Michael Medved Defends Slavery

Posted by Jillian at 1:00 PM on September 28, 2007.

This post, written by Jillian, originally appeared on Sadly No!

I am beginning to suspect that the greenhouse gases being released into the world by industrialized nations are having an adverse effect on the space-time continuum. There are days, based on the rhetoric I see coming from some of the loonier corners of the right wing batty brigade, that I can't tell whether it's 1932, 1919, or 1896.

See, Michael Medved wants to set us all straight about the so-called evils of American slavery.

Before we go on, I just want to stop and savor that line for a minute or two. Michael Medved. American slavery. Revisionist history.

At this point, I'm pretty much irrelevant, aren't I? You just know this is going to be chock-a-block full of gibbering insanity.

Luckily for us, he's broken his ravings down into numbered bullet-points - much like the leaflets you find stuck to telephone poles about how the head of the CIA is a mutant lizard person who performs religious/medical experiments on homeless people often are.

Those who want to discredit the United States and to deny our role as history's most powerful and pre-eminent force for freedom, goodness and human dignity invariably focus on America's bloody past as a slave-holding nation.

See what I mean? Aren't we off to a rollicking good start?

1. SLAVERY WAS AN ANCIENT AND UNIVERSAL INSTITUTION, NOT A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN INNOVATION. At the time of the founding of the Republic in 1776, slavery existed literally everywhere on earth and had been an accepted aspect of human history from the very beginning of organized societies. Current thinking suggests that human beings took a crucial leap toward civilization about 10,000 years ago with the submission, training and domestication of important animal species (cows, sheep, swine, goats, chickens, horses and so forth) and, at the same time, began the "domestication," bestialization and ownership of fellow human beings captured as prisoners in primitive wars. In ancient Greece, the great philosopher Aristotle described the ox as "the poor man's slave" while Xenophon likened the teaching of slaves "to the training of wild animals." Aristotle further opined that "it is clear that there are certain people who are free and certain who are slaves by nature, and it is both to their advantage, and just, for them to be slaves."

And after so opining, Aristotle then got drunk on six-week old wine and had unspeakable carnal relations with a sixteen-year old boy. For real!

Medved actually thinks an argument about how the ancient Greeks and Mesopotamians practiced slavery are worth considering. Does he know anything at all about ancient Near Eastern ethical standards? You'd think someone who's presumably read the Old Testament once or twice in his life would appreciate the progress that humans have made in applied ethics since then. By 1776, for instance, European civilizations had given up the practice of stoning disobedient children.

As sad as this particular argument is, it's actually the best of the six that Medved manages to muster: it's all downhill from here, I'm sorry to say.

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.

Okay, now I'm really confused. Didn't Medved just finish saying that slavery was "universal"? How could it have been "limited" in America if it were "universal"?

Actually, this chumpwad's abuse of and ignorance about American history is making me too mad to even joke right here. Slavery was NOT limited in America AT ALL. The first American colony to legalize slavery was Massachusetts (in 1641); the first slave revolt in English colonial territory was in 1712 in New York. Slavery existed EVERYWHERE in the New World - everywhere there were people with enough money to buy other people.

And the ham fisted rhetorical trick of claiming that slavery only existed for 89 years in the United States is beyond horrid. I had a girlfriend once who had lived with a guy who beat her for eight years before she married him. They divorced after two years. If you claimed that "well, she was only married to someone who hit her for two years", you would be technically correct. You'd also be a pompous, condescending asshole of the first order by minimizing the eight years she spent with him without being married.

Slavery existed on this continent for over two hundred years before the laws supporting it were removed, and any attempt to minimize that fact is beyond execrable. Way to go, Medved - have you considered pimping this argument out to David Duke? I bet he'd love it.

Grrr.....I don't like being this angry. Let's move on and hope we get to the funny stuff soon...

3. THOUGH BRUTAL, SLAVERY WASN'T GENOCIDAL: LIVE SLAVES WERE VALUABLE BUT DEAD CAPTIVES BROUGHT NO PROFIT. Historians agree that hundreds of thousands, and probably millions of slaves perished over the course of 300 years during the rigors of the "Middle Passage" across the Atlantic Ocean.

Not funny. Very true, and very sad. Could we be having a breakthrough here? Has Michael Medved looked into his own people's history - the exodus, the Shoah - and found compassion in his heart for the sufferings of the human chattel broken on our shores?

Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean.

I'm sorry; what was that?

Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean.

I'm.....well, I'm......

You know what? I'm just going to go sit over here in the corner and pretend that I never, ever read that sentence. I much prefer the thought of living in a world where people who would honestly say that the worst thing about the slave trade was the money slave traders lost on slaves who died in transit are put into a home for the deranged and cared for compassionately until they died, far away from any access to pens or paper or the internet, not given syndicated radio shows. You guys watch this for a couple of minutes; I'll be back.



All right. Let's move on, shall we? And just forget about that earlier bit - I'm still pretending it didn't happen. Don't spoil the illusion for me.

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.

Oh, fuck it. I give up. What does this even have to do with whether or not slavery is a blot on American history? Slavery would somehow have been more horrible if everyone had gotten rich off of it? So because the defense of slavery was often rooted in pure, unadulterated racism instead of economic convenience (an assessment I agree with, by the way), this makes it a better thing?

5. WHILE AMERICA DESERVES NO UNIQUE BLAME FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SLAVERY, THE UNITED STATES MERITS SPECIAL CREDIT FOR ITS RAPID ABOLITION.

Yes. And while I deserve no unique blame for inflicting this piece of tripe by Medved on you, I merit special credit for its rapid cessation.

I have to stop soon anyway, because I'm starting to feel physically ill from reading this. If you really care, you can see a brief breakdown on when various countries outlawed slavery here; I note (as I'm reaching for the milk of magnesia) that we beat out Zanzibar by about thirty years. Hooray.

6. THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT TODAY'S AFRICAN-AMERICANS WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THEIR ANCESTORS HAD REMAINED BEHIND IN AFRICA.

And this is the crux of it right here; the fiery, dense kernel of stupid, crapulous, filthy, racist tripe that generations of wingnuts past have applied the titanic pressures of their stupidity to in order to produce a perfect diamond of codswallop.

We did those benighted African savages a favor by enslaving them, you know. We brought them civilization, and Christianity! And shoes! And transistor radios! Just look how happy they are, walking around in their shoes with their transistor radios and praising Jesus! How can you say what we did is wrong?

What's wrong with this, of course, is that even if every single descendant from a slave alive in America today were currently rich enough to spend all of their time managing their own elephant polo team, that still doesn't make slavery right. If slavery is wrong, then it is wrong, no matter how salutary the outcome of enslavement may (or may not) be.

Medved goes on to make some blathering argument about how calls for reparation of any sort are all motivated by white liberal guilt, and since he's proven that there's no need for any of us white folks to feel guilty about anything, all those annoying uppity darker folks should just get back in the kitchen and hush up. I have to say that I am consistently amazed at the moral depravity this sort of argument shows in the person who makes it - is the only time one seeks to right a wrong when one feels a personal sense of moral guilt over the wrong? From where I'm sitting, this is actually the height of moral bankruptcy. This isn't an argument about whether some sort of reparations for slavery are right or wrong; this is simply the recognition that if reparations are a moral right, then they are a moral right whether or not you or I or Michael Medved have any reason to feel guilty over the legacy of slavery in this country.

I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to the next set of installments in the "Inconvenient Truths by Michael Medved" series. Seeing as how he schooled us all on the "Inconvenient Truth of Genocide Against Native Americans (it never happened!)" last time, I'm betting the next one is going to set us all straight on the Inconvenient Truth About Rape (it's not so bad if you lie back and relax!), or perhaps the Inconvenient Truth About Witchtrials (those witches deserved it!).

Tagged as: media, racism, slavery, conservatives, medved, cultural critcism

Jillian is a regular blogger for Sadly No!