Congress Endorses a Lie About Slavery
by: Michael Medved, townhall.com, July 31 2008
The much heralded “slavery apology” voted on Tuesday by the House of Representatives is far worse than a meaningless gesture. This illiterate and mendacious resolution also constitutes an assault on history and a vicious anti-American smear.
The problem with the resolution isn’t its condemnation of the institution of slavery or its denunciation of the brutal discrimination of Jim Crow; obviously, the oppression and exploitation of millions of African captives represented a monstrous and indefensible crime against humanity.
The resolution, however, makes a specific point that America bears unique guilt for the enslavement of Africans and suggests that slavery in the United States proved the worst in history, amounting to an unprecedented degradation of its victims.
The resolution (written, in obvious haste, by the fatuous freshman Congressman Steve Cohen of Tennessee) includes the following wildly misleading “whereas” clause as its deeply embarrassing third paragraph:
“Whereas slavery in America resembled no other form of involuntary servitude known in history, as Africans were captured and sold at auction like inanimate objects or animals...”
No reputable historian – no, not one – would agree with this outrageous statement.
The House suggests that slavery in America represents some horrible innovation, achieving incomparable levels of degradation? Actually, slavery in the United States strongly resembled all the most common forms of involuntary servitude that have constituted a universal human institution since the beginnings of recorded history. In fact, the practice of enslaving humans began in the mists of pre-history at the same time as the domestication of beasts and pointedly used some of the same cruel techniques to secure unquestioning obedience from man as well as animal.
Even among the famously civilized Greeks (more than two-thousand years before the emergence of the United States) Aristotle said the ox was the poor man’s slave and Xenophon “compared the teaching of slaves, unlike that of free workers, with the training of wild animals.”
Of the estimated eleven to thirteen million human beings kidnapped from Africa and brought to the New World in the 400 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, less than 5% of them went to the British colonies in mainland North America. In other words, some nineteen out of twenty slaves were shipped to the West Indies and Latin America, not to the future United States.
The idea that the House of Representatives now officially endorses the claim that “slavery in America resembled no other form of involuntary servitude in history” is an embarrassment—one more shameful demonstration that preening politicians are willing to assault history, the truth, and even their own country in their mad, headlong pre-adjournment rush to serve the stern gods of brain-dead, America-hating political correctness.
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