In a garrulous piece of revisionist history, rightwing movie critic Michael Medved offers an impassioned justification for the slavery of Africans in America. According to Medved, to reject slavery on its merits might ”deny our role as history’s most powerful and pre-eminent force for freedom, goodness and human dignity.”
Here are the six key points of Medved’s argument:
1. SLAVERY WAS AN ANCIENT AND UNIVERSAL INSTITUTION, NOT A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN INNOVATION.
2. SLAVERY EXISTED ONLY BRIEFLY, AND IN LIMITED LOCALES, IN THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC – INVOLVING ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE OF THE ANCESTORS OF TODAY’S AMERICANS.
3. THOUGH BRUTAL, SLAVERY WASN’T GENOCIDAL: LIVE SLAVES WERE VALUABLE BUT DEAD CAPTIVES BROUGHT NO PROFIT.
4. IT’S NOT TRUE THAT THE U.S. BECAME A WEALTHY NATION THROUGH THE ABUSE OF SLAVE LABOR: THE MOST PROSPEROUS STATES IN THE COUNTRY WERE THOSE THAT FIRST FREED THEIR SLAVES.
5. WHILE AMERICA DESERVES NO UNIQUE BLAME FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SLAVERY, THE UNITED STATES MERITS SPECIAL CREDIT FOR ITS RAPID ABOLITION.
6. THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT TODAY’S AFRICAN-AMERICANS WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THEIR ANCESTORS HAD REMAINED BEHIND IN AFRICA.
In the always amorphous rightwing world, Medved’s piece rises to a new level of the bizarre. Is he attempting to assuage his own guilt over slavery? Open a dialogue about the history of slavery in America? Or, argue against the movement to pay reparations to the descendants of African slaves?
On the otherhand, maybe he’s just a racist kook with a keyboard?
11 Comments
+ at 7:41 am
Michael Medved is a racist piece of shit.
+ at 8:39 am
Wow. Medved statements makes me sorry for missing out being considered property not human, the whips and chains, the beatings and murders, being bought and sold like cattle, being separated from loved ones and family and being kept uneducated and uninformed.
I wonder if he would want to switch places with my ancestor who were kept as slaves? After all, its wasn’t so bad.
+ at 11:45 am
It sounds to me that Medved is trying to convince himself that he isn’t a mouthpiece slave for the corporatist movie industry.
Just a bit of “projecting” from Mikey.
Plus being ignorant doesn’t help his argument much.
Sh*thead.
+ at 12:22 pm
A sign of things to come… for everyone not of blue blood.
Blue is the color that matters, folks.
+ at 12:39 pm
Bloggernista hits it on the head..the untied corporations of america has a pathetic and disgusting history of considering some humans NOT human. This is and always will be our national shame. And the depth of institutionized racism is beyond measure. Look at the frenzy of immagrants, look at the stats of who is in our prisons . i swear this stuff keeps me up at night..it is so horrid.
And the way this country – goes all jingoistic , creeps me out beyond belief.
White guys in ties, especially those elected officials – well i am not quite sure they are human. Each day i grow more certain of this. The richest, not sure about them either.
The american dream ain’t what it used to be and it never was.
+ at 2:50 pm
Medved is a racist midget.
+ at 6:19 pm
If the union had lost Medved might be a slave today.
From 1848 until the Second American Revolution in 1860 US politics boiled over as the slavocracy faced down a growing sentiment in the North that slavery was a danger to everyone. There’s a well documented history of threats to extend slavery to northern Euroamericans after the 1808 ban on importing slaves (see below).
The first slaves in prerevolutionary North America were indentured slaves; captured Indians, Irish, the spillover from Brit prisons, and religious minorities like Quakers. The Indians escaped or killed themselves and the Euroamericans melted away to new towns. The Brits solved the problem by importing African slaves and simultaneously launching a christian propaganda crusade damning them as inhuman and inferior.
To maintain unity against the Brits during the First American Revolution the problem was shoved under the table where it festered until 1848. Then the Free Soil Party, (later the Republican Party) was founded with the slogan “Free soil, Free speech, Free Labor, and Free men”. From there the road led inevitably to ‘Bleeding Kansas’, Harper’s Ferry, Ft. Sumter, Appomattox and the 13th and 14th Amendments which at long last completed the work of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Following are some sources on ‘White Slaves” and the threat of the southerners to extend slavery to working people and farmers in the North. They’re from the interracial voice website www dot webcom dot com fwrdslsh intvoice.
“White Slavery: An American Paradox” by Carol Wilson and Calvin D Wilson in Slavery and Abolition, 19:1.
“The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s” by Walter Johnson in Journal of American History, (June 2000)
The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New Look at the Slavery Issue by Lawrence R. Tenzer (Manahawkin, NJ: Scholars’ Publishing House, 1997)
Finally, Medved’s racism is linked to his being an apologist for zionism. Zionism is an extremist racist ideology that justifies the apartheid state of Israel, similar to the earlier justification by slaveholding christians used to justify kidnapping and enslaving Africans.
+ at 9:44 pm
I’m betting this is the case.
+ at 8:19 am
What vjp said. Medved has a mental condition and it’s called racism. Common amongst the radical right wing crowd. These people like Medved make me ill.
+ at 12:47 pm
Michael Medved might want to give this speech in a public forum in South Central or Harlem and then after he comes up for air, tell us if he still thinks slavery is cool?
+ at 2:39 pm
I have found out that my grandfather and his sister were sold into slavery about 1895. They were sold to a farmer who didn’t have enough children to work his farm. They were kept with the animals. This was at Watertown ,Michigan area. They are white not black. I am writing this because in school they only teach about black slavery. My son brought up the subject and his teacher just foot noted it.
It is a bad thing all slavery. Yet it seems that people who were never a slave think they have the right to claim they were based on what happened to a family member. These same people want compensation (profit) from what happened to someone long dead. Many white people gave their lives to free the slaves(all colors). Yet todays blacks punish all whites for the events a very long time ago. All members of my family didn’t own slaves and some went to war to stop slavery. So I am saying this…. Keep your face out of mine . If you want me to give you respect. You must give respect . My family and I don’t owe you anything.
The grandson of a white slave.