[...] Comment on The Lie That America Bears Unique Guilt for Slavery by …Vietcong atrocities do not provide context for My Lai. Sabra and Shatila do not contextualize suicide bombings Insurgent atrocities do not provide context for Abu Ghraib. From a moral standpoint, all evil acts are sui generis. … […] [...]

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[...] Comment on The Lie That America Bears Unique Guilt for Slavery by …Vietcong atrocities do not provide context for My Lai. Sabra and Shatila do not contextualize suicide bombings Insurgent atrocities do not provide context for Abu Ghraib. From a moral standpoint, all evil acts are sui generis. … [...]

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[...] Comment on The Lie That America Bears Unique Guilt for Slavery by …Vietcong atrocities do not provide context for My Lai. Sabra and Shatila do not contextualize suicide bombings Insurgent atrocities do not provide context for Abu Ghraib. From a moral standpoint, all evil acts are sui generis. … [...]

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Word,

“I heard Howard Zinn on the Dennis Prager Show asked by the host if the world would have been better off had America never existed. His answer was “yes”.

I reject that belief. Flatout.”

You and I agree.

And when I say “we have too much to do,” I mean “we” as Americans, liberal and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans.

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“Are there any conservatives out there who are pushing for reparations for descendants of slaves?”

There aren’t a lot of liberals, either, pushing for reparations *for the descendants of slaves*.

The modern slavery reparations movement isn’t about cash payments to those who can be identified as descended from slaves. There are too many moral and practical problems with that notion. It’s about acknowledging the inequality that has resulted from slavery and discrimination, and finding fair and appropriate ways to address this legacy of our past.

This is what the legislation currently pending before Congress attempts to do, and this is something which many conservatives I know support wholeheartedly.

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Dave,

Thanks for holding my feet to the fire. It makes me think.

@Dave Noble:

What an odd thing to say. I know you are not unique as a conservative in this belief. To your credit you cite it as an opinion and not a fact. The suggestion here is that liberals are inherently masochistic – they derive some kind of perverse pleasure (’they make themselves feel by feeling so much guilt”). I’d respectfully ask you to step back from that statement and think how you’d react as a conservative if similar psychological dysfunction was posited as the basis for your beliefs. I wouldn’t even make that request of many of the bloggers here who don’t hesitate to explicitly describe liberals as “mentally ill,” “psychotic,” and “delusional.”

Hmmm….not sure how to respond to this. In one sense, I see what you’re saying; in another, I just don’t see what was so bad about my generality about liberals. Go ahead and give me a generality/stereotype of conservatives. I’ll let you know if I take disagreement on it.

Perhaps if there were a more specific group, identifiable under the umbrella of liberalism? Do you disagree with the usefulness (and I understand the prat falls) of applying generalities and stereotypes?

So many liberal Democrats I know personally seem obsessed with “white guilt“, whenever topics come up about American history. Also “moral relativism” and “moral equivalency”. If you’ve read my recent posts on Islam, you know I’m not an Islam-basher. But should I point out something regarding an incident involving Islamic fundamentalists/radicals, my liberal friend can’t help herself when she has to throw into the conversation, “Christianity/religion in general has done this evil and that evil, too…..”

I believe that this “white guilt” burden is taken to a fault; an extreme. You can see it reflected in Hollywood, in the types of movies that come out. Very few seem to focus on American exceptionalism. A great many seem all too willing to focus on America’s sins, though.

So am I just imagining things, based upon my political biases? I don’t think so; but I am stuck with my bias and the influence it has over my thinking.

We don’t have time for guilt, once we have acknowledged the realities of our history. We as a nation have too much to do.

Can you clarify this? Are you talking “we” as Americans? Or your political allies/liberals? Because I keep hearing about the sins of our past, and driven by liberals. Are there any conservatives out there who are pushing for reparations for descendants of slaves?

Who is not acknowledging “the realities of our history”? I’m ready to drive on, because “we as a nation have too much to do”. It’s why I’m “unimpressed” in a way, that Barack Obama was elected president, as a non-white president. Even though he broke a glass ceiling, there was never a doubt in my mind that a non-white could ever be elected to the highest office. As far as I felt, that glass ceiling in general was shattered at least two decades ago, if not longer.

I was moved by the glass ceiling breaking though; but only insofar as it meant so much to so many of my fellow citizens. But really, if we are ever to get beyond race, we need to quit looking at race, quit fixating upon it, quit obsessing over it….otherwise, it will always be an issue.

I would argue that Medved is wasting as much intellectual energy and as much of our limited national attention as the Sharpton, Farrakhan, and Churchills of the world (I am not suggesting moral or intellectual equivalency here)

I fully disagree. He’s only wasting his time of if American perceptions weren’t shaped by the Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky worldview of American history and her place in world history.

I heard Howard Zinn on the Dennis Prager Show asked by the host if the world would have been better off had America never existed. His answer was “yes”.

I reject that belief. Flatout.

I still fail to see what we gain as Americans by pointing out that our practice of slavery was not unique.

Perhaps because you do not see and hear what conservatives see and hear, which comes down to the impression, created by historians such as Howard Zinn, that America bears unique guilt.

Now, Word, were you to turn and ask me what harm there is the conservative line of argument epitomized by Medved, here is my evidence from a post above:

“The incident at Abu Ghraib was the equivalent of a college hazing, not torture.

Thus proving Medved’s point.”

This kind of minimization and moral obtuseness has degraded the American moral sensibility from the right, just as it has been degraded from the left.

Dave,

I absolutely agree with you that abu Ghraib was a lot more than just “a college hazing’. You called N. O’Brain on it; good for you. I, as a partisan hack, let it whiz right by me, shrugging it off subconsciously as hyperbole and a flippant remark aimed at a “liberal troll”. I don’t know N. O’Brain, but gave him an automatic pass that I don’t believe he truly thinks that. It’s kind of an overreaction response to the other end of the hyperbolic equation- which is that abu Ghraib constitutes the worst stain on American credibility and amounts to the worst torture, and Guantanamo is the equivalent to a Soviet Gulag, yadda, yadda, yadda. Did abu Ghraib really warrant 33 frontpage NYTimes articles? THAT, more than the actual incident(s), did more to harm us in a time of war (the way it was reported and talked about) than the severity of the actual crimes. It made good propaganda fodder for jihadists.

The 33 frontpage stories and Seymour Hersh’s perspective is the same kind of guilt obsession that I am talking about.

The same thing that leads Murtha to condemn the Haditha Marines before facts were in and Newsweek to report that a soldier at Guantanamo flushed a Koran down the toilet.

Where are the frontpage stories about America’s war heroes? The same eagerness to make Jessica Lynch into a national hero is missing now, when the news media decided that “Bush lied, people died” and Iraq was the wrong war, after all.

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Word,

Typos:

(“they make themselves feel *good*by feeling so much guilt”).

Now, Word, were you to turn and ask me what harm there is *in* the conservative line of argument epitomized by Medved, here is my evidence from a post above:

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Word,

No one is saying let’s forget the past; let’s just not distort it to make ourselves feel good by constant handwringing self-loathing and exaggerated sense of feeling unique guilt. I really do think many Americans- usually liberals- make themselves feel good by feeling so much guilt and the need to do penance for crimes committed by ancestors generations ago.”

What an odd thing to say. I know you are not unique as a conservative in this belief. To your credit you cite it as an opinion and not a fact. The suggestion here is that liberals are inherently masochistic – they derive some kind of perverse pleasure (‘they make themselves feel by feeling so much guilt”). I’d respectfully ask you to step back from that statement and think how you’d react as a conservative if similar psychological dysfunction was posited as the basis for your beliefs. I wouldn’t even make that request of many of the bloggers here who don’t hesitate to explicitly describe liberals as “mentally ill,” “psychotic,” and “delusional.”

We don’t have time for guilt, once we have acknowledged the realities of our history. We as a nation have too much to do. I would argue that Medved is wasting as much intellectual energy and as much of our limited national attention as the Sharpton, Farrakhan, and Churchills of the world (I am not suggesting moral or intellectual equivalency here)

I still fail to see what we gain as Americans by pointing out that our practice of slavery was not unique. Re: the New Jersey resolution, I would still ask what modern sovereign nation had an agricultural economy based on slavery? But I have no interest in beating that horse.

Now, Word, were you to turn and ask me what harm there is the conservative line of argument epitomized by Medved, here is my evidence from a post above:

“The incident at Abu Ghraib was the equivalent of a college hazing, not torture.

Thus proving Medved’s point.”

This kind of minimization and moral obtuseness has degraded the American moral sensibility from the right, just as it has been degraded from the left.

And because I don’t like to talk behind someone’s back –

Nobrain, if you think Abu Ghraib was equivalent to a college hazing, you and I live in two different universes, practically and morally. I guess My Lai was target practice and the Trail of Tears was a hike.

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“This has gone way off topic and if you want to discuss this further email me and we will discuss it that way.” (Curt)

No need to. Have it your way, I don’t feel like arguing with you. You can think it is childish, I don’t think so. But have it your way… I don’t really care.

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@Dave Noble:

Word,

From a moral perspective, there is no contextualization of evil. Srebenica, in which Christian murderers slaughtered 8000 Bosnian men and boys, does not provide “context” for 9/11 in which Muslim murders slaughtered over 3000 Americans. Vietcong atrocities do not provide context for My Lai. Sabra and Shatila do not contextualize suicide bombings Insurgent atrocities do not provide context for Abu Ghraib. From a moral standpoint, all evil acts are sui generis. They stand on their own.

I understand. But we are talking specifically about the issue of slavery. And have acknowledged that all slavery is abhorrent and evil. But what is at issue is when one nation specifically- America- is singled out as the worst offender in the history of the world. That is a flat out defamatory lie. There is nothing wrong with calling people on it; it doesn’t minimize the actual gravity of American slavery.

“Again, who does not acknowledge where we’ve been? Not Medved. Not wordsmith.”

Actually, my homely analogy is directly on point. When Billy tells Mom that Johnny did it too, he isn’t denying his own guilt either, he’s trying to deflect it. He’s saying “I’m not the only one, I’m not unique, I’m not so bad.” Medved is doing the same thing.

No….he’s not. He fully acknowledges the evil atrocities of slavery in our past. But that’s not the book he’s writing about. He is specifically addressing the charge from the Ward Churchills and Noam Chomskys and Howard Zinns who have created this impression of unique guilt. A more accurate analogy would be to have Billy acknowledge to mommy that, yes, he pulled wings off of flies and delighted with toasting ants by holding a magnifying glass under a hot sun…when he was 6. Older brother Johnny not only did those things when he was 3, but graduated on to setting cats on fire when he was 6, followed by victimizing other kids as he got older. Mommy ignores that there is anything wrong with Johnny who also went on to commit armed robbery, including knifing another kid. Instead, she constantly berates Billy, who’s now 12 years old; not a perfect child, but one who fully accepts that what he did at age 6 was wrong, and not only that, when he was 7, went on an activist crusade to insure that all the other kids at school realize how cruel it was to pull wings off bugs and torture them with a magnifying glass. Billy gets zero credit for that. Billy recognizes and understands his sins. Is it wrong to point out to mommy that there is something wrong with her only punishing and putting down Billy?

My tweaking of your analogy is imperfect; but do you at least get my point?

He’s saying “We’re not the only ones, we’re not unique, we’re not so bad.” Worse yet by using the term “lie,” he’s suggesting we are being slandered, subjected to an unfair calumny.

We are being slandered! Do you not see that there are some beliefs out there that are just patently false?

What child of the 70′s didn’t grow up watching Roots every year? It became part of the American pysche, driving home the evils of our past sin of slavery. That was good; that was needed. But now, how much damage has it also done in creating certain perceptions that are false and misleading?

Alex Haley’s “Roots”: Fact or Fiction?
by Thomas Sowell (January 30, 2002)

“Roots” was the only book I knew my teenage son to read, aside from assigned school books, computer manuals and chess books. He was thrilled to receive a copy autographed by Alex Haley, courtesy of George Haley, his brother, whom I had met.

Alex Haley himself I never really met, though I saw him in person once because we went to the same barber in Los Angeles. Both then and in his television appearances, Alex Haley seemed like a very decent man. That is why it is especially painful to have to recognize, now that the television series based on “Roots” is going to be re-run on its 25th anniversary, that its enormous success a quarter of a century ago was a tragedy for blacks and for American society in general.

Why a tragedy? The short answer is what Winston Churchill said during World War II: “If the past sits in judgment on the present, the future will be lost.” Some disastrous policies had been followed in the years leading up to World War II, and Churchill had sharply criticized those policies at the time but, now that the war was on, looking back could only interfere with the life-and-death job at hand.

There are some very big jobs at hand for black America — and looking back at centuries past is a costly distraction from the work that needs to be done here and now. Moreover, the past that people are looking back at in “Roots” is not a wholly real past. When challenged by professional historians, Alex Haley called his work “faction” — part fact and part fiction. He said that he had tried to give his people some myths to live by.

It was not that “Roots” merely got some details wrong. It presented some crucially false pictures of what had actually happened — false pictures that continue to dominate thinking today.

“Roots” has a white man leading a slave raid in West Africa, where the hero Kunta Kinte was captured, looking bewildered at the chains put on him as he was led away in bondage. The village elders were likewise bewildered as to what these white men were doing, carrying their people away. In reality, West Africa was a center of slave trading before the first white man arrived there — and slavery continues in parts of it to this very moment.

Africans sold vast numbers of other Africans to Europeans. But they hardly let Europeans go running around in their territory, catching people willy-nilly.

Because of the false picture of history presented by “Roots” and by other sources, last year we had the farce of the president of Nigeria making demands on the United States because of the enslavement of people whom his own countrymen had enslaved, and on behalf of a country where slavery still persists, more than a century after emancipation has occurred throughout the Western world.

“Roots” also feeds the gross misconception that slavery was about white people enslaving black people. The tragedy of slavery was of a far greater magnitude than that. People of every race and color were both slaves and enslavers, for thousands of years, all around the world. Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before the first African was brought across the Atlantic. Asians enslaved other Asians, as well as whatever Europeans they could get hold of. Slavery existed in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus ever got here.

Slavery, like cancer, was not limited to any particular country or race. To talk about cancer as if it were an American disease, or a white or black disease, would be absurd. If reparations were to be paid for slavery, everybody on this planet would owe everybody else.

There is no danger of that actually happening. The danger is that too many blacks, especially among the young and the ill-educated, will be backing into the third millennium still looking back at centuries past — or at fictions about centuries past — when there are opportunities all around them that most people in the rest of the world today would die for.

The ancestors of black Americans were not taken from some Eden, and there is no Eden for black Americans to return to today. If compensation were to be paid for the difference between where they are and where their ancestors came from, they would owe money, not receive money. But it would be ridiculous to lose the future because of the past.

We are as bad and as good as we are, regardless of what other peoples or nations have done.

Agreed; but the level of self-loathing and self-hatred for historical distortions is just as harmful as living in denial.

And I am not talking about the American people “feeling guilty” about slavery or the plight of Native Americans. What do we need to get a grip about?

I’m the one who’s talking about unique guilt. That’s what Medved’s addressing. I still think you’re missing his point, and mine for giving it blogtime. You don’t feel that race profiteers like Louis Farrakhan don’t need to “get a grip”? Senator Cohen for pushing the apology resolution that includes some over-exaggerated assertions?

I proudly stand at attention for the national anthem. But I don’t need to remind everyone that “we weren’t the only ones” whenever one of our national crimes is mentioned. I love my country enough not to make excuses for it.

Do you love it enough to defend it against slander and lies and distortions? Or do you just stand there and “take it” like the good patriot you are?

@WadeHM:

I have to jump in on this discussion.

What we did to the Native American Indians was terrible. People can make all the excuses they want about diseases, but America was bent killing the Indians. It is in our history and cannot be ignored. We tried to force our religion and our “advanced culture” on them. When they resisted we called them savages. When they fought back, we slaughtered many of them and put the rest on reservations where they had no rights to land that we stole form them, and they had no rights to move anywhere else in this country. Where do you people think the term “off the reservation” came from?

Wade,

Again, no one is denying that what we did to Native Americans was horrible. But when there are those out there who romanticize this notion that Native Americans were “noble savages” who were also eco-friendly environmentalists living in harmony with nature and their fellow Indians, it’s just nonsense. Because Indians ultimately were on the losing side of western expansionism, and were here “first”, we conveniently forget that they weren’t absolved of atrocities themselves- not all of which were mere retaliation against the brutality exercised by white European settlers. Some tribes attacked, unprovoked. Warfare wasn’t exclusive only to white vs. red; it was also red vs. red, even before the white man arrived. Mayans, Aztecs…engaged in the most horrific cannibalistic enslavement and sadisitic practices of torture and sacrifice. I’d say “savages” is a rather apt adjective for them, if simplistic and narrowly defined.

Slavery is another black eye for America too. I don’t agree that America was built by slave labor, but we still had slavery. And that was shameful too. No matter how worse it was elsewhere, no matter who was responsible for selling the slaves, America supported it knowing it was wrong. Even the founding fathers knew it was wrong and still some of them owned slaves, and still they did not stop it. They could and should have.

Let me cut-and-paste a couple of my comments on another thread:

wordsmith #17:

All men are flawed, Mata.

Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner.

How is that “a flaw”, other than by judging the 18th century by 20th and 21st century moral standards? Easy to do, today, armchaired by the distance of history.

Thomas Jefferson openly denounced slavery as a profound evil. To actually abolish slavery and free slaves was no simple task. In some places, it was legally impossible to do. Taking into consideration the context of the times that they lived in is vital to understanding why those who were against slavery were often at odds with the abolitionists, let alone with a world that “grew up” on the institution of slavery.

Thomas Sowell (“The Real History of Slavery”, in Black Rednecks and White Liberals):

One of the early battles that was lost [in the anti-slavery sentiments growing amongst colonialists] was Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence, which criticized King George III for having enslaved Africans and for over-riding colonial Virginia’s attempt to ban slavery. The Continental Congress removed that phrase under pressure from representatives from the South.

When Jefferson drafted a state constitution for Virginia in 1776, his draft included a clause prohibiting any more importation of slaves an, in 1783, Jefferson included in a new draft of a Virginia constitution a proposal for gradual emancipation of slaves. He was defeated in both these efforts. on the national scene, Jefferson returned to the battle once again in 1784, proposing a law declaring slavery illegal in all western territories of the country as it existed at the that time. Such a ban would have kept slavery out of Alabama and Mississippi. The bill lost by one vote, that of a legislator too sick to come and vote. Afterwards, Jefferson said that the fate “of millions unborn” was “hanging on the tongue of one man, and heaven was silent in that awful moment.”

Three years later, however, Congress compromised by passing the Northwest Ordinance, making slavery illegal in the upper western territories, while allowing it in the lower western territories. Congress was later authorized to ban the African slave trade and Jefferson, now President, urged that they use that authority to stop Americans “from all further participation in those violations of human rights which has been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa. Congress followed his urging.

Abstract moral decisions are much easier to make on paper or in a classroom in later centuries than in the midst of the dilemmas actually faced by those living in very different circumstances, including serious dangers.

One way to understand the constraints of the times and their effects on public attitudes is to examine the difference between the way that many in nineteenth-century America saw the slave trade, as distinguished from the way that they saw slavery itself. If the institution of slavery and the presence of millions of slaves were facts of life, within which many decision-makers felt trapped by having inherited the consequences of decisions made by others in generations before them, the continuing trade in slaves, whether from Africa or within the United States, was a contemporary problem that was within their control. Thus, decades before slavery was abolished, the United States joined in the outlawing of the international slave trade. Even many Americans not yet ready to support the abolition of slavery as an institution nevertheless made the bringing of more slaves from Africa a capital offense in the United States.

The moral distinction between slave trading and the continuation of slavery as an institution might be hard for some in later centuries to understand because, in the abstract, there is no moral difference. Only in the concrete circumstances faced by the people of the times was there a practical social difference.

wordsmith #19:

Try putting yourself in the context of the times, and the social constraints of what was possible. Your casting moral judgment is anachronistic. Moral choices can be made only from options that are actually available to be made. More excerpts from Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals:

We cannot assume twenty-first century options, or even present-day knowledge, when judging decisions made in the 19th century. Nor can we assume that we have superior knowledge of the social realities of an earlier era that we never lived through, compared to the first-hand knowledge of those who confronted those realities daily and inescapably.

Moral Questions about slavery have been, almost exclusively, Western moral questions.. Non-Western societies had neither moral concerns about slavery nor, in most cases, the power to decide on the continuance or extinction of the institution for themselves during the era of European imperialism, when slavery was suppressed over most of the world by the West. Not only has the West’s crucial role in the destruction of slavery around the world gone largely unnoticed, standards applied almost exclusively to the West have been used to condemn European and European offshoot societies for having once had slavery.

Even those Western leaders who sought to end slavery are condemned by critics today for not having done it sooner or faster. The dangers and constraints of their times have too often been either ignored or brushed aside as mere excuses, as if elected leaders operating under the constitutional law could simply decree whatever they felt was right.

~~~

Even those slaveholders with aversions to slavery in principle were constrained by a strong tradition of stewardship, in which the family inheritance was not theirs to dispose of in their own lifetime, but to pass on to others as it had been passed on to them. George Washington was one of those who had inherited slaves and, dying childless, freed his slaves in his will, effective on the death of his wife. His will also provided that slaves too old or too beset with “bodily infirmities” to take care of themselves should be taken care of by his estate, and that the children were to be “taught to read and write” and trained for “some useful occupation”.

This is an important point to highlight, because some like Jefferson and Washington understood that simply freeing slaves without giving them the necessary tools and means to survive in society was more like abandonment than liberation. They did consider the possibility of sending freed slaves back to Africa. But the reality was, many of these slaves no longer had ties to Africa, either.

One concrete result of the back-to-Africa movement was the establishment of the colony of Liberia on the West African coast, to which freed American blacks were sent during the administration of James Monroe, for whom they named their capital Monrovia. These first settlers were decimated by African diseases to which they no longer had biological resistance- which was just one of the problems of trying to undo the past.

Frederick Douglass himself, refused the offer to be sent to Africa, seeing himself as an American.

[Washington's] estate in fact continued to pay for the support of some freed slaves for decades after his death, in accordance to his will.

The part of Washington’s will dealing with slaves filled almost three pages, and the tone as well as the length of it showed his concerns.

The language of the will was written in very legalistic terms; but when it came to speaking about what was to become of his slaves, he spoke with the passionate command of issuing an executive decree: “I do hereby expressly forbid the sale…of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretext whatsoever.”

“There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it.” Washington once said, in regards to slavery as a national issue. The moral question for him was easy; but how to carry it out with compassion and foresight planning was a complex matter. Only through legislation, did Washington see it as a realistic possibility to end the institution; and he said that the legislator who could achieve that, would get his vote.

During his public life, Washington was known to leave behind slaves he brought with him on his travels to the north, in effect, freeing them. His behavior as a slaveowner is also noted in Richard Brookhiser’s Founding Father:

Beginning in the early 1770′s, he rarely bought a slave and he would not sell one, unless the slave consented, which never happened. not selling slaves was an economic loss. Slave labor on a plantation with soil as poor as Mount Veronon brought in little or nothing…The only profit a man in his position would make was by selling slaves to states where agriculture was more flourishing. Washington would not. “I am principled against selling negroes as you would do cattle at a market…” From 1775 until his death, the slave population at Mount Vernon more than doubled.

Back to you, Wade:

I am right-wing conservative, I love my country, but I can admit her errors. This country has had her share sins, but I still love this country and still am proud of her, but I will not simply dismiss her sins, especially based on the premise that, “But Johnny did it too.”

We must remember the truth so that we don’t forget it.

No one is saying let’s forget the past; let’s just not distort it to make ourselves feel good by constant handwringing self-loathing and exaggerated sense of feeling unique guilt. I really do think many Americans- usually liberals- make themselves feel good by feeling so much guilt and the need to do penance for crimes committed by ancestors generations ago.

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