branch of a tree. The display was the thing. The theatrical production of pain, to the point of mutilation, was the thing. The transmission of trauma was the thing.”

We heard pretty much the same thing during the late Trump era, when Blow and others brought up an incomplete retelling of Marion Sims’ surgeries on black women in the 1800s and the 1932 syphilis experiments on black men as reasons why modern POC should not take the COVID vaccine. Anger today is insufficient unless fanned by multipliers from the past until any means necessary is justified as overdue justice.

Those are fighting words. They are meant to set the stage should that Minneapolis jury fail to satisfy the blood lust masquerading as a call for justice. But no one really wants justice per se, they want an eye for an eye. The certainty across America that cities will burn if the jury reaches the “wrong” conclusion makes clear that eye will be taken one way or another. A near-majority of Americans probably agree that it should be.

The sad thing about what Blow writes (and obviously he is just an avatar who puts into words what many think) is the assumption of intent by the cops who killed George Floyd. Intent is a critical part of justice. What did you intend to do? It’s the difference between Murder One and lesser crimes such as manslaughter or even self-defense. Blow sees no such distinction because it was a cop and a black man. At an Upper West side cocktail party 40 floors from reality Blow would probably say the application of intent in such cases is racist itself if it saves a cop from the gallows.

Within the horrors of slavery the intent was indeed to create ghoulish examples. Violence was a cruel tool of communication. Same for the ravages of the civil rights era, where Klansmen went out of their way to tell people they may have hung the wrong man for the rape of a white woman but no matter, they’re all the same. Same for the Freedom Riders; how many do we have to kill before ya’ll stay home? The violence was systemic, intentional, organized, and towards a common purpose of racial dominance. We share a sick history.

But does any thinking person believe those Minneapolis police officers woke up one day with the intent, the desire, the plan, to kill whatever black man fate put into their hands? That they each personally wanted to send a signal to the world white power as exercised by uniformed cops, like modern day overseers, will keep blacks in their place? That in the chaos of that moment, ignited by Floyd’s own actions of taking drugs and passing funny money, a complex socio-racial-political drama was intentionally acted out?

That is exactly what Blow, the MSM, and BLM want everyone to believe. They use every tool available to create that emotional narrative complete with an awkward martyr, from Blow’s dramatic prose to the media linking every white-on-black act of violence to a national supremacist conspiracy whilst ignoring black-on-black or any other violence. The job is to start a fire, and you can’t start a fire without a spark. If you don’t have one, create one.

Each week we have a new national outrage to pull on that thread. Which thing is elevated is driven by the presence of good video, a clever hashtag, and the ease with which the tragedy can be linked to others. So the mass shooting in Atlanta zooms to first place because of the anti-Asian theme (which is not even true) while the mass shooting in Colorado fades quicker than a beer buzz. Americans have been conditioned to take the bait; in the cesspool my Facebook page has become it is easy to see the tide come in on an issue and then just as quickly go out. The same people upset about Russiagate last year were all about anti-Asian violence last week and have shifted to Floyd  with equal vitriol this week.

Thought is not allowed. Apart from the crude techniques of deplatforming and canceling (thanks, @jack!) one trick is to disallow people who speak uncomfortable truths or propose counter-narratives. The disallow response usually starts with “as a…” with the commentator moving on to say “as a woman…” or “as a trans man…” and dismiss any other understanding of events because of an inability to have their lived experience. So what can I know about George Floyd, systemic racism, etc.? HuffPost has built an entire vertical around this, with various “as a…” people claiming their victimhood as birthright.

As a human being, in reply I often cite education, the ability to learn about others’ lives through books, music, listening to people via documentaries or in real life. Isn’t that what all that stuff in the library is for anyway? But we dismiss education today as part of the same system of racism. We self-righteously allow tweeting mobs to ban books instead of allowing people to determine the value of ideas themselves. We do not want to be challenged. We want to believe emotional narratives, as people once did making up tales about angered gods who controlled the sun and tides. We should aspire to be better than our troglodyte ancestors or we will disappear with them.

But if emotion is all that matters, and I am trying to reach those who value it over all else, here goes. My now-deceased father was a Holocaust survivor. He lived, and I exist, only because someone on his side of the family realized they had to risk everything and do sometimes not-so-good things to survive and get out. And for those who want to argue now that that doesn’t count because he didn’t suffer as much as someone else, well, then let’s talk more about how slavery was OK if the owner was a nice guy. I thought not, bro.

For those who say I can’t understand, you cannot point to a more comprehensive example of systemic racism than the Holocaust, an explicit nation-state goal in our lifetimes to use industrial resources to eliminate an entire people. When I visited Germany a few years ago and was singled out for jay walking, should I have claimed anti-Semitism, told the cop my family story, demanded reparations? Or maybe just not jay walk?

So let us talk uncomfortable truths. Of course reforms are needed, they always are. But the cop killings that dominate our mindspace are miniscule compared to the number of blacks who destroy themselves with drug abuse, the road Floyd was on. The number of police killings of blacks, however tragic, is a drop compared to the ocean of blacks killed by other blacks, never mind all the other murders America tallies. For example, the recent murder of a Capitol cop by a black nationalist received little coverage, and less political comment.

There’s another uncomfortable truth about George Floyd. Floyd wasn’t at home eating breakfast when he died, nor was he dragged to the cops in chains. He broke the law to arrive at that terrible moment. Now that doesn’t justify his death, but know there was more than ideology which brought Floyd and those police officers together. Meanwhile, no evidence exists of systemic racism. The most compelling “proof” of anything systemic is some simplistic numerical totals, more blacks killed then whites, naïve in ignoring every other possible explanation. The pattern is so clear that if we avoid it there must be some reason.

That reason is the use of deaths for political power and partisan gain. If you want to enflame people and drive voters, you focus on cop killings (now with video because people film attacks instead of stopping them) If you believe all black lives matter, you would focus on issues less politically useful but many times more deadly.

Without victimhood to dismiss every problem as someone else’s fault, what would Charles Blow write about? Steps to make the patient well instead of prolonging the disease? Could he and the others switch to demanding more work directed toward unemployment, drugs, single parent families, kids who skip school, juvenile crimes, teenage moms, children shot in gangland crossfire, intergenerational dependency on public assistance, and personal responsibility? Or would he find something else he could blame on anonymous forces, something seemingly without a solution other than to keep voting for charlatans and buying newspapers from exploiters?

In his inimitably supercilious and churlish fashion, last week Obama endorsed slavery reparations, and blamed his inability to implement them during his administration on white racism:

“So if you ask me theoretically: ‘Are reparations justified?’ The answer is yes,” he said. “There’s not much question that the wealth of this country, the power of this country was built in significant part — not exclusively, maybe not even the majority of it — but a large portion of it was built on the backs of slaves.”

“What I saw during my presidency was the the politics of white resistance and resentment, the talk of welfare queens and the talk of the undeserving poor and the backlash against affirmative action,” Obama said on the podcast. “All that made the prospect of actually proposing any kind of coherent, meaningful reparations program struck me as, politically, not only a non-starter but potentially counter-productive.”

These statements are factually incorrect, bigoted, and extremely divisive, demonstrating exactly why race relations degraded more during Obama’s administration than in any other since Woodrow Wilson–a figure with whom Obama shares many similarities, none of them good. (I compared Obama and Wilson during the very early years of the former’s administration.)

Where to begin deconstructing this vicious farrago? I guess with the most vicious part–the claim that white racism doomed his high-minded dreams for reparations. Look at this part again:

the politics of white resistance and resentment, the talk of welfare queens and the talk of the undeserving poor and the backlash against affirmative action

Obama must have been having an acid flashback to the Reagan years when he said this. “Welfare queens”? Really? Who the hell has said that in the past 30 years?–that’s a trope from about 1982. Similarly “undeserving poor” and “backlash against affirmative action.” FFS–these are all anachronisms that had f-all to do with disputes over reparations in the 2010s.

Obama’s bigotry is also revealed by his failure even to countenance the possibility that resistance to reparations (not just among whites, but Asians, Hispanics, and even blacks) was and is rooted in a belief that the entire idea is monstrously unjust, and wildly impractical.

In terms of injustice, the argument for reparations is rooted in ideas of collective guilt. Not surprising from Obama and his ilk, but a profoundly unjust and anti-Western idea, and one which as wreaked untold miseries (including in the form of death camps and gulags and killing fields) wherever it has held sway.

Further, reparations impose no penalty on those responsible for slavery or who benefited from it, and pay no recompense to those who suffered from it directly, all of whom have been dead for at least decades, and most for centuries.

Think of any living white American. Not a single one is personally responsible for any sin committed by any dead white American prior to 1865. Moreover, virtually no living white Americans conceivably benefited in any material way from slavery.

Take me and my family for instance. The first of my father’s ancestors to arrive in the US did so in 1867. Most of the rest came here in the 1870s. How did they benefit from slavery? And if at all, by how much?

On my mother’s side, one great grandfather arrived in 1848–and settled in Ohio (and fought in the Civil War, including the March to the Sea, which freed numerous slaves). The remainder of her ancestors arrived to these shores between 1620 (yes, on the Mayflower) and the late-18th century. But every single one resided in a northern colony or state which were free states by the late-18th century; never held slaves; and were almost to a man and woman near subsistence farmers living on or near the frontier. So how did they benefit from slavery?

Pretty much every white American can to a considerable degree make a plausible claim that there is no plausible chain of causation between their current economic circumstances and slavery. The descendent of Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine. Italians or Jews or Slavs arriving at Ellis Island in the last quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th. Even the descendants of poor whites in the South: there is some debate in the economic history literature that slavery might actually have made them poorer, not richer.

There is also the issue of the incredible cost paid by all Americans in the 1860s to end slavery. The Civil War resulted in the deaths of upwards of 400,000 men serving in Union armies: As Lincoln said, “every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword.” Shall be, and was. Hundreds of thousands more suffered horrific wounds, and debilitating diseases that scarred them for life: approximately 400,000 collected disability pensions, despite the fact that the government presented many obstacles to those making claims. Untold numbers suffered extreme emotional trauma–a subject only now receiving much attention (including in the drama Mercy Street). Even beyond the losses suffered by those who died or were maimed emotionally or physically, these casualties affected the economic circumstances of their families, and their descendants.

So how is it just to force those living now who did not benefit from slavery even indirectly, and who may well have suffered some loss from it or from the war fought to end it, to pay compensation? Should I get a credit for my Civil War veteran ancestors’ disabilities (a lost arm, lifelong rheumatism)? It cannot be rationalized even on the twisted logic of collective guilt, for this living collective is neither neither guilty of sins committed by some dead collective, nor the recipient of ill-gotten gains.

Obama tries to get around these issues thus:

“There’s not much question that the wealth of this country, the power of this country was built in significant part — not exclusively, maybe not even the majority of it — but a large portion of it was built on the backs of slaves.”

This is a monstrous untruth. In fact, the reverse is true. “Slavery made America rich” is a leftist mantra. It is also categorically false, as has been demonstrated by massive scholarship over the years.

The economic historical literature on the subject is vast, but Deirdre McCloskey summarizes it well:

Yet the economic idea implied—that exploitation made us rich—is mistaken. Slavery made a few Southerners rich; a few Northerners, too. But it was ingenuity and innovation that enriched Americans generally, including at last the descendants of the slaves.

It’s hard to dispel the idea embedded in Lincoln’s poetry. TeachUSHistory.org assumes “that northern finance made the Cotton Kingdom possible” because “northern factories required that cotton.” The idea underlies recent books of a new King Cotton school of history: Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (Harvard University Press), Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf), and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books).

The rise of capitalism depended, the King Cottoners claim, on the making of cotton cloth in Manchester, England, and Manchester, New Hampshire. The raw cotton, they say, could come only from the South. The growing of cotton, in turn, is said to have depended on slavery. The conclusion—just as our good friends on the left have been saying all these years—is that capitalism was conceived in sin, the sin of slavery.

Yet each step in the logic of the King Cotton historians is mistaken. The enrichment of the modern world did not depend on cotton textiles. Cotton mills, true, were pioneers of some industrial techniques, techniques applied to wool and linen as well. And many other techniques, in iron making and engineering and mining and farming, had nothing to do with cotton. Britain in 1790 and the U.S. in 1860 were not nation-sized cotton mills. (Emphasis added.)

…

Economists have been thinking about such issues for half a century. You wouldn’t know it from the King Cottoners. [Or Obama.] They assert, for example, that a slave was “cheap labor.” Mistaken again. After all, slaves ate, and they didn’t produce until they grew up. Stanley Engerman and the late Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel confirmed in 1974 what economic common sense would suggest: that productivity was incorporated into the market price of a slave. It’s how any capital market works. If you bought a slave, you faced the cost of alternative uses of the capital. No supernormal profits accrued from the purchase. Slave labor was not a free lunch. The wealth was not piled up.

The King Cotton school has been devastated recently in detail by two economic historians, Alan Olmstead of the University of California at Davis and Paul Rhode of the University of Michigan. [Obama apparently missed this.] They point out, for example, that the influential and leftish economist Thomas Piketty grossly exaggerated the share of slaves in U.S. wealth, yet Edward Baptist uses Piketty’s estimates to put slavery at the center of the country’s economic history. Olmstead and Rhode note, too, from their research on the cotton economy that the price of slaves increased from 1820 to 1860 not because of institutional change (more whippings) or the demand for cotton, but because of an astonishing rise in the productivity of the cotton plant, achieved by selective breeding. Ingenuity, not capital accumulation or exploitation, made cotton a little king.

One could go on and on. Critically, cotton production represented a relatively small fraction of US income and wealth. As McCloskey (and others) note, American economic growth derived from myriad factors, of which cotton and slavery represented a modest and arguably trivial part.

Further, to the extent that slavery did massively benefit a small Southern elite, well the Civil War pretty much took care of that, no? The war devastated the planter class. Yes, more millionaires lived in sugar plantations along the Mississippi River in Louisiana than anywhere else in the US in 1860, but in 1865 the grand houses were burned; the stables emptied; the animals slaughtered or seized–and the slaves gone. They sowed the wind, and reaped the whirlwind.

Take Braxton Bragg as an example. The much-hated Confederate general married into a wealthy Louisiana planter family, but his time in the slaveholding aristocracy was short lived: Union troops confiscated his plantation in 1862, and after the war Bragg scraped by selling insurance and working as an engineer for a struggling Texas railroad. And he was one of the fortunate.

Wars also consume resources that could have been invested in productive activities: the massive expenditure of wealth to fund the Civil War reduced future US income, rather than increased it.

All meaning that Obama’s argument that modern Americans have been been unjustly enriched by the past injustices of slavery, and thus should pay reparations, is a complete falsehood. (A falsehood propagated by the loathsome 1619 Project as well.)

There are also the practical questions of to whom reparations would be paid, and the justice of any formula for rewarding them.

Are payments to be made on the basis of the one drop rule? That would be mordantly ironic, no?

Most descendants of slaves in the US are also the descendants of non-slaves, mainly whites, some of whom were more likely beneficiaries of slavery than you or I. There is considerable variation in the ratio of slave ancestry among Americans who currently identify as black. How will a reparations scheme reflect such variation? (Depending on how it does so, it could lead to another irony–a replacement of a historical reluctance of some who identify as white (especially in the South–read some Faulkner) to admit African ancestry, with a rush to find a slave ancestor: maybe investing in a genetic testing company is a way to speculate on the prospects for reparations!)

However these knotty issues are resolved, the resolution will be highly arbitrary–and hence add yet another element of injustice to an already irretrievably unjust enterprise.

Then there is the question of what is the counterfactual against which harm can be calculated. It could even be said there is no plausible counterfactual: Person X, descended from slaves, would not exist in the counterfactual world in which slavery never existed. So how can you calculate the harm suffered by X? And maybe there is no harm. Some portion of Person X’s genetic material would exist in some other people, living in Africa in far worse conditions than Person X. Person X could therefore be said to be the beneficiary of the horrors his enslaved ancestors suffered. But, of course, said ancestors cannot be compensated for these horrors.

Any just system of compensation and taxation to pay it (for reparations is at root a massive redistributive scheme) should have at least some connection between the harm suffered and the compensation paid, and between the responsibility for inflicting the harm, or the benefit received therefrom, and the tax paid. For all of the reasons discussed herein, slavery reparations cannot be just. Indeed, they are guaranteed to be unjust.

And it is that fundamental injustice–which is an inherent feature of the entire concept of reparations–is what makes it extraordinarily divisive. Even people of good will will not voluntarily submit to such a fundamental injustice, and indeed, people of good will will resist the imposition of such an injustice.

Obama’s failure to recognize this, and his assertion that opposition to reparations is rooted in base, racist motives speaks volumes about the man–and about what he thinks about the majority of Americans. And it does not speak well. Pushing for reparations will inevitably and severely exacerbate racial tensions, and divide the nation. Claiming that opposition to reparations can only be due to racism will divide it even more. This is the last thing we need now. But Obama apparently decided he had inadequate time in office to accomplish his mission, so he is devoting his post-presidency to fan the flames of enmity in America.

*There are also issues of economic efficiency. Reparations are purely redistributive. It can have no effect on the behavior that caused the harm–because all those behaving thus are long dead. But redistributive programs impose deadweight costs. These include, inter alia, the deadweight costs of taxation required to pay reparations; the costs of administering the program, including the costs to detect and punish fraud; and the rent seeking costs incurred by those attempting to secure the transfer. These deadweight costs make everyone poorer. And this does not even consider the cost of the strife that a battle over reparations would engender.

streetwiseprofessor.com

After Trump’s suggestion that he would give his nomination acceptance speech at the White House triggered potential legal objections, his campaign mooted the possibility of giving the speech at the Gettysburg battlefield. This triggered paroxysms of insanity that are remarkable even against the background of repeated paroxysms of insanity that have been playing on a loop for almost 4 years now.

Leading the Stupid Parade was CNN’s Jerry Diamond: “This is a President who has consistently positions himself as a defender of Confederate symbols and monuments to Confederate generals.” He was soon joined by assorted leftists, notably Meathead himself, Rob Reiner, who repeated the theme that going to Gettysburg was a dog whistle to racists and Neo-Confederates.

The clownery here is just too much. Anyone making these statements has no clue about Gettysburg, the history of the battlefield, or the monuments there. No. Clue. Whatsoever.

To start with, Gettysburg was the turning point in the war against slavery. Recognizing this, in November 1863 President Lincoln gave a speech at the dedication of the National Cemetery on the battlefield. This speech just happens to be the most famous oration in American political history, and arguably in the entire English language. For those who have forgotten, or never knew (which, alarmingly, is a very real possibility):

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

“Dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” A paean to Slavocracy if I ever heard one! “A new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The authoritarian’s creed, right?

That is what Gettysburg means. That is what those who speak there pay homage to. That is what politicians who speak there want to be associated with.

Speaking of the National Cemetery, it is the resting place of over 3,500 Union dead. Sure, there are seven Confederates buried there. By accident–they were mistakenly identified as Federals. Except for the remains of Confederate dead undiscovered in the years after the war–whose bones still rest in those lost graves–the bodies of the Johnnies were removed to the South, to places like Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.

So honoring the dead there means honoring the Union dead.

As for monuments, according to the National Park Service, there are 1,328 monuments at Gettysburg. Over 1,100 are to Union units.

Anyone who is remotely familiar with the history of the battlefield (which certainly excludes Meathead and other meatheads who bloviate on the subject), the moving political force behind the creation of the park (and other parks at Chickamauga, Shiloh, and Antietam) were Union veterans. Gettysburg in a particular was intended to be a shrine to the Union cause. The most important single figure in this movement was the notorious Dan Sickels, wounded on July 2, 1863.

Many Union veterans were deeply hostile to any recognition of Confederates on the battlefield. This was a monument to their achievement, in the name of Union, and for some the end of slavery.

Virtually every Union regiment and battery that fought at Gettysburg is memorialized there in granite and bronze. The veterans, and sometimes the states their regiments were recruited in, paid to create these sentinels in stone.

Monuments to any Confederates, or any Confederate figures, were placed in the park much later. The 11 states that contributed soldiers to the Army of Northern Virginia have placed monuments there. Some–like Virginia’s and North Carolina’s–are large and impressive. Some–like Texas’–are more modest.

The larger memorials (notably Virginia’s) do have Lost Cause resonance. But for the most part they recognize the bloody toll that the citizens of these states paid on three days in July, 1863.

Interestingly, one of the most recent additions to the monuments at Gettysburg is a statue of James Longstreet. After the war, Longstreet became a Republican. He defended the Reconstruction government in Louisiana, and attempted to defend blacks against the depredations of white supremacists opposed to said government, and to the civil rights of blacks.

For which he was vilified in the South.

I have been to Gettysburg over two dozen times, the first time when I was 9 years old. I have walked every foot of that field from Benner’s Hill to Big Round Top, and probably seen well over one thousand of these monuments, and read the text on most of them. Based on that, I can state definitively that anyone who believes it is Stone Mountain in Pennsylvania is beyond delusional.

Yes, there are monuments there that might warm the cockles of a Lost Causer’s heart, but overwhelmingly it is a massive memorial to the Union cause and Union sacrifice. Indeed, Gettysburg was arguably the singlemost important milestone in making the Cause a Lost one.

Most importantly, it is the site of the Gettysburg Address, which is the seminal speech that framed the cause for which the Union fought, and set the course for the post-war order. A course (according to the Emancipation Proclamation issued six months before the battle and then months before the speech) that included the end of slavery.

But the left (particularly in the media) is totally obsessed with playing Six Degrees From Slavery. In their twisted, fevered brains, if Trump does anything that is at all associated with the Confederacy, he is doing it because it is associated with the Confederacy. But a sensible person, and one who knows the battlefield, the history of the battle, and the history of the battlefield-as I do, and have since I was a boy-knows that the greatest associations are with the fight for freedom and democracy, and the fight against slavery.

streetwiseprofessor.com

A convinced opponent of slavery, he foresaw no way it could be ended but by the decree of a commander-in-chief during a civil war. A decree that would also end the three-fifths rule which gave the slave-owning states such predominant power. And it all came to pass, just as he feared, in the two decades after his death in 1848.

His other fear was that the behavior of America would destroy America. On 4 July 1821, while Secretary of State, he gave a speech which summarized his thoughts and hopes. It deserves to be read in full but probably the most famous section is

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

He believed that America should be an example “Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of mind.” Involvement in the outside world would inevitably corrupt and destroy liberty “The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.” Likewise, and for related reasons, he despised the expansionism of Andrew Jackson, believed Texas should be in the Union but not by war and trickery, was skeptical of the constitutionality of the Louisiana Purchase. Better by far that these areas should, of their own free will, and in their own good time, join the Union. To compel, to war, to trick was to destroy the essence of America.

Which brings me to Diana Johnstone and her memoir Circle in the Darkness. Johnstone is a leftie – not the Bolshevik kind, not today’s kind, but an old-fashioned, very American kind – the New Deal kind. Her parents were active in the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration and she grew up with a belief that the principal job of governments was to make things better for ordinary people, wars were to be avoided and America was best off minding its own business – peace and social justice, in other words. She and Adams would have found much to agree with in each other. Her title would also fit Adam’s idea of America in the world – a bright circle of decency in the general darkness.

Johnstone’s book is a lament for the left that used to be and a relating of how, when and where it disappeared. Probably the most notable difference between her early days and today is that today’s left no longer worries about, protests against or even thinks about war. The Iraq War of 2003 was met with enormous protests around the world. They did not stop it, of course, but at least many people said no to it. Subsequent American wars in the Obama period met no protests.

U.S. military forces have been at war for all eight years of Obama’s tenure, the first two-term president with that distinction. He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.

His administration overthrew the Libyan government, overthrew the Ukrainian government, attempted to overthrow the Syrian government, supported the Saudi war in Yemen and continued all the wars it inherited. Not a peep of protest. Partly because Obama was a Democrat and the corporate media fawned over him as “cool” and “intellectual.” But he also moved the wars offstage – by reducing the number of troops on the ground, they became drone attacks, special service troops, contractors, bombing. Far offstage. But where are the anti-war protests against the hated Trump? He too has continued the wars he inherited (but at least started no new ones) but, on the other hand, he is throwing sanctions at everybody. Not bullets, not “kinetic”, but not exactly peaceful either – just a different way of trying to destroy the monsters. The left has become persuaded that wars are good wars, not to be protested, if they can be wrapped in a human rights package. Libya is destroyed, turned into a hellhole because Qaddafi was “bombing his own people.” Ukraine ditto because Yanukovych was “corrupt.” Assad “gasses his own people.” With the narrowly restricted control of the news media, the monsters are easily manufactured.

The Western left no longer opposes wars because the “search for monsters to destroy” has silenced them – it’s good to destroy monsters. Who names and condemns the monsters? Why the monster-destroyers of course. And, if the monster is painted sufficiently monstrous by the controlled media, then no one questions the motives of the monster destroyers; no one even asks whether the monster destroyers have motives other than pure ones. As Johnstone writes:

Once a cause was identified by the Western media-political establishment as “good,” there was a herd-like rush to join it, to show that we are so good that we will not even listen to anyone who questions it, for fear of being identified with the Evil Ones.

and

The Kosovo War marked a change in the attitude of the Left toward U.S. military intervention. An immense publicity campaign, playing on false analogies with World War II, succeeded in rallying much of the Left to the need to “do something”—and the only “something” available was NATO bombing.

The left has lost the skepticism and mistrust of the authorities which used to be one of its foundations. What does the Western left agitate about today? Human rights. But not the human rights of children murdered in Yemen or Ukraine or African slaves in Libya; it’s the human rights of sexual minorities that obsesses those who consider themselves progressives. Or tearing down statues. Neither of which impedes the real aims and interests of the monster-destroyers in the slightest. A useful diversion as far as the looters of the world are concerned. Johnstone’s book recounts how, step by step, drop by drop, the Western left has been diverted into trivia.

For around two centuries, the “Left” was the term designating the most forward-looking, creative political forces in our societies. The Left fought for the independence of Vietnam and other colonized Third World countries. Now it is absent from the whole international movement to restore national sovereignty, condemned as “extreme right.” The Left is sabotaged from within by dogmatism. When “left” is reduced to a catechism, it cuts itself off from the real world and serves only as a means to denounce or punish deviations from the creed.

Both Obama and Trump came to power promising to end the endless wars – “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.” (Obama 2002) For the money spent in the Middle East the U.S. got nothing (Trump 2017). But the wars, the bombing, the droning continue and now Trump has added sanctions and cyberattacks to the mix. As Adams feared, once America goes looking for monsters abroad, monsters it will find. And always another after those.

And then the monsters follow you home. Despite the Obama administration’s success at making America’s foreign wars invisible to ordinary voters, the wars have been delivered to their local police departments. They have received billions of dollars of military equipment originally acquired to destroy foreign monsters. The result is – as the current spate of riots in America shows – that American police are virtually indistinguishable from American soldiers. Does dressing like a soldier make you act like a soldier? Have the citizens of America become monsters to destroy? Perhaps they are – police killed over a thousand Americans last year.

The monster-destroying has turned on America itself and is tearing the country apart. The favored candidate lost the election and blamed Russia – now everyone is told he must either agree that Russia is a monster or undergo being called dupe of that monster. “The Interagency”, formed for the monster wars, nearly got rid of a president.

Adams’ monsters roam America and the left obsesses over some lump of bronze or the label on a toilet door.

A treaty signed in 1868 between the U.S. government and the Sioux people recognised the Black Hills in South Dakota as exclusive to the indigenous. The agreement was toppled in 1874 when gold was discovered in the Black Hills in a mining expedition led by General George A. Custer. As mining exploitation commenced, the intruders requested army protection against the Sioux people who were making use of their terrain according to their rights, leading to the confiscation of indigenous territory by the U.S. government in 1877.

Fifty years later, the Black Hills were permanently desecrated to create a monument glorifying white supremacy. According to Trump’s speech, “Mount Rushmore will stand forever as an eternal tribute to our forefathers and to our freedom.”

The faces of former presidents Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt were carved in indigenous territory by the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who had ties to the Ku Klux Klan. On stolen land, the ugly combination of racism, slavery and massacres created a monument that eliminated all recognition of indigenous historical memory and presence.

As U.S. activists continue their purging of public spaces across the country, Mount Rushmore elicited greater attention. However, in the late 1960s and 1970s Native Americans mobilised for reclamation of their territory. Any current debate and action regarding the future of the site must start with the indigenous – anything less will be tantamount to another cycle of obliterating the Sioux history and in turn, misrepresenting the Native Americans’ demands for recognition.

The UN Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples recognises the right to self- determination, lands and resources. In 2012, the UN recommended that the U.S. should return indigenous lands to the Native Americans, including the black Hills. However, the UN has taken a lenient approach towards eradicating colonialism due to its legitimising the presence of colonial states. At the UN, decision-making is a colonial endeavour and any suggestions of reparations to the indigenous are always non-binding recommendations, in order to contradict the right to indigenous self-determination and to prevent decolonisation from happening.

A thorough reckoning of colonialism requires recognition of all the violations committed against black people and Native Americans. There exists common ground as regards exploitation; territory, however, is an important component that must not be overlooked. For the Sioux people, the Black Hills are a sacred site and it is the return of their lands that they demand, not financial compensation for stolen territory. In 1980 the U.S. Court of Claims ruled that the 1877 confiscation of indigenous land from the Sioux was illegal and declared compensation to the paid, which the Sioux people refused on principle. Financial compensation is no substitute for decolonisation. Neither would it suffice for the mass execution of Native Americans after the U.S.-Dakota War in 1862 by President Lincoln, under whose rule, the military ordered 303 men sentenced to death after brief travesties of trials, some lasting a mere five minutes. On December 26, 1862, 38 men from the Dakota indigenous community were hanged in public.

Mount Rushmore stands as a reminder of how U.S. colonial and racist politics exploited indigenous territory to carve reminders of slavery and massacres. This conflation by the colonisers requires careful thought. The toppling of monuments has ignited a rethinking of colonial history, yet the Black Hills appropriation has been doubly desecrated by the exploitation of indigenous land to glorify all forms of oppression. While presently it is unlikely that the carved abominations will be destroyed, and the decision should rest with the Sioux people, it is important to consider the Black Hills as a site of memory, where colonialism created a monument to itself at the expense of the indigenous Native Americans and slavery. For a rethinking of history, a reversal of memory annihilation is necessary.

It is clear that there is a storm coming, however, the question is will it be the sort of storm that provides sustenance and relief to drought-stricken and barren lands, or will it be the sort of storm that destroys indiscriminately and leaves nothing recognizable in its wake?

There is such a heavy tension in the air, the buildup we are told of centuries of injustice, oppression and murder. It feels like the entire world’s burden has laid itself upon one culprit and that it is high time that that villain pay for past blood spilled.

That villain is the United States.

It is common to hear that this nation was created under the hubristic banner of “Freedom from Empire”, while it brutally owned slaves and committed genocide on the indigenous people. That the “Declaration of Independence” and the “U.S. Constitution” are despicable displays of the highest degree of grotesque hypocrisy, and that in reality the U.S. was to replace one system of empire with another and far worse.

These are weighty charges indeed, and nobody can deny that great crimes against humanity have been committed. However, it is important that we review this history in full, for if we lose sight of the forest, we will be losing sight of an ongoing battle that is still waging.

We will have abandoned the work of past heroes that has been left unfinished and will have replaced it with the false idol of anarchy, mistaking its ‘empty-promises of liberty’ as a mark of what constitutes a ‘true freedom’.

How can we avoid such ‘empty-promises’ and strive for ‘true freedom’?

There is no better account in addressing such a question as that of Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), a former slave who would become an advisor to Abraham Lincoln during the dark days of the Civil War and the Consul General to Haiti in his elder years.

A through-and-through TRUE American hero (1).

From Slavery to Freedom

Frederick Douglass was born in Talbot County, in the State of Maryland. Though it was impossible to know his exact date of birth, he gathers that the month of February 1817 is as accurate as possible. The name given to him by his dear mother was, in the words of Douglass “no less pretentious and long” than Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey (Frederick’s mother was believed to be the only slave in the region who knew how to read).

Frederick recalls that in his youth “I was just as well aware of the unjust, unnatural, and murderous character of slavery, when nine years old, as I am now. Without any appeals to books, to laws, or to authorities of any kind, to regard God as ‘Our Father’ condemned slavery as a crime.”

Already, by the age of nine, Frederick had set himself upon not only the idea of escape from this destitution, but was always mindful to an education wherever he could find it.

Luckily, in this unhappy state his only adult friend Miss Lucretia, (daughter of Captain Anthony the slaveholder of Frederick), arranged for Frederick, at the age of ten, to be sent away from the plantations to live in Baltimore with her husband’s brother Hugh Auld.

It was in Baltimore that Frederick would learn how to read.

Years go by and at around the age of fifteen or sixteen, Frederick is sent back to the plantations (over a family squabble), and not surprisingly is found to be wholly unfit for a life of hard-labour as an obedient slave. He is thus promptly sent to “Covey, The Negro Breaker” to lodge with for a period of one year.

For six months, Frederick was whipped and beaten on a regular basis. From the dawn of day till the complete darkness in the evening, he was kept hard at work in the fields, and was worked up to the point of his powers of endurance.

Until one day he decides finally that it is better to resist and risk the consequences than continue to live such a contemptible life as a mere brute. He decides one day to simply refuse to be treated as an animal, not to strike back but to oppose the striking.

As Frederick states “A man without force is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, though it can pity him, and even this it cannot do long if signs of power do not arise. He only can understand the effect of this combat on my spirit, who has himself incurred something, or hazarded something, in repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant. Covey was a tyrant and a cowardly one withal. After resisting him, I felt as I had never felt before. It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous tomb of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. I was no longer a servile coward, trembling under the frown of a brother worm of the dust, but my long-cowed spirit was roused to an attitude of independence. I had reached the point at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, though I still remained a slave in form. When a slave cannot be flogged, he is more than half free. He has a domain as broad as his own manly heart to defend, and he is really ‘a power on earth’. From this time until my escape from slavery, I was never fairly whipped. Several attempts were made, but they were always unsuccessful. Bruised I did get, but the instance I have described was the end of the brutification to which slavery had subjected me.”

The Abolitionist Cause in Light of the Preservation of the Union

“…that the fathers of the Republic neither intended the extension nor the perpetuity of slavery and that liberty is national and slavery is sectional.”

– Frederick Douglass

To make a long story short, Frederick would successfully escape the South and on September 3^rd 1838, arriving in New York at the age of 21, he would finally embark on a life as a free man.

It would be only four or five months living in New Bedford before Douglass would meet William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most prominent leaders of the Abolitionist movement. It did not take long for Douglass to be invited along their speaking tours to recount his story as a runaway slave from the South.

Though Douglass would owe much of his future as a great orator and writer in thanks to his Abolitionist friends who gave him a strong start in this direction and introduced him to many important figures, Douglass would eventually distance himself from the Abolitionist “scripture”.

This distancing was caused by Douglass’ later recognition that there was in fact, no “pro-slavery” character in the U.S. Constitution as Garrison had been stating.

Douglass states, “After a time, a careful reconsideration of the subject convinced me that there was no necessity for dissolving the union between the northern and southern states, that to seek this dissolution was not part of my duty as an abolitionist, that to abstain from voting was to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery, and that the Constitution of the United States not only contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but, on the contrary, was in its letter and spirit an antislavery instrument, demanding the abolition of slavery as a condition of its own existence as the supreme law of the land.”

During this time, Douglass would start his own anti-slavery newspaper called “The North Star”. Along with this new editorial responsibility, Douglass would no longer leave it to the “good advice” of his “more learned” Abolitionist friends, but would take the responsibility upon himself to seek out and come to know whether such assertions by the Abolitionists on the nature of the Republic were true.

 “My new circumstances compelled me to re-think the whole subject, and to study with some care not only the just and proper rules of legal interpretation, but the origin, design, nature, rights, powers, and duties of civil governments, and also the relations which human beings sustain to it. By such a course of thought and reading I was conducted to the conclusion that the Constitution of the United States – inaugurated to ‘form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty’ – could not well have been designed at the same time to maintain and perpetuate a system of rapine and murder like slavery, especially as not one word can be found in the Constitution to authorize such a belief…the Constitution of our country is our warrant for the abolition of slavery in every state of the Union…being convinced of the fact, my duty upon this point in the further conduct of my paper [The North Star] was plain.”

Abraham Lincoln would be elected as the President of the United States on March 4^th, 1861. To which Douglass stated of the occasion:

“It was Mr. Lincoln who told the American people at this crisis that the ‘Union could not long endure half slave and half free; that they must be all one or the other, and that the public mind could find no resting place but in the belief in the ultimate extinction of slavery.’ These were not the words of an abolitionist – branded a fanatic, and carried away by an enthusiastic devotion to the Negro – but the calm cool, deliberate utterance of a statesman, comprehensive enough to take in the welfare of the whole country…In a few simple words he had embodied the thought of the loyal nation, and indicated the character fit to lead and guide the country amid perils present and to come.”

On Meeting Lincoln

“I still believed, and spoke as I believed, all over the North, that the mission of the war was the liberation of the slave, as well as the salvation of the Union…”

– Frederick Douglass

With this newly discovered orientation, Douglass not only put the preservation of the Union as something necessary and expedient but, most importantly, something that could not be sacrificed in striving for the Abolitionist cause.

Douglass would be one of the first to encourage the recruitment, through his paper “The North Star”, of black soldiers to join the Union’s war against the Confederate South. The thought was that by these men joining the war, they would prove their mettle in the cause for emancipation.

These were hard days, since black soldiers were not given equal treatment nor protection in the Union army. They also risked, if captured by the South, being enslaved, a sentence in Douglass’ words “worse than death”. Douglass had been assured that equal treatment would eventually occur, but it was too slow moving in his eyes and he refused to continue recruiting black soldiers into the Union army.

It was at this point that Douglass was invited to meet with President Lincoln to discuss his concerns over the matter.

Douglass describes his first meeting with Lincoln: “I was never more quickly or more completely put at ease in the presence of a great man than in that of Abraham Lincoln…Long lines of care were already deeply written on Mr. Lincoln’s brow, and his strong face, full of earnestness, lighted up as soon as my name was mentioned…I at once felt myself in the presence of an honest man – one whom I could love, honor, and trust without reserve or doubt.”

One of the points of concern Douglass discussed with the President, was on the unfair treatment of black soldiers as POWs and suggested that the North should retaliate and commit the same treatment on their Southern POWs to dissuade this unequal treatment, to which Lincoln responded, “Retaliation was a terrible remedy, and one which it was very difficult to apply – that, if once begun, there was no telling where it would end – that if he could get hold of the Confederate soldiers who had been guilty of treating colored soldiers as felons he could easily retaliate, but the thought of hanging men for a crime perpetrated by others was revolting to his feelings…Though I was not entirely satisfied with his views, I was so well satisfied with the man and with the educating tendency of the conflict I determined to go on with the recruiting.”

Douglass reflects on his decision:

“It was a great thing to achieve American independence when we numbered three millions, but it was a greater thing to save this country from dismemberment and ruin when it numbered thirty millions. He alone of all our presidents was to have the opportunity to destroy slavery, and to lift into manhood millions of his countrymen hitherto held as chattels and numbered with the beasts of the field.”

The Emancipation Proclamation

“Since William the Silent, who was the soul of the mighty war for religious liberty against Spain and the Spanish Inquisition, no leader of men has been loved and trusted in such generous measures as was Abraham Lincoln.”

– Frederick Douglass

During the third year of the sanguinary Civil War, January 1^st 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Douglass states of the occasion: “the formal and solemn announcement was made that thereafter the government would be found on the side of emancipation…It must be the end of all compromises with slavery – a declaration that thereafter the war was to be conducted on a new principle, with a new aim.”

It was at this point that Lincoln received criticism for extending the war unnecessarily. The South was ready to make certain concessions and the North was eager to end the war. By Lincoln announcing the Emancipation Proclamation, it was thought by many to be a reckless provocation making any possibility of peace fruitless.

On this subject, Douglass would meet with Lincoln for the last time, before he would be assassinated.

“The main subject on which he wished to confer with me was as to the means most desirable to be employed outside the army to induce the slaves in the rebel states to come within the deferral lines. The increasing opposition to the war, in the North, and the mad cry against it, because it was being made an abolition war, alarmed Mr. Lincoln, and made him apprehensive that a peace might be forced upon him which would leave still in slavery all who had not come within our lines. What he wanted was to make his proclamation as effective as possible in the event of such a peace…He said he was being accused of protracting the war beyond its legitimate object and failing to make peace when he might have done so to advantage. He was afraid of what might come of all these complaints, but was persuaded that no solid and lasting peace could come short of absolute submission on the part of the rebels [the South]…He saw the danger of premature peace…I was the more impressed by this benevolent consideration because he before said, in answer to the peace clamor, that his object was to save the Union, and to do so with or without slavery. What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him. I listened with the deepest interest and profoundest satisfaction, and, at his suggestion, agreed to undertake the organizing of a band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel states, beyond the lines of our armies, and to carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.

…I refer to this conversation because I think that, on Mr. Lincoln’s part, it is evidence conclusive that the proclamation, so far at least as he was concerned, was not effected merely as a [political] ‘necessity’.”

President Lincoln would be selected to continue a second term and was inaugurated on March 4^th, 1865. About one month after the official end of the Civil War. Lincoln would be assassinated just a mere 41 days after his second inauguration.

Douglass writes, “His first inauguration arrested the fall of the Republic, and the second was to restore it to enduring foundations.” The fact that Lincoln’s leadership was savagely cut short was a tragedy for all who understood that the true foundation of the Republic was built upon the principle “liberty for all”.

In that sad moment, when the country heard of the death of their leader who was to bring them closer to this goal, Douglass states,

“We shared in common a terrible calamity, and this ‘touch of nature made us’ more than countrymen, it made us ‘kin’.”

Reflections on the Past

It is an utmost testament to the grace and nobility of Frederick Douglass’ character that an soon as the law and spirit of slavery had been broken, he made a point to no longer harbour hate and resentment for the past wrongs committed upon himself. He recognised that humanity was indeed inherently good and would ultimately strive towards goodness if left to its natural tendency… that to punish the children of those who committed crimes before them would destroy any good that ever existed in the world.

Douglass recounts, “If any reader of this part of my life shall see in it the evidence of a want of manly resentment for wrongs inflicted by slavery upon myself and race, and by the ancestors of…[those who once owned slaves], so it must be. No man can be stronger than nature, one touch of which, we are told, makes all the world akin. I esteem myself a good, persistent hater of injustice and oppression, but my resentment ceases when they cease, and I have no heart to visit upon children the sins of their father.”

I will end here with an account of Douglass when he revisits the place where he was born a “slave” and sees his former “master” Captain Auld, upon his request on his deathbed, after his escape to the North over 25 years ago:

“But now that slavery was destroyed, and the slave and the master stood upon equal ground, I was not only willing to meet him, but was very glad to do so…He was to me no longer a slaveholder either in fact or in spirit, and I regarded him as I did myself, a victim of the circumstances of birth, education, law, and custom.

Our courses had been determined for us, not by us. We had both been flung, by powers that did not ask our consent, upon a mighty current of life, which we could neither resist, nor control. By this current he was a master, and I a slave, but now our lives were verging towards a point where differences disappear, where even the constancy of hate breaks down and where the clouds of pride, passion, and selfishness vanish before the brightness of infinite light.”

(1) This paper has used Douglass’ account of American history from his writings in his autobiography “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass”, for which the full pdf version can be found here.

The author can be reached at cynthiachung@tutanota.com

But there’s no point toppling slaveholders without toppling what slaveholders wrought, up to and including their greatest achievement of all – the U.S. Constitution. This is the document that not only governs life in the United States down to the tiniest legal detail, but, thanks to America’s global hegemony, undergirds the international system as well.

Yet the Constitution is a plan of government created by slaveholders for slaveholders in order to maintain their wealth and perpetuate their grip on power. Of the 55 delegates to the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787, twenty-five were slaveowners, which was more than enough to give them an effective veto over the proceedings as a whole. Slaveholders were economically predominant in six of the thirteen states – Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia – which was more than sufficient to stop the constitutional process in its tracks since Article VII stipulated that nine had to approve the new constitution before it could become law.

So the rest had no choice but to go along. Not everyone in America supported slavery. To the contrary, Massachusetts and New Hampshire had already banned it by 1787 while Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had passed gradual abolition laws that were putting it on the road to extinction. But slaveowners were influential in swing states like New York and New Jersey, while they were so rich and powerful in the south – George Washington was worth better than half a billion dollars in today’s money – that New England abolitionists had no choice but to go along.

As a result, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a member of the Philadelphia convention, was able to reassure his fellow South Carolina plantation owners that the new constitution would render the south’s “peculiar institution” impregnable. “In short,” he said, “considering all circumstances, we have made the best terms for the security of this species of property it was in our power to make. We would have made better if we could; but on the whole, I do not think them bad.”

So strong was slavery’s position, in fact, that Abraham Lincoln conceded as late as 1861 that he had “no lawful right” to “interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists.” In the end, the only way abolitionists were able to get around this legal blockade was by launching an extra-constitutional civil war, a brutal four-year slog through blood and mire that ended up costing the life of one American in fifty, a level of carnage relative to population that was double that of the French Revolution of 1789-94.

This was the “covenant with death and an agreement with hell” that the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced in 1854. As Albany Law School professor Paul Finkelman noted in a 2013 article, the Constitution included half a dozen or more provisions that rendered slavery untouchable. Article I guaranteed that the African slave trade would continue for more than twenty years – until 1808, to be exact. Article IV required northern states to return slaves trying to escape to freedom, while Articles I and IV contained separate clauses empowering Congress to put down slave rebellions. Article I prohibited taxes on slave-produced exports, while, in general, the document’s division of powers conceded vast areas of domestic policy, slavery first and foremost, to the states.

Three features were particularly important. One was a senate based on equal state representation. Since Congress controlled new states entering the Union, this allowed slave states to maintain a rough parity with the North that would allow them to veto any and all bills right up to the Civil War. A second was a notorious clause in Article I allowing southern states to count slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment. The upshot was to give slave states as many as twenty-five extra seats in the House of Representatives, as well as up to twenty-five extra votes in the Electoral College. This is why Thomas Jefferson was able to triumph by eight electoral votes over John Adams of Massachusetts in the 1800 presidential race. It’s also why eleven of the fifteen presidents prior to Lincoln were slaveowners – because the South had stacked the deck. (Besides the two Adamses, John and John Quincy, the only exceptions were a couple of northern nonentities who were pro-slavery nonetheless – Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire and James Buchanan of Pennsylvania.)

The third major weapon in the slaveholders’ arsenal was Article V, which governs how the Constitution can be amended and which is so slanted to minority interests that it allows just over one-third of either house of Congress or one-fourth-plus of the states to veto any constitutional alteration, no matter how minor. So steep are the barriers to reform, Finkelman points out, that slavery conceivably be with U.S. still if Union forces hadn’t abolished it at gunpoint.

But what’s important in terms of today’s protesters is that while slavery may be gone, its legacy is not. Thanks to equal state representation, the Senate is even more lopsided than it was in the mid-nineteenth century and hardly less racist since blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately concentrated in the ten largest states that are outvoted four to one by the minority of Americans who live in the other forty. Article V still allows one-fourth-plus of the states  –  i.e. thirteen states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the population – to veto any constitutional reform. Since most of the small states tend to be lily-white bastions like Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Vermont, it’s not difficult to guess whose interests wind up being served.

Then there’s the three-fifths clause. To be sure, the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified three years after the Civil War, supposedly rendered it moot by declaring that congressional representation “shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state.” But the after-effects linger on. If it wasn’t for the three-fifths clause, we wouldn’t have the Electoral College since its entire purpose was to augment the power of the slave states over the presidency. But if it wasn’t for the Electoral College, we wouldn’t have Donald Trump, who won in 2016 by 306 electoral votes to 232 despite trailing by better than two percent in the popular vote.

So contrary to an endlessly reactionary Democratic Party, it wasn’t Russia that put Trump, but a superannuated constitution that people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer revere.

Finally, there’s the police. As Finkelman points out, southern states pushed for a constitutional arrangement that granted them maximum local autonomy. They wanted a monopoly on local power so they could deal with both runaway slaves and poor white farmers for whom slavery was economically devastating. But the upshot centuries later are myriads of local police departments – nearly 18,000 in all – answerable to no one other than local politicians who are every bit as benighted as they are. They have a license to kill as a consequence because that’s the way slaveholders wanted at the time, an arrangement that no one’s been able to do a thing about since because America’s untouchable eighteenth-century constitution means that it’s all but set in stone.

So go ahead – topple all those status of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other child-snatchers. But don’t forget to topple the plan of government they created. Slavery may be gone, but its ghost is with us still, which is why it’s time to exorcize it once and for all.

Thalia ANTHONY, Stephen GRAY

Prime Minister Scott Morrison asserted in a radio interview that “there was no slavery in Australia.”

This is a common misunderstanding which often obscures our nation’s history of exploitation of First Nations people and Pacific Islanders.

Morrison followed up with “I’ve always said we’ve got to be honest about our history”. Unfortunately, his statement is at odds with the historical record.

This history was widely and publicly documented, among other sources, in the 2006 Australian Senate report Unfinished Business: Indigenous Stolen Wages.

What is Slavery?

Australia was not a “slave state” like the American South. However, slavery is a broader concept. As Article 1 of the United Nations Slavery Convention says:

Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.

These powers might include non-payment of wages, physical or sexual abuse, controls over freedom of movement, or selling a person like a piece of property. In the words of slavery historian Orlando Patterson, slavery is a form of “social death”.

Slavery has been illegal in the (former) British Empire since the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade of 1807, and certainly since 1833.

Slavery practices emerged in Australia in the 19th century and in some places endured until the 1950s.

Early Coverage of Slavery in Australia

“Governor Davey’s Proclamation” board, painted in 1830 and nailed to trees to depict a policy of friendliness and to show that colonists and Aboriginal people were equal before the law. (Government of Van Diemen’s Land, original conception by Surveyor General George Frankland, State Library of New South Wales, Wikimedia Commons)

As early as the 1860s, anti-slavery campaigners began to invoke “charges of chattel bondage and slavery” to describe north Australian conditions for Aboriginal labour.

In 1891 a “Slave Map of Modern Australia” was printed in the British Anti-Slavery Reporter, a journal that documented slavery around the world and campaigned against it.

Reprinted from English journalist Arthur Vogan’s account of frontier relations in Queensland, it showed large areas where:

… the traffic in Aboriginal labour, both children and adults, had descended into slavery conditions.

Seeds of Slavery in Australia

In the pastoral industry, employers exercised a high degree of control over “their” Aboriginal workers, who were bought and sold as chattels, particularly where they “went with” the property upon sale. There were restrictions on their freedom of choice and movement. There was cruel treatment and abuse, control of sexuality, and forced labour.

A stock worker at Meda Station in the Kimberley, Jimmy Bird, recalled:

… whitefellas would pull their gun out and kill any Aborigines who stood up to them. And there was none of this taking your time to pull up your boots either. No fear!

Aboriginal woman Ruby de Satge, who worked on a Queensland station, described the Queensland Protection Act as meaning:

if you are sitting down minding your own business, a station manager can come up to you and say, “I want a couple of blackfellows” … Just like picking up a cat or a dog.

Through their roles under the legislation, police, Aboriginal protectors and pastoral managers were complicit in this force.

Slavery was Sanctioned by Australian Law

Legislation facilitated the enslavement of Aboriginal people across the Northern Territory, Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland. Under the South Australian Aborigines Act 1911, the government empowered police to “inspect workers and their conditions” but not to uphold basic working conditions or enforce payment. The Aboriginals Ordinance 1918 (Cth) allowed the forced recruitment of Indigenous workers in the Northern Territory, and legalised the non-payment of wages.

In Queensland, the licence system was effectively a blank cheque to recruit Aboriginal people into employment without their consent. Amendments to the Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 gave powers to the Protector or police officer to “expend” their wages or invest them in a trust fund – which was never paid out.

Officials were well aware that “slavery” was a public relations problem. The Chief Protector in the Northern Territory noted in 1927 that pastoral workers:

… are kept in a servitude that is nothing short of slavery.

In the early 1930s, Chief Protector Dr. Cecil Cook pointed out Australia was in breach of its obligations under the League of Nations Slavery Convention.

‘… it certainly exists here in its worst form’

Accusations of slavery continued into the 1930s, including through the British Commonwealth League.

In 1932 the North Australian Workers’ Union (NAWU) characterised Aboriginal workers as “slaves.” Unionist Owen Rowe argued:

If there is no slavery in the British Empire then the NT is not part of the British Empire; for it certainly exists here in its worst form.

In the 1940s, anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt surveyed conditions on cattle stations owned by Lord Vestey, commenting that Aboriginal people:

… owned neither the huts in which they lived nor the land on which these were built, they had no rights of tenure, and in some cases have been sold or transferred with the property.

In 1958, counsel for the well-known Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira argued that the Welfare Ordinance 1953 (Cth) was unconstitutional, because the enacting legislation was:

… a law for the enslavement of part of the population of the Northern Territory.

Profits from Slaves

Australia has unfinished business in repaying wages to Aboriginal and South Sea Islander slaves. First Nations slave work allowed big businesses to reap substantial profits, and helped maintain the Australian economy through the Great Depression. Aboriginal people are proud of their work on stations even though the historical narrative is enshrined in silence and denial.

As Bundjalung woman Valerie Linow has said of her experiences of slavery in the 1950s:

What if your wages got stolen? Honestly, wouldn’t you like to have your wages back? Honestly. I think it should be owed to the ones who were slave labour. We got up and worked from dawn to dusk … We lost everything – family, everything. You cannot go stealing our lousy little sixpence. We have got to have money back. You have got to give something back after all this country did to the Aboriginal people. You cannot keep stealing off us.

consortiumnews.com