[African Americans must] understand that even while in the throes of slavery, their lives as Americans are likely much better than they ever would have enjoyed living in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Knowing what we know today about life on the African continent, would an existence spent in slavery have been any crueler than a life spent in sub-Saharan Africa?
34 comments
Because being owned by another person and having all rights & freedoms taken away, having your kids sold as property and never seeing them again, and being forced to toil in the hot sun all day is far better than just living in poverty.
When did Africa become part of America?"[African Americans must] understand that even while in the throes of slavery, their lives as Americans are likely much better than they ever would have enjoyed living in sub-Saharan Africa."
"Niggers should never have been brought to a shining new land."
Though with people already living on the continent I would hardly categorize North America as "new." But, here I am arguing semantics with a Nazi.
On a Usenet newsgroup I frequent, this assclown's remarks came up. The resident libertarian reactionary defended him and slavery. When I (among others) denounced his stand, he attacked me as "hate-filled." Classic DARVO.
"[African Americans must] understand that even while in the throes of slavery, their lives as Americans are likely much better than they ever would have enjoyed living in sub-Saharan Africa."
Slaves lived better than free men? Methinks not.
@NiggEraser
I, like Leighton Buzzard am also a Jew and can tell a Nazi when I see one, and I hate to break it to you chief, but you're a Nazi.
Remember, the Nazis didn't only kill Jews, they killed Gypsies, Poles, the Disabled and (GASP!) Africans.
@New Face of Rove - Hell, even Maasai and Khoi tribesmen living in non-air-conditioned huts and thatch houses in Kenya, Tanazania and Namibia lived better than African-American slaves. No one was whipping them, working them to death or taking away their freedom or using the women as rape toys like a lot of American slave owners were wont to do (the main source of why most African-Americans have some European ancestry).
Do you know the major reasons southern Africa is in bad shape these days? Because of European colonialism and the slave trade. The natives were pretty well off until all those white people started claiming everything in sight, shipping them off to be worked to death (if they survived the journey, that is) and generally fucking things up.
Slave Trade was primarily via Africans selling slaves to Europenas, actually. Barbaric Colonism did fuck them up, why those places that had it the worst like Congo are off the worst.
Ethopia I just don't know. They beat Italy and Italy just came back in pre WW2 with tanks to murder 'em. There was no real point.
By the time Europe Got serious about Colonizing Africa most of them had banned slaves. The worst of the colonials were just basically imposing slave like labor on their natives.
Which brings up the question why Americans just exterminated the Native Americans, despite some of them intergrating into American Society just dandy. Though there was a debate over how to treat them way, way back in the day. Supreme Court Decides Georgia's treatment of the Native Americans is bad. Andrew Jackson refuses to step in. Ughles.
@Mattiedef - Ethiopia is very poor in terms of income per capita because it's a corrupt monarchy. Part of the same reason Mali is very poor. The monarchy just makes money off the populace and does nothing to improve the country.
"By the time Europe Got serious about Colonizing Africa most of them had banned slaves. The worst of the colonials were just basically imposing slave like labor on their natives."
That's kind of inaccurate. By the time Europe got serious about colonialism in the 19th while they did officially ban the buying of slaves in Europe they didn't ban Europeans moving to Africa and taking slaves there, nor did they ban takeovers, slaughters or punitive wars against Africans. Well after slavery was banned in Europe there were European colonists killing Africans like nobody's business (read up on the Herero & Namaqua Genocide or the massacres of the Shona people in Zimbabwe and the Zulus in South Africa). European kings like Leopold II still murdered millions of Africans (he murdered somewhere between 4-20 million people in central Africa) with impunity late into the 1800s. European colonialists in Africa were also still allowed to do things like take up all the arable land and round off the native Africans onto reservations surrounded by non-arable or barely-arable land, force Africans into Christian schools to learn European langauges and disallow them from passing down their aboriginal religions or languages to their children, etc.
Europe held onto to its colonial empires in Africa until the end of WWI and WWII when Europe was so damaged by those wars it no longer had the military or economic power to hold back native rebellions and revolutionary movements. However, they did not just gleefully give up their empires - well into the Cold War Europe worked with the US to train counterrevolutionaries and install puppet dictators (like the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba by US puppet dictator Mobuto Sese-Seko in Zaire) who promised the West to uphold European property and capital holdings in Africa in return for Western money and support. That's a HUGE contributor to Africa's problems today - puppet dictators who allowed the African people to starve so Westerners could continue to monopolize arable farming land and productive capital in Africa.
Look up things like the DeBeers Company and how they make a huge profit on a relatively plentiful resource (diamonds) by paying African workers next to nothing and forcing them to labor in dangerous conditions. Just because Europe ended slavery WITHIN Europe decades before the US doesn't mean Europe stopped raping Africa of resources and allowing colonists to herd the natives into concentration camp-like reservations and using them for cheap (and even unpaid slave) labor.
@all: Stop calling every racist or fascist a Nazi. Nazism is a very specific ideology, only if you agree with all of those things that Nazism preaches you can be considered a Nazi. If you hate black people, you might be a Nazi, but you also just might be a racist -- and in my book that's bad enough to despise these people.
Nazi-baiting makes the term as wishy-washy as "Communism" or "Socialism" in the United States, and we can all see what came from that.
For the life of me I will never understand the completely irrational hatred that some people have for arbitrary "races" that differ from their own. It makes no sense. Like that one racist's Ferrari metaphor. The fuck? Seriously, the fuck?! The world's largest forced migration, the world's largest economic profiteering off of forced labor, the world's largest subjugation of real, human beings, and it is reduced to someone shitting in a nice car? You have got to be kidding me. If this is the best argument that racists could come up with, they're even more pathetic than I thought.
@ UHM: this here is a site that takes the piss out of and insults various loonies. We'll call 'em what we fucking well like. We are not about correct use of language and history, we are all about the abuse. You want to get all politically correct and play word-magic games, fuck off over to Pharyngula, they're big on that shit over there.
1. I assume that a life lived in some sort of freedom, even if only relative, is always better than a life lived in slavery.
@Vox
Ooo, I remember that one. I liked how you linked fascism as a response, or a reaction, to a fermenting socialist/communist/populist revolutionary drive.
It makes a lot of logical sense. Right wing ideology, in its purest form, is a reaction ary force, and what's further right than fascism(savagesuzie et. all notwithstanding)?
@ Leighton Buzzard
You use the same rhetoric as fundies who refer to "leftist fascists". Abuse is pointless when we are supposed to be seeking a moral high ground. I agree with UHM.
@J.James
@J. James
For the life of me I will never understand the completely irrational hatred that some people have for arbitrary "races" that differ from their own. It makes no sense. Like that one racist's Ferrari metaphor. The fuck? Seriously, the fuck?! The world's largest forced migration, the world's largest economic profiteering off of forced labor, the world's largest subjugation of real, human beings, and it is reduced to someone shitting in a nice car? You have got to be kidding me. If this is the best argument that racists could come up with, they're even more pathetic than I thought.
I don't get it either. Discrimination based on stupid things like skin color or whatever is like discrimination based on big noses!
"AAARRGGH! SCHNOZZERS!...."image image image image image
That sure wouldn't go over well with Roger & Pete. Pete would trash the bus while Roger...
image image image
Babs would nag everyone to death....
"[African Americans must] understand that even while in the throes of slavery, their lives as Americans are likely much better than they ever would have enjoyed living in sub-Saharan Africa."image
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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