Republican Candidate Says 'Holocaust Never Happened'

[_Kevin Graham]

http://oaklawn.patch.com/articles/repub ... happened#c

Gee, what a surprise here. He celebrates Hitler's birthday and thinks Americans are dumb enough to elect him? I'm sure he'd win if running in Loran's backyard of Kershaw, South Carolina, population 2,000.

[_Buffalo]

Loran just claimed that slavery wasn't a racist institution, so perhaps Loran will be joining this guy's campaign.

[_SteelHead]

Link please?

[_Morley]

Link please?

http://mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=561905#p561905

[_SteelHead]

Droopy's mind, intellect, rational have left the building.

One of the chief justifications for slavery on the US was a that via the curse of Cain/Ham blacks were less human. References to other forms of racism do nothing to further his argument.

[_Droopy]

Loran just claimed that slavery wasn't a racist institution, so perhaps Loran will be joining this guy's campaign.

Did I now...

[_Droopy]

Droopy's mind, intellect, rational have left the building.

One of the chief justifications for slavery on the US was a that via the curse of Cain/Ham blacks were less human. References to other forms of racism do nothing to further his argument.

Yes, that was one justification, but the Atlantic slave trade would have existed without it, and slavery had existed, for thousands of years, in virtually all other cultures, with and without similar justifications. Slavery was primarily an economic institution justified by the spoils of war and conquest, caste relationships, political and social theory, and tradition.

Without the already well established African slave trade among Africans themselves and other Old World peoples, the Atlantic slave trade wouldn't have existed, at least not to nearly the degree it developed.

What I have said (following Dinesh DiSouza), is that the concept of "racism" as we understand it today is primarily an antebellum, reconstruction era concept in the sense of it being cut loose from the economic and social institution and taking on a life of its own in which racial bigotry itself became the focus, not racial inferiority as an afterthought justifying primarily Christian slavery. If slavery were primarily a matter of racism, one must be dumbfounded by the numbers of free black slave owners running successful plantations in those early American centuries, of by the fact that slavery was a well known practice among American Indians.

Contemporary leftist ideology demands that the complexities of real history conform to the grand, simplistic moral dramas of leftist academic theory and activist propaganda, but facts are still stubborn things.

[_SteelHead]

Boy droop that is a lot of big words strung together.

Yes economics was a motivating factor of slavery throughout history, yes slavery was practiced by just about everyone on everyone, yes slavery existed in varying degrees from debtor and indentured servant to chattel, but to say that because of the other factors the racism as evidenced in the popular justifications for slavery during the period was not racism... is stretching it.

Whites indentured and owned whites, blacks raided, sold, traded blacks.... yes. But the institution in the US evolved into an institution of race, where the slaves traded as chattel by the mid 1700s (pre international trade ban in the US) were black, those held from that point till the emancipation of the slaves were black, and the slave trade was almost totally comprised of members of various African tribes of the Yoruba family. The curse of Cain and its then Ham was then used as a theological argument to justify holding a race of men as chattel.

Let's call a spade a spade. Race was used in conjunction with the Bible to justify the practice in the antebellum US and argue its (slavery's) legitimacy, ergo racism.

The fact that racial bigotry about who you attended church with was common, and though said behavior was not perceived as it is today does not make the behavior any less racist.

[_Droopy]

Boy droop that is a lot of big words strung together.

I must apologize again for writing above the general 7th to 8th grade reading comprehension levels of this board. Nothing's going to change on that score, but I do commiserate with those unable to enter the discussion because of these limitations.

Yes economics was a motivating factor of slavery throughout history, yes slavery was practiced by just about everyone on everyone, yes slavery existed in varying degrees from debtor and indentured servant to chattel, but to say that because of the other factors the racism as evidenced in the popular justifications for slavery during the period was not racism... is stretching it.

No, it wasn't, not in our modern understanding. For this to have been the case, some concept of "non-racism" or of racial equality would have had to have been available as a comparison and contrast to the concept "racism." No such concept existed, however. No one, of any ethnic background, did not feel himself and those like him to be superior and in some sense "chosen" above other peoples (and even above different tribes within a related ethnic group).

That some peoples were inferior, less intelligent, less morally cognizant, and of much less human potential was common to most, if not all people's of that age. Slavery was, to some extent (when not simply a traditional aspect of war-making and conquest) a reflection of that mentality, but that mentality was not a requirement for the practice to have existed. Having black skin and other morphological differences doubtless made justifications for slavery psychologically easier to imagine and support once conceived, but it was, again, a symptom, not the cause, of the existence of the Atlantic slave trade.

Whites indentured and owned whites, blacks raided, sold, traded blacks.... yes. But the institution in the US evolved into an institution of race, where the slaves traded as chattel by the mid 1700s (pre international trade ban in the US) were black, those held from that point till the emancipation of the slaves were black, and the slave trade was almost totally comprised of members of various African tribes of the Yoruba family. The curse of Cain and its then Ham was then used as a theological argument to justify holding a race of men as chattel.

Yes, it was...as an afterthought and as a convenient justification. It was not the cause or pretext for the practice. As you've already mentioned above, indentured servitude as a white on white phenomena, and blacks held other blacks as slaves throughout the period. Race was a peripheral aspect of the practice. If not, one is hard pressed to understand that the source of America's slaves - the African and black Muslim warlords of the era who kept a steady supply of prisoners taken in their ceaseless wars available for Atlantic slave traders - were themselves all of the same ethnic background, this relationship providing no break to the practice of either continual warfare or the slaving that was one of its inherent corollaries.

The racism of which you speak, a viscous, relentless hostility to blacks for no other reason than their blackness, is primarily a phenomenon of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction period, not the practice of slavery itself, where even many of the blacks enslaved would have been hard pressed, from their own cultural perspective, to deny the legitimacy of slavery qua slavery. No one, in other words, wants to be a slave, but that's a long way from a moral or philosophical critique of the institution itself.

[_Quasimodo]

The racism of which you speak, a viscous, relentless hostility to blacks for no other reason than their blackness, is primarily a phenomenon of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction period, not the practice of slavery itself, where even many of the blacks enslaved would have been hard pressed, from their own cultural perspective, to deny the legitimacy of slavery qua slavery. No one, in other words, wants to be a slave, but that's a long way from a moral or philosophical critique of the institution itself.

I had always considered enslavement, rape, murder and torture evils, but now that Droopy has pointed out that they were a normal, excepted and common practice in pre-reconstruction times I can ease my conscience. Thanks Droopy!

It's comforting to know that the accepted practice of sexual abuse of female slaves by their owners was moral. I'm now quite sure that the institutions of slave breeding farms were above reproach in their times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_breeding_in_the_United_States

I wonder if the slaves knew just how lucky they were?