Consicely put, and not nearly present enough in contemporary discourse.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/zsnr8q/year_of_abo...
The US wasn't much of an outlier.
As a general rule, anyone who tries to use slavery as a skeleton key to understand US politics is most likely an ideologue with an agenda. Sane people don't propose struggle sessions for events which happened 100+ years ago when everyone involved is long dead. You wouldn't point to a gigantic statue of Genghis Khan to explain what's wrong with modern Mongolia.
I don't think this is a slavery thing. Trump just sucks.
Slavery ended in 1865. That's 161 years ago. So maybe there are a few modern 80-year-olds who interacted with 80-year-old former slaves when the modern 80-year-olds were infants. Those 80-year-old former slaves would themselves have no memory of slavery since it would've ended before they could form memories. And the modern 80-year-olds would have no memory of the interaction, since they themselves were infants when the interaction happened.
In other words: There aren't very many of these people, and it's unclear if most of them would count.
You know something which happened more recently in the US than slavery? Prohibition. A trendy, self-righteous moral crusade which didn't accomplish what it set out to achieve, and ended up creating a bunch of problems instead.
I think Prohibition is a pretty good template for understanding the form and tendencies of modern left-wing activist movements. But--at least reducing alcoholism was a good cause that we had a shot at doing something about! Short of inventing a time machine, crusading against slavery from centuries ago seems rather pointless. That's not a problem for activists whose primary goal is to be trendy and self-righteous, of course.
That's not long enough ago to call it ancient history.
Either George, who enslaved her mother, or his brother, Dr. Fabius Haywood, who enslaved her older brothers, Rufus and Andrew,[3] was probably Anna's father
Moreover, she was still a slave until she was six and served her masters as a domestic house servant. When you were six you were probably being educated to read and write and do math.
You guys are so quick with your “well ackshually” that you’re missing the point which is very simple and has been restated by other posters.
I don't know anyone that has spoken to a former slave.
And most people of color in the US's ancestors were not slaves in the US south. They came as immigrants from other countries.
The issue is not slavery. It might be racism. But it is not "I can't have slaves anymore"
That certainly means it's recent to me. My own parents (both still alive) grew up while "separate but equal" was still law of the land.
So, yes, it's definitely racism. Or shall we say, the lasting imprint of slavery and the Confederate ideology more generally. Reconstruction failed and therefore allowed the Confederate ideology to persist for 100 years of Jim Crow and right on into today.
Slavery has existed as far back as history. The idea that people are created equal, and are equal under the law, is very, very new, and that idea has resulted in a great many positive things happening.
A good general wouldn't voluntarily shift the battleground to a region where their troops are weak. Political persuasion is no different. The Democratic Party keeps losing because they cling to unpopular positions on cultural issues. If Trump is as bad as you say, prove it to me by showing willingness to strategically cede ground on a few issues in order to win more voters.
What I do see is media and politicians on the Right characterizing extreme positions held by a minority of folks on the far Left as though they are adopted by the entire Left, and that weak uncritical minds on the Right believe that nonsense. Rush Limbaugh pioneered this technique to profit himself, and Trump gave him a fucking Presidential Medal of Freedom in his first term.
Maybe I should work harder to make my actual views clear. I added a few sentences to the end of my original comment in this thread: "I don't think this is a slavery thing. Trump just sucks." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572347
Besides all the YouTube videos, X posts, the addition of two new right-wing TV networks (OANN and NEWSMAX), “Truth” Social, WSJ, NY Post, etc.? Silence is a myth perpetuated by the right (“people are trying to suppress the truth and your 1A rights!”) to build a following when in fact opposition voices are plentiful.
The Republican propaganda machine will always be ready to make any cultural issue the dems hold 'unpopular'. They turn anything and everything into a culture war, and if nothing exists, they are more than happy to manufacture it.
Observe how they turned their own vaccine into a cultural issue.
>We're still fighting the remnants of the confederacy. Germany and Japan in particular purged most of those elements from their society. Here we built statues to the evil fucks
That is a historical fact which has important explanatory power. It may not directly be the best basis for public Democratic platform, which most people probably agree with. The core manifestation is in our institutions, and that's what we need to fix. I agree with you that framing it through the lens of corruption is the best overt political strategy.
I get the sense that many in this thread simply have an un-quenched lust for re-education camps. Probably under Stalin they'd be mumbling about dastardly capitalist spies and saboteurs.
This sounds like a thinly-veiled argument to keep them up. But why should we keep them up? In what universe does it make sense to honor the losers of a failed coup attempt against our nation by embodying them in statutes?
The reason many continue to pursue this is because of the surprising number of people who want to maintain them. It's not a "crusade against windmills," it's a crusade against people who want to honor the enemies of our nation. It's as understandable as being upset that a group of people would want to maintain an Osama bin Laden statue in the middle of Manhattan.
Taking statues down may not change much in and of itself, but it's a small piece of the bigger puzzle.
> I get the sense that many in this thread simply have an un-quenched lust for re-education camps.
Well that escalated quickly.
...
Most countries’ legal systems, however, carve out an exception for prisoner-workers, permitting the state to require them to work—sometimes for no pay, but typically for very low rates of pay.
There are, even so, multiple potential benefits to prison work. For example, ICPR’s recent research indicated that prisoners who could not work (when prison regimes around the world were restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic) reported many negative consequences, including to their mental and physical wellbeing. At the minimum, work may mitigate some harmful impacts of imprisonment. At best, it may increase prisoners’ prospects of successful reintegration into society, potentially also benefitting society by reducing recidivism."
https://www.prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/publicatio...
(emphasis mine)
Here's a photo from a Brazilian prison from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour#/media/File:Inmat...
The question is whether the prisons in Brazil are private, and are allowed to sell prison labor FOR A PROFIT, incentivizing both greater incarceration rates, and disincentivizing release.
The answer is no, I’m not aware of ANY other country that allows a private organization to profit off the labor if people imprisoned by the state. At least not any country we would consider 1st world.
It’s absolutely absurd to suggest the current situation is beneficial to anyone but the ruling class and anyone claiming otherwise has never been to prison, never had a relative or friend who has been to prison, or is literally a psychopath who lacks basic human empathy.
Your comment stated: "And does Brazil have their own 13th amendment that allows them to use prison labor as their modern slave workforce?"
The article I linked states: "Most countries’ legal systems, however, carve out an exception for prisoner-workers, permitting the state to require them to work..."
So my quote directly answers your original concern.
Your new concern is about private prisons. Here's a new quote from the article which addresses your new concern:
"Involvement by non-public entities in prison work can take many forms. In most countries including all three of Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States, for-profit companies operate entire prisons (or provide services within prisons) under government contract. Similarly, the operators of both public and private prisons in all three countries contract with buyers, equipping prison workshops and using prisoner labour to produce goods and services which go on to be sold beyond the prison."
(p. 15, emphasis mine)
So no, the US system doesn't seem to be especially unusual, according to this article.
You're welcome to decry this practice as inhumane, btw. I just don't think it is some sort of skeleton key which will help us understand every aspect of US politics.
Rich from someone that brought up slavery from nowhere.
The norm now is to require a wage for mandatory labor, but of course often it's just a pittance. (Only 6 US states have uncompensated labor.) But even when you require minimum wage, many criminals owe restitution, so it could be and is taken away again.
Many US states have penal labor systems just like in Europe, that is nominally opt out, mandatory wages, etc, but at the end of the day it's always open to accusations of coercion and claims of "slavery".
The rhetoric around the 13th Amendment is exactly why we're in the situation we are now politically. Everything is equivocated to maximize rhetorical impact. Every unethical thing a politician does is "corruption", so when you get open and egregious corruption as with Trump, people can't discriminate and assume it's all the same.
Was penal labor abused to roll back the clock on abolition? Yes. Is penal labor abused today? Yes. But calling it slavery, drawing parallels to chattel slavery, is just irresponsible.
> Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The 13th amendment specifically mentions penal labor as an exempt form of slavery.
Take your criticism to the authors of the 13th amendment, not the people who bothered to read it.
So do you agree or not agree that mandatory penal slavery is an extension of 19th century and earlier American slavery. Because that's what the movement and rhetoric are saying. And removing the Exception Clause won't change the rhetoric, because the entire point is to argue "things haven't changed".
It's the same rhetoric that equivocates "wage slavery". All those things can, of course, fall under a literal definition of slavery. Just like all forms of misbehavior by politicians can be called corruption. We can say, well, Trump isn't doing anything every other politician hasn't done. Which can be literally true. But I choose not to play semantic games like that, because those semantic games are at least as likely to be used to excuse abuses as they are to prevent them. If you want reform, pursue reform. Note that many states have removed their state constitutional Exceptions Clauses which by itself resulted in zero changes to the status quo, because when you play semantic games there's always room to redefine things on-the-fly, or to find another semantic loophole. Every court knew what the Exceptions Clause actual, contextual meaning was, and can just as well redefine slavery or non-slavery to exclude or include penal labor. Semantic games don't change the real world, except insofar as they promote cynicism, confusion, and disengagement from substantive issues.
I agree that mandatory penal slavery (as practiced in US prisons in the 21st century) is an extension of 19th century and earlier American slavery.
I suppose you could question their sanity, but the point stands - history has a short memory, and a few generations are nothing.
Especially when the after-effects of slavery, including segregation, disenfranchisement through gerrymandering and for-profit imprisonment, and other forms of continuing violence, are still live issues today.
I think the obvious answer here, insofar as that's true, is that historical continuity is simply not as strong as you are assuming. I mean you've basically admitted it yourself. In 1860 would you vote for the Democrats or the Republicans?
As for the Genghis Khan comparison, I may have made an error. We may just be dealing with severe cognitive limitations here.
Do you need me to spoonfeed you about where you can find them? Or do you not actually have the intellectual capacity to be able to use a search engine, or a chatbot?
Your replies indicate your disdain for appeals to the history of American slavery in political discussions, yet you were the one who brought it into the conversation, diverting the thread by initially straw-manning the parents view.
They are always the first to cast someone as an "other" and scapegoat for all of their problems. You're the type of person to hear "Haitians are eating their cats and dogs!" or "Mexico is sending us rapists and murders" and say "That guy has a good point!". It's pretty fucking gross and you're a clown at best for defending them.
No kidding amigo.
There have been some changes in alignment over the years, but every Republican I've every talked to remains proud of their historic roles above.
The PRC and North Korea still use slave labour as do some other countries. The Soviet Union had slavery with the Gulag system during the 20th century, and other places such as East Germany had some within living memory.
* * *
Trump outperformed with black people relative to Romney and has appointed black people to his cabinet.
>problems going on to the present day
Often more noise than substance, e.g. the odds of a black man being unarmed and killed by cops in the US are something like one in a million annually.
>The white vote in the US was a solid majority for Democrats before the Civil Rights Act and is now a solid Republican majority.
Ethnic bloc voting is not at all unusual by international standards. I might as well interpret black loyalty to the Democrats as racism against white people.
>Those who "deserve it" are usually not white.
Trump has had many many "beefs" with white people such as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, James Comey, Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, Megyn Kelly, Joe Scarborough, Rosie O'Donnell, etc.
What frustrates me is when activists take an issue which should be a winner ("Trump is corrupt, let's do something about government corruption, all Americans can unite around this") and immediately pivot to handwavey, divisive race-baiting and talking about how utterly depraved conservatives supposedly are. Sometimes it seems like you guys are determined to lose.
For a trace of the thread directly from the civil war to the current Supreme Court, check out this podcast episode:
A few examples of prominent Nazi officials who worked in West Germany: Reinhard Gehlen, Albert Schnez, Adolf Heusinger (Inspector General of the West German Army), Hans Speidel (major NATO commander), Johannes Steinhoff (Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1971–1974), Johann von Kielmansegg (Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe), Ernst Ferber, Karl Schnell, Franz Joseph Schulze, Ferdinand von Senger und Etterlin etc.
“Researchers found that some 77 percent of senior officials in the [West German] Justice Ministry had once identified as Nazis, a portion higher than during the Third Reich, the period between 1933 and 1945 when Adolf Hitler controlled Germany, and much higher than researchers expected. The group included Nazi-era prosecutor Eduard Dreher, a man who sought the death penalty for petty criminals, and Max Merten, who played a role in deporting Jews from Greece.” – 2016 Christian Science Monitor Study
East Germany did purge most of its Nazi elements, but became a dictatorship in its own right. When Germany reunited, there was a purge of East German judges but a number of people involved in the old system continued in the new Germany. (Even Angela Merkel who had a significant position in the FJD.)
Most of former Soviet Union made a limited attempts to remove Communist era officials. Some of those responsible for Stalin era atrocities died in their beds. Russia is still full of them, and age, not officialdom . Even people like Valentina Tereshkova the former cosmonaut. PR China has never purged itself fully of Maoism, and Chairman Mao's picture still pops up everywhere despite being arguably the biggest mass murderer in history.
I know you think you're being cute but some of us had grandparents that had to flee that shit and do not find quite so hilarious as you and your mates.
About a quarter of a million, hardly the biggest .. and importantly this was at the request of the Mexican Government who wanted many of the Mexican workers who entered the USofA to be returned to work in Mexico.
Despite the derogatory name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback was a attempt to appease the Mexican Government and get their continued support to provide "legal" Mexican labour to the USofA.