Slavery is neither strange nor peculiar

Walter E. Williams: Leftists cite issue as means to 'reduce respect for our Constitution'

Published: 1 day ago

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Walter E. Williams, Ph.D., is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. He holds a Doctor of Humane Letters from Virginia Union University and Grove City College, Doctor of Laws from Washington and Jefferson College and Doctor Honoris Causa en Ciencias Sociales from Universidad Francisco Marroquin, in Guatemala, where he is also Professor Honorario.

The favorite leftist tool for the attack on our nation’s founding is that slavery was sanctioned. They argue that the founders disregarded the promises of our Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These very ignorant people, both in and out of academia, want us to believe that slavery is unusual, as historian Kenneth Stampp suggested in his book, “Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South.” But slavery is by no means peculiar, odd, unusual or unique to the U.S.

As University of Nebraska-Lincoln political science professor David P. Forsythe wrote in his book, “The Globalist,” “The fact remained that at the beginning of the 19th century an estimated three-quarters of all people alive were trapped in bondage against their will either in some form of slavery or serfdom.” Slavery was common among ancient peoples – Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Greeks, Persians, Armenians and many others. Large numbers of Christians were enslaved during the Ottoman wars in Europe. White slaves were common in Europe from the Dark Ages to the Middle Ages. It was only during the 17th century that the Atlantic slave trade began with Europeans assisted by Arabs and Africans.

Er- NO. I'd have more accurately put it the other way around, like this:

"it temporarily expanded under Arabs and Africans to include whites."

Slavery is one of the most horrible injustices. It posed such a moral dilemma at our 1787 Constitutional Convention that it threatened to scuttle the attempt to create a union between the 13 colonies. Let’s look at some of the debate. George Washington, in a letter to Pennsylvania delegate Robert Morris, wrote, “There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it.” In a Constitutional Convention speech, James Madison said, “We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.” In James Madison’s records of the Convention he wrote, “(The Convention) thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”

John Jay, in a letter to R. Lushington: “It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. The honour of the States, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion, loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.” Patrick Henry said, “I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil.” George Mason said, “The augmentation of slaves weakens the states; and such a trade is diabolical in itself, and disgraceful to mankind.”

Northern delegates to the Convention, and others who opposed slavery, wanted to count only free people of each state to determine representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. Southern delegates wanted to count slaves just as any other person. That would have given slave states greater representation in the House and the Electoral College. If slaveholding states could not have counted slaves at all, the Constitution would not have been ratified and there would not be a union. The compromise was for slaves to be counted as three-fifths of a person when deciding representation in the House of Representatives and Electoral College.

My question for those who condemn the Three-Fifths Compromise is: Would blacks have been better off if northern convention delegates stuck to their guns, not compromising, and a union had never been formed? To get a union, the northern delegates begrudgingly accepted slavery. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood the compromise, saying that the three-fifths clause was “a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding states” that deprived them of “two-fifths of their natural basis of representation.”

Here’s my hypothesis about people who use slavery to trash the founders: They have contempt for our constitutional guarantees of liberty. Slavery is merely a convenient moral posturing tool they use in their attempt to reduce respect for our Constitution.

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"WOW, THAT WAS AN INTERESTING HISTORY LESSEN, UNCLE VLADDI!" you say.

"But what's YOUR take on all this?!" you ask? Well, here goes!

Slavery is in reality actually the end-goal of all criminals' crimes! All such hypocrites (and all criminals are hypocrites, as all hypocrites are criminals) who inflict them selves with paranoid masochism so they can pretend to always be the perpetually oppressed victims of all other people, embrace, as hypocrites are wont to do, by definition, the double standards of subjectivity wherein they are always right, all cause-and-effect objective "facts" be damned, and everyone else is always wrong (unless until and except when they agree that the hypocrite is always right)! CAPISCE?!

*Some* ancient (and even some modern) criminal hypocrites have claimed that God Itself sanctioned their hypocrisy, and turned the cult-like worship of them selves into religions of enforced Submission to these lies.

Your property represents your time and effort, or the time and effort of your parents or others who chose for you to have it. And time and effort are the stuff of life. If you worked for a certain nunber of hours to buy, say, a necklace for your wife, in addition to the sentiment that you both attach to your gift to her, you will never get those numbers of hours back again. Ever. They will have been deleted from your life. Think about that and imagine that those numbers of hours were deleted from the end of your life. What would you call that?

Well, I'd have to call it SLAVERY. Robbery is violent extortion, but most basically all crimes are thefts, which retroactively force people to work for the criminals for free. Forcing people to work for free is called SLAVERY. Criminals enslave other people and irresponsibly delinquent, criminally negligent lazy libertine "liberal" criminals insist that only they should have rights (like, to your stuff, without having to earn or otherwise pay for it - which they call "equality of outcome" over equality of opportunity to earn it) and so always want to offload their own responsibilities onto others by stealing their rights to defend themselves from criminals, (by insisting the only real crime is to accuse an "equally helpless fellow victim" of being a "criminal" just because they tried to commit some "crimes" against you) while insisting you only have a responsibility to become and remain their slaves. Having the right to freedom from the responsibility of having to think about fearful consequences - basically, having rights without responsibilities - is what all criminals are always all about, and to dilute their own personal responsibility while. increasing their rights to extort others is why so many of them form into gangs for "totalitarian" total control (aka slavery) - such gangsters dress in different uniforms and whine about different wrongs some supposed other people sort of like you may have once done to other people sort of like them in order to pretend to justify their slavery attempts, but in the end all such gangsters (fascists, socialists, communists, muslims) are all the same thing: enslavers.

Wednesday, May 29, 2019