the industrial revolution was a textile revolution and this was what caused the revival of slavery in the south. cotton was needed for English mills. what was picked by the black slaves in america was spun into yarn by the wage slaves in england.
99% of whites in the american south had nothing to do with any of this, and profited not one cent. only the super rich. the elite. this seems all too familiar at times. a class of wealthy elites on both sides of the ocean profiting off a corrupt institution...and they had the sexual depravity back then, too. 75% of whites in the american south didn't even own slaves, and out of the rest, most owned maybe one or two and worked alongside them. this used to be common knowledge taught in every school.
in a country of 27 million free people and 4 million slaves, the planter class which owned most of those slaves probably numbered no more than 20,000, and that includes everyone who owned at least 20...and the super rich of the elite planter class, that owned a quarter of the slaves in america, numbered only a little more than 2000.
snopes and the like are fond of puffing up the actual 1.4% number of americans who owned slaves, by adding everyone who 'profited from slavery', ignoring the fact that the vast majority of slaveowners only owned one or two and worked the fields, and playing with the geographic scope to give people the impression that 25% of white americans were plantation slavemasters.
it was the wealth of this tiny class of elites that made slavery so entrenched in the south. it was the hubris of this tiny class of elites, thinking that they had absolute control of the economies of america and europe by controlling such a major export, that doomed america to the civil war.
it is strange to think that you could take a cotton crop that was 60% of american exports on the eve of secession, and wipe it out totally without inflicting a complete apocalypse on the american economy...but it is not strange when you realize that this crop almost entirely inflated the fortunes of this class of 20,000 planters and especially these 2000 elites. the south after the war was plunged into poverty of course, but this was the lot of 90% of southern whites before the war already.
this is the real economic history of slavery in america, this is what we used to teach in the schools before a failing newspaper desperate for relevance decided to create their own alternate history and present it as the real thing.
in some ways the world never changes. but at least the civil war put an end to slavery in the US.
but it didn't put an end to europe's dependence on slaves for their cotton. because when the cotton exports were cut off, and did not come back after the war, they went elsewhere.
to west africa. mozambique and angola. and to india, where england went right back to creating the same dependence they tried to thrust on us.
and what were the conditions of those workers in west africa, who farmed europe's cotton?
the new york times will not tell you this. it does not fit their demonization of america to point it out. it does not please them to teach our children that, after america had spilled a crimson ocean of blood in payment for the guilt of enslaving our fellow man, a guilt that 98% or more, of those whose blood was shed, had no part in incurring, that europe and england still needed slavery, and kept it going.
outside their own boundaries, but they kept it going. and going. and going.
out of sight, out of mind.
the hypocrisy of the elites is conserved. it seems it is never destroyed, but only changes form...
what a speech and what a great setting!
from day one, trump has been a breath of fresh air, and from day one, trump has always been energetic. I liked that four years ago, wanted to see him shake things up.
but i never at that time expected him to become so, well, presidential. so aware of the weight of history that he is carrying right now.
well, this may be difficult to execute in practice; unlike the africans, we are not currently enslaving other people and therefore have none to sell.
in a pinch, i suppose we could round up a herd of fat white arsonistas but no one would buy such rotten produce as that.
new york city in 10 years is going to make a great dystopian movie set.
empty plinths, graffitied, half-burned buildings with smashed windows, population long gone.
"they had the gods ashing, and ubtreas. they were something like men, but they ate stupidity too fast."
it's not 'being a cuck', it's following orders. the anarchist front is on the other side of the lines. the moral cowardice is safely ensconced high up and well behind the lines, as usual.
the orders may therefore be lousy orders, they may be unconstitutional and they may be completely foolish, but unfortunately they are still orders.
quitting is an option but remember, the officer on the street faces chaos and lawlessness and evil on every work day. shots fired, someone's dead, police called, twenty people around and no one saw nothing. children raped or beaten to death. whole families shot in home invasions.
the average policeman on the street 100% knows that the thin blue line is real and he is part of it, otherwise he wouldn't stay on the job at all.
quitting is for chiefs and staff who suffer a little political embarassment and bail out before their public-office aspirations take too much damage.
we are, that's the problem.
wall street and their politicians kept us trading with the axis powers right up to the eve of world war 2. roosevelt didn't cut off trade when germany invaded czechoslovakia, he put a 25% tariff on german imports.
maybe even more so with japan, because germany had gotten to the point where they weren't importing much from us at all.
money, money, money. always supreme.
our popular, populist hero.
populist is such a good word. imagine the mental derangement necessary to believe that being a populist is bad. that being a politician in a democratic country, who actually wished to carry out the will of the people, is a bad thing.
of course we don't have to imagine it, we see it play out live every day.
to understand lincoln, look at the donald.
they are far more comparable than many might appreciate.
the cultural arsonistas like to scream about lincoln's seemingly contradictory statements on slavery, preservation of the union, and the emancipation proclamation. his famously ambivalent letter to horace greeley is almost equivalent to a trump tweet...because he had already drafted the proclamation when he sent that letter.
the cultural arsonistas do not recognize a vastly clever game of 4D chess.
always remember, lincoln was the 19th century equivalent of a corporate lawyer, and a very wise, clever and successful one...but he also seems, somehow, to have had a keener insight into what america meant in a historical context, than nearly anyone of his generation.
if lincoln had not placed this proclamation in the midst of an elaborate 4D chess game, tying it to the future of a preserved union, and emphasizing its usefulness in decreasing the economic power of the planter elites to continue the war, emancipation might have been challenged later. as distasteful as it is to speak of people in this way, to the planter class, the slaves that were freed represented the modern day equivalent of 160 billion dollars in property.
douglass absolutely made a strong impression on lincoln. but i think he also tied into lincoln's insight into america's place in history. the same way that trump seemed to grasp that america could not remain tied to communist china, and remain america, lincoln understood that slavery could have no part in a future america.
it was a shame that this genius was assassinated before he had a chance to guide the reunification process. we might have seen the south quickly rebuilt, without slavery, but with its pride intact, and we might have avoided the klan, segregation, and all the tensions that can be traced directly back to the radical republicans and their antifa-like attempt to tear up and destroy every vestige of southern culture.
of course this is completely against the cultural arsonistas' preferred view of reconstruction, which absurdly casts the radicals as heroes.
nothing every changes, does it.
lincoln, by the way, was a polarizing figure, no less than trump. greatly respected by nearly everyone who met him and spoke with him, it seems, yet violently hated by many, as well. there were not a few authors in those days who castigated him in no uncertain terms.