Um....

[conuly]

Glenn Beck: Slavery "started with seemingly innocent ideas" and then "the government began to regulate things"

I haven't actually watched the video, so maybe this quote was taken wildly out of context. I'm not sure what context that could possibly be, but if there's any form of justification for this, somebody braver than I am can point it out to me. I refuse to risk my precious brain cells.

Comments

[mc776]

I'm not even going to watch that.

I would speculate that the context would be Beck free-associating every evil thing, ever, with "government" which is implicitly only government that the Fox News crowd doesn't like (i.e., the part that doesn't either take care of old white retirees or torture and kill brown people)

As for the "seemingly innocent ideas" bit... I dunno, that's just part of him not being human I guess? D:

[dragonwolf]

I took the grenade for you guys. The scary part is that his statements around the slavery thing make me wonder if he ever paid attention in history class.

He's like, it started small, it didn't start overseas. Then the court got involved... And he proceeds to ramble on about how the ebil gubment is somehow responsible for the slave trade, despite the fact that...you know...the government actually worked the way it was supposed to, and slavery was a state matter, not federal. Then, of course, there's also the fact that it didn't start out overseas to begin with, but rather went overseas when everyone's Native American slaves kept running away...

I stopped listening after he started rambling about how the government brought slavery to the US.

Of course, any ramble that starts with "they're changing education," as if a) education wasn't already government-run (at least largely, as in public schools, which is what the changes are mainly for), and b) there's actually nothing wrong with the current state of American education. That, of course, is a matter I won't even go into here.

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

The context is . . . . (wait for iiiit) . . . health care reform.

Well, duh. What else?

Slavery is a common subject in a Beck rant, though. Health care reform is slavery. Taxes are slavery. Progressives are just like slave owners.

"I would like to propose that the president is exactly right when he said, 'slaves sitting around the campfire didn't know when slavery was going to end but they knew it was would and it took a long time to end slavery.' Yes it did. But it took a long time to start slavery and it started small and it started with seemingly innocent ideas. And then a little court order here and a court order there and a little more regulation here and a little more regulation there and before we knew it, America had slavery. It didn't come over in a ship to begin with as an evil slave trade. The government began to regulate things because the people need answers, they needed solutions. It started in a courtroom, then it went to the legislatures. That's how slavery began. And it took a long time to enslave an entire race of people and convince another race of people that they were somehow or another less than them and be done."

Funny. I was actually under the impression that without "government regulation", we'd still have slavery.

[conuly]

What the... but the... but I mean... we fought a WAR over government intervention to STOP slavery omfg I think I'm going to vomit right now brb.

[leora.livejournal.com]

History is one of my weak subjects, I admit that. But my understanding was that before slavery, we had indentured servants. People would come over, and they'd have to work for 7 years with basically no rights, and then they were free and had paid off the travel or their debts or whatever sent them here. However, the work was really hard and the environment harsh, so the life expectancy of an indentured servant wasn't that high, so a lot of them died before they were free anyway.

As the life expectancies started climbing, it started to be more cost-effective to have slaves rather than indentured servants, because you could keep them working for you without salary for even more than 7 years. And so slavery started to increase and indentured servitude started to decrease.

Thus triangle trade, molasses -> rum -> slaves -> molasses with everyone but the slaves profiting at each step. And a decent chunk of Southerners were slave holders, but a decent chunk of northerners were involved in the slave trade and the atrocities on the slave ships, so the north shouldn't get too smug or morally superior when they were so deeply involved in it too.

Then there were government regulations created to force slave owners to vary the diets of slaves so that they weren't fed the cheapest food options every single day (interestingly, there was a rule against always feeding slaves lobster, which these days is usually seen as a luxury food, but it was very cheap and local for some slave owners and any food fed to you ~all the time~ is going to get tiresome), laws against not taking care of elderly slaves once they could no longer work, so they weren't completely abandoned once they were used up (and of course they'd have no savings, since they were slaves), and so forth to try to slightly decrease the worst of the atrocities. But those laws seem to have been created as a response to really bad treatment, generally the really bad treatment seems to have come first.

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

History is one of my weak subjects, I admit that. But my understanding was that before slavery, we had indentured servants. People would come over, and they'd have to work for 7 years with basically no rights, and then they were free and had paid off the travel or their debts or whatever sent them here.

Histories differ. I'll quote some sources that, uh, "teach the controversy."

The other crucial event that would play a role in the development of America was the arrival of Africans to Jamestown. A Dutch slave trader exchanged his cargo of Africans for food in 1619. The Africans became indentured servants, similar in legal position to many poor Englishmen who traded several years labor in exchange for passage to America. The popular conception of a racial-based slave system did not develop until the 1680's. (A Brief History of Jamestown (http://www.preservationvirginia.org/rediscovery/page.php?page_id=6), The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, Web published February, 2000)

For perspective on this story, keep in mind that the colony was founded in 1606, so there just wasn't a large gap between the founding and the first commercial trading of Negroes even according to the most apologetic sources.

The legend has been repeated endlessly that the first blacks in Virginia were "indentured servants," but there is no hint of this in the records. The legend grew up because the word slave did not appear in Virginia records until 1656, and statutes defining the status of blacks began to appear casually in the 1660s. The inference was then made that blacks called servants must have had approximately the same status as white indentured servants. Such reasoning failed to notice that Englishmen, in the early seventeenth century, used the word servant when they meant slave in our sense, and, indeed, white Southerners invariably used servant until 1865 and beyond. Slave entered the Southern vocabulary as a technical word in trade, law and politics. (Robert McColley in Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, 1988 pp 281)

My view is more in line with the second quote, which I believe is substantiated by the fact that "cargo of Africans" came from, well, Africa, where the Dutch and British were enslaving the Africans from tribes they could conquer and treating or fighting with the ones they couldn't.

Those people weren't being transported because they had debts, they were being brought to "the New World" to trade to other Englishmen who needed labor.

I should note that during this time, Europeans were also captured and used for slave labor in the Ottoman Empire and parts of North Africa, and that the Arabs were heavily involved in overland European and African trading routes. Slavery was far more the norm than the exception, which makes it that much more unlikely that the Africans in question were going to be released in seven years.

Hi! My name is Samantha, and I am married to a historian. I have all sorts more random facts at my fingertips these days than before I met him. :-)

[leora.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I hadn't realized that. Okay. Although my understanding was that in practical terms, there wasn't really a difference in most cases between slave and indentured servant, since in both cases it tended to be a life sentence. But maybe that wasn't the case in North America.

But I suppose it is unsurprising given the deep bigotry that was clearly present well before the US became the US.

[marveen.livejournal.com]

But I suppose it is unsurprising given the deep bigotry that was clearly present well before the US became the US.


Hell, it's my understanding that most cultures were xenophobic to some degree or another before the mid-20th century or so (and duh, many still are, just some are making an effort not to be).

[leora.livejournal.com]

Psychology is my field. And a tendency to break people into Us and Them is certainly very common and seems to be cross-cultural. The ability to dehumanize Them and then do horrible things to people in that group has been well demonstrated.

It does seem to be a fairly natural state for people to fall into, unless the culture makes great strides to educate its masses against this tendency. And I'm not sure how possible it is to truly move away from it. But you can definitely make a difference in degree.

[marveen.livejournal.com]

The psych. prof in college was deadly dull (reading out of the book for lectures? every day? really?) but soc. was my favorite class, despite the killer exams. That prof made you THINK and defend your position in class discussions, which happened roughly three times a week.

Thus I don't mistake my own cultural biases for universal truths. ;)

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

I don't even want to know. Hopefully Beck will soon reach WTF critical mass and implode into a black hole.

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Chris' Invincible Super-blog (http://www.the-isb.com/?p=2346) had the best take on Beck we've ever seen. Talking about the Bizarro world in Superman, he said there's always a one-page description of how things work there: us am hate beauty, us am love ugliness, us think Glenn Beck have some good ideas.

[ascian.livejournal.com]

Bizarro Glenn Beck should be a meme.

[ascian.livejournal.com]

He's actually doing a beautifully artful bit of trolling here. He takes Obama's anecdote about slaves sitting around a fire and, treating it as a metaphor, extends the metaphor in a very blurry way. Basically he just talks about the healthcare system Obama's creating but is calling it 'slavery'. At no point does he nod to or acknowledge that he's speaking metaphorically, so you have to listen to the context. I cottoned on when he talked about 'a court order here and a court order there' leading to slavery. This serves the wonderful dual purposes of galvanizing his supporters with a (meaningless but) bold statement and making his detractors rageface at the out of context (not due to how it's reported but because that's how he said it) statement about slavery.

10/10. Successful troll is damned successful.