'They could have families': Dennis Prager whines about the 'slave narrative in your kid's college'
Right-wing radio host Dennis Prager falsely proclaimed on Tuesday's edition of his podcast that the United States spearheaded the abolition of slavery and that enslaved persons held an advantage because they were permitted to reproduce.
"It's a very distressing thing what is being done here. The hatred of America and of capitalism is what animates the entire slave narrative in your kid's college. Yes, Corey glossed over that the US ended slavery for the rest of the world. While Britain started it, then we continued it. That is correct," Prager declared. "Yep."
That is incorrect.
In 2007, Reuters published a timeline of the elimination of slavery by the Western powers. The US was one of the last to do so.
"It was only after many failed attempts that, in 1807, the slave trade in the British Empire was abolished. However, slaves in the colonies (excluding areas ruled by the East India Company) were not freed until 1838 – and only after slave-owners, rather than the slaves themselves, received compensation," the British Parliament explains on its website. Although the US followed suit in 1808, it would take multiple decades for slavery to come to a formal end.
Granted, some individual states ended slavery in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. But human enslavement remained in the United States until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution on December 6th, 1865. The debate over the Punishment Clause – which outlaws forced servitude "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" – has remained in the century-and-a-half since.
Next, Prager attempted to soften the realities of American slavery by drawing historical comparisons:
By the way, if you talk about Islamic slavery – which was considerably more barbaric – and, believe me, there was barbarity in our slavery. But most slaves could actually have children, for example. And on more than a few occasions, they were separated from their parents. Horrible, truly horrible. But the Black slave population increased tremendously because they could have families in so many cases. Under Islam, that was not possible, the men were castrated. And they weren't castrated with an anesthetic, shall we say. The agony is indescribable, and so many of them died just because of the barbarity of being castrated.
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Prager omitted the fact that enslaved women were often raped by their American overseers. These brutal acts of power and dominance dehumanized and degraded individuals locked in bondage, whose ability to consent was nonexistent.
Prager then suggested that criticisms of the past are rooted in modern people having nothing better to do other than complain:
The left hates America because they have nothing going on in their lives that gives them meaning. The inferior always hates the superior. The left is morally inferior to the United States and its founders and the Judeo-Christian system. The inferior morally hate the morally superior. The left has always been morally inferior from Lenin to today.
Watch Prager's clip below via Media Matters for America or at this link.
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