By the conclusion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade at the end of the 19th century, Europeans had enslaved and transported more than 12.5 million Africans.
Stand to be corrected, but last I heard both the number and the confidence level was lower, IIRC ~10m+/-2m.
I'm working on Columbus Day in Columbus, Ohio! It's a travesty!
I once went to see the replica Santa Maria on Columbus Day in Columbus, Ohio.
Anyway, I had to take today off because the school was closed.
Interesting that so few of the dots appear to be going to the mainland Spanish Americas, except Argentina. I guess because the Caribbean was the transshipment point.
I have a four-day weekend, thanks to the fall of the Qing Dynasty. The implications are possibly less fraught.
I did not realize until this year that both Minneapolis and St Paul celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day.
A political turning point for me: When I was a freshman back in the early nineties, I got into an argument with someone at my small, relatively conservative SLAC who was tabling against Columbus Day. I had kind of bullshit reasons. I was not so much convinced by the anti-Columbus Day person's arguments as made to realize that my reasoning was garbage and that I was not actually very informed. Because I felt embarrassed to have such weak arguments, I changed my mind. Also, I think, because I'd always assumed that I was a pretty left-wing person (and I was, for the place I grew up) and getting into it with someone incontrovertibly lefter than me made me uncomfortable.
I do miss those relatively optimistic days. Possibly because I was young and had finally, finally gotten out of my horrible town and therefore everything seemed bright and new, and possibly because of the brief post-Cold War "we're going to have a peace dividend, also multiculturalism" glow, it seemed to me like things were really getting better. Ha.
Also, when I look back on my youth, I remember how much the past seemed not that bad. Or at least, I didn't have the emotional range or maturity to understand that even if everyone did mean well, society couldn't turn on a dime, and that terrible events linger and linger. I supported a lot of stuff verbally (and even materially to the tune of fund-raising and going to protests) whose gravity I didn't even begin to understand.
Interesting that so few of the dots appear to be going to the mainland Spanish Americas
Perhaps because a) less of a slave economy and b) they were able to supply them with native slaves rather than African ones?
I was surprised at the regular ships going north from Africa to Portugal. The step-down in 1807 is less than I'd expect - you really get a step-down after 1815, I suppose because that's when the RN had the resources to get into interdiction. Still a steady stream from Angola to Brazil though.
Interesting decisions, too, on what to exclude; why stop in 1860? Were there really no more slave ships after that?
I have a four-day weekend, thanks to the fall of the Qing Dynasty. The implications are possibly less fraught.
That's the great thing about having your public holidays to mark simply that the Bank of England is closed for the day. Very little contentious about that.
there was a curious parade here yesterday that seemed to be both a Columbus day and an Indigenous Peoples' parade.
Standard Italian American stuff at first (Italian flags & etc.) followed by various groups of people dressed in what looked to be indigenous Central and South American garb.
It seemed like a pretty strange combination.
Much to quibble with in the interactive. It shows numerous appearing to depart from southern Africa which on inspection departed from Benin; a ship departing "Benguela, Nigeria" (it's in Angola); ships appearing to depart from points far inland; a ship flagged British when the database detail says Portuguese.
I kind of wanted the dots to accumulate in the New World instead of disappear.
AIUI most of the individuals died without having children.
Most of the dots did disappear, as they were people sent to sugar plantations in the Carribean and Brazil where they were deliberately worked to death - 50-60% mortality in a few years -- since import of new slaves every few years was cheaper than keeping people alive. That's also why the Carribean and Brazil take the brunt of the trade. Have a nice day.
7.1.b: Native forced labor, but not chattel slaves (banned in the 16C).
7.2: 1808-15 metropolitan Spain and Portugal are occupied by France; the colonies opened their ports to British and American ships (legally in Brazil, local initiative in Spanish America), at a time when their exports presumably were selling at wartime prices. The Anglos were smuggling before that anyway, but it picked up during the war years.
7 last: presumably the intended audience is American.
The slave ships to America were supposed to have stopped before 1860. It's in the U.S. Constitution that we could ban the importation of slaves after 1808.
I think 1860 is just when the British Navy mostly stopped things.
In elementary school we celebrated it as Native genocide day. It's also how we first learned about syphilis.
We also spent months on the Atlantic slave trade as part of our "fucked up shit white people did" theme in social studies.
The Jesuits were framed as heroes for their role in getting native chattel slavery banned in S. America.
There was a movie, with Robert DeNiro.
Good Fellas, or The Mission. I can't remember which.
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Jesuit.
I've never understood the Italian-American connection to Columbus. He's Genoese and worked for the Spanish crown, back when Italy wasn't even remotely a thing. He has basically zero cultural connection to Southern Italian immigrants. Secondly, if you want to have "Italian day," there are a billion other better options than a guy who kicked off a massive genocide. Why not have Da Vinci day, or Marco Polo day, or even something like, "delicious carbs" day?
21
We watched that movie in middle school and high school, I think. Pro-Jesuit propaganda in public schools!
That animation is really powerful. I wasn't quite sure, how I would respond, but it really does create a feeling of accumulating horror.
||
On that note, I think Ezra Klein does a good job of highlighting why Ta-Nehisi Coates doesnt' have much hope to offer:
Reading Coates, I do not believe hope, for him, is synonymous with progress. Hope is prediction. It is about ultimate levels, not current trends. To be hopeful about race in America is not to say that slowly things will become less bad. It is to say that they will become good, equal, just. To be hopeful is to believe that America will one day embody its ideals, that it will atone for its past. Coates quotes Malcolm X, who said, "You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress."
There is a paragraph in Coates's book that I have read and reread. It is, to me, the clearest distillation of his worldview and its power. I do not think there is any doubt that this paragraph is true. I also do not think it is possible to live inside its truth and feel very hopeful:Any fair consideration of the depth and width of enslavement tempts insanity. First conjure the crime -- the generational destruction of human bodies -- and all of its related offenses -- domestic terrorism, poll taxes, mass incarceration. But then try to imagine being an individual born among the remnants of that crime, among the wronged, among the plundered, and feeling the gravity of that crime all around and seeing it in the sideways glances of the perpetrators of that crime and overhearing it in their whispers and watching these people, at best, denying their power to address this crime and, at worst, denying that any crime had occurred at all, even as their entire lives revolve around the fact of a robbery so large that it is written in our very names.Though America may improve, its debts will never be repaid, its ideals will never be reached, the barest definition of justice will never be attained. It was, Coates says, his seminal article on reparations that crystallized this knowledge. "The reparations claim was so old, so transparently correct, so clearly the only solution, and yet it remained far outside the borders of American politics. To believe anything else was to believe that a robbery spanning generations could somehow be ameliorated while never acknowledging the scope of the crime and never making recompense. And yet that was the thinking that occupied mainstream American politics."
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18. The US banned the slave trade in 1807 (it took effect on 1/1/1808). That doesn't mean there wasn't still some slave smuggling, but it was banned. A lot of slavers changed to supplying the parts of the Caribbean where the trade was still legal. Cuba, for one.
18. The US banned the slave trade in 1807 (it took effect on 1/1/1808). That doesn't mean there wasn't still some slave smuggling, but it was banned. A lot of slavers changed to supplying the parts of the Caribbean where the trade was still legal. Cuba, for one.
I guess the Post button is working harder today to make up for all the buttons on vacation.
I've never understood the Italian-American connection to Columbus.
I don't either, but that reminds me that Larry Penn wrote a great song about his experience, as a teenager, playing music in an Italian-American club which had little wooden icons for the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria which rotated the stage (see the link for a more complete description).
I actually have a hard time comprehending on the most basic level Americans' reaction to slavery and genocide because I was raised by Northern Europeans, for whom the legacy of genocide is the Holocaust. Apologizing and paying reparations was always framed as the most bare minimum any decent society could do, and completely inadequate to the crime committed. That Americans won't even apologize for the obvious wrongs committed just... I can't even.
32: The cases aren't easily comparable. The Holocaust happened in 12 years, the vast majority of the killing in 4. American slavery happened over ~250 years, ending 150 years ago, 4 or 5 generations. Any individual can truly say, "Well, *I* didn't do anything." The vast majority of white Americans, even in the South, can say honestly that none of their ancestors even owned slaves.
33: The vast majority of Germans can say that neither they themselves or their ancestor killed even a single Jew.
23: It's the one with "Mendoooozaaaa!" Or maybe that's McBain.
25: Seconding this. Move Italian-American Day to a different day, make it St. Patrick's Day with pizza and wine and ruddier tricolors, and forget about Columbus--who might not have even been from Genoa itself both from its non-Italian territories (or even somewhere else).
32: It being longer ago--in its most extreme forms--makes it easier to ignore, and it's a lot more tied up into our origin myth than the Holocaust. You can de-Nazify Germany but you can't de-American the United States. So we have to live with the cognitive dissonance and ignore it to pretend, or else we must open the floodgates to the fact that we're actually rather awful people.
33
But that *I* didn't do anything is the attitude that's the problem. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) issued a formal apology for the holocaust in the early 90s, even though American Lutherans fought in the US Army against the Germans. Norway paid restitution to holocaust victims (as they should), even though they could argue that it was ultimately the Germans fault. Weaseling out of responsibility when you've clearly at least indirectly benefited is IMO, a mindset that needs to be changed.
35.3
Yeah, that sounds right. It's depressing because I can't see a way to bring about change.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) issued a formal apology for the holocaust in the early 90
That's pretty weird. Because some of the people who actually committed the crime were Lutherans? But they weren't American Lutherans. They weren't in any sense part of ELCA.
An uncharitable person would think that this sort of unnecessary apology is a nice way of buffing up one's public image with the donors, rather like the tearful sinners-repent-and-come-to-Jesus moments which their televised colleagues are so fond of, without necessitating actually doing anything.
Agreed that Italian Americans definitely have a lot more attractive names than Columbus to choose from if they want to celebrate their Italian heritage. How about Borgia day?
And with Columbus, it's not even simply that his actions were bad by modern standards. His governing of Hispanola was a scandal at the time. I believe he was jailed for it at one point.
38
I'm unsure of who these donors would be, other than their own members, and why they would donate more money if the ELCA denounced the holocaust. It was part of a general trend to remove antisemitic content from the liturgy. Lutherans are very earnest people and they take duty/responsibility very seriously.
27: Yeah, I liked that as a counterpoint to Loomis' misguided piece. If I'm reading him correctly, Loomis is calling on Coates to offer some kind of hope, but that's not the role that Coates has chosen. There's absolutely nothing wrong with just trying to tell people the truth.
You see this argument a lot with climate change, and I don't buy it there, either. Yeah, it's all pretty grim, and it's good that there are people out there looking for ways to be hopeful. But an honest assessment of the size and scope of the problem is important, too.
I'm somewhat more sympathetic to the Loomis-style argument when it comes to gun control, but that's only because I think gun control defeatists -- while certainly justified by the facts -- have drowned out the voices of people who are pushing to get shit done. But even with gun control, I think the defeatists are mainly calling valid attention to the scope of the challenge, rather than calling on people to give up.
38
The ELCA also formed in the 80s. There is no way the organization could have played any part in the Holocaust. Again, that "I didn't directly do it therefore I don't have to apologize" the precisely the attitude that I find a turn off. No living white Americans have ever owned slaves, but America as a country done fucked up, and needs to apologize and pay restitution.
36.1: No argument.
35.3 presumably gets it: emotionally far away and very attenuated.
34: Of course. But, differences:
(1) the crime of slavery was mostly in exploitation,* where the Holocaust was mostly killing; so it's easier for white Americans to say they didn't benefit from the crime; and where the Holocaust did see exploitation one can often point to some still-existing entity like VW, which I'm guessing is rare in the US.
(2) The Holocaust was carried out by the state, which claimed (not without basis) to represent the whole German people. US slavery was private sector, and directly at least only quite a small fraction of the private sector. I guess that makes it a lot harder to assign collective guilt.
The ELCA bit is interesting. IIRC the Evangelical Lutherans were the established church of Prussia, and a lot of German-Americans maintained a strong German identity, pre-WWI at least. That together could feed into a sense of collective responsibility. I find it intuitively hard to fathom though.
*In the US anyway, see Caribbean experience above.
Turn-ons: virtue signaling, walks along the banks of the fjords.
Turn-offs: unrepentant perpetrators of genocide, brunettes.
39.1 My regular nominee is Carlo Tresca, labor organizer, journalist, anti-fascist, anti-Stalinist, resisted the Mafia though it cost him his life.
The ELCA also formed in the 80s. There is no way the organization could have played any part in the Holocaust. Again, that "I didn't directly do it therefore I don't have to apologize" the precisely the attitude that I find a turn off.
Yeah, but surely you have to draw the line somewhere. Should the ELCA apologise for Year Zero and the genocide of the Tasmanian people?
US slavery was private sector
I don't think this is true, but it's possible I don't understand what you mean.
45: The advantage of Borgia day is that a holiday that you celebrate by holding orgies and assassinating your political enemies is pretty much guaranteed to be popular.
47: I mean most slaveowners and traders were private individuals or companies.
47: I think he means that slaves weren't owned by the government, but by private citizens.
Ajay needs to apologize for Britsplaining.
I've never understood the Italian-American connection to Columbus.
Because you're completely missing the USian cultural context in the late 1800s. Italian immigrants wanted to prove that they were just as American as nativist whites, and the 400th anniversary of Columbus' landing was a convenient hook (remember, Chicago's 1893 World Fair was called the "Columbian Exhibition", and was very much conceived as a stage for demonstrating that the US was a world power on par with anyone).
Italians were looking very specifically for a tie to America, not just a homeland hero to celebrate. Furthermore, the Indian Wars were just wrapping up; nobody gave a shit about the genocide that Columbus kicked off.
Garibaldi would have been a plausible candidate, given that he fought for the Union and was viewed as a bringer of democracy to Italy, but you don't generally create a holiday like Columbus Day around a guy who a. just died a few years ago, and b. was extremely contentious back home.
Anyway, it's perfectly common for historical figures to be semi-randomly plucked for symbolic value only tangentially related to their actual conditions. Columbus isn't really an outlier there.
And the liberal NYTimes decides to publish a Columbus apologia on its front page.
Not that I think this is super important, but it would have been hard for Italian-Americans to choose a more vile representative. Don't they think that reflects on who they appear to want to be? If you want to keep it relevant to American discovery, why not Amerigo himself?
46.2 No, those are on the Quakers and the Church Mission Society, respectively.
52 JRoth brings the goods.
48 Wasn't that the premise of a terrible movie that came out a few years ago?
55.2 In its third installment, I believe.
49: gotcha. But those private markets were propped up by local, state, and federal law. Maybe that doesn't matter, but I think it probably does. For example, one of the most important mile markers on the road to emancipation was the Fugitive Slave Act, which forced northerners to confront their complicity in the slaveocracy.
52
That makes sense, given the context. I guess I'm not sure why now things can't change. I do like Borgia day as an option.
Given our current administration, perhaps Mussolini day would be more doable?*
*My husband's grandmother was a fan of Mussolini but not so much of Trump. We had to be sure not to refer to Trump as fascist around her lest it might make her think more fondly of the orange man in the White House.
57: Ok. But, (1) enabling private-sector slaving is different from actively pursuing slavery as a national policy; (2) state involvement presumably varied drastically by location; and (3) in any case what matters today isn't the facts but how Americans remember them, and I'm guessing most Americans remember basically private slave ships and private planter mansions.
I kind of wanted the dots to accumulate in the New World instead of disappear.
Agreed, and I also wanted the dots in the New World to grow in size to show the generations born into slavery. I've never seen an estimate of all people who were enslaved in America(s), both those kidnapped and those born into slavery. Obviously I'll have to go google it now.
59: I think most Americans don't have a clear sense of private versus public slavery. I think most Americans, if they think about slavery at all, think, "That was a very long time ago, and I had nothing to do with it! I don't understand why these shiftless negroes are still complaining! And those NFL guys are making millions! They should salute the flag while fellating a first responder!" All of that said, slavery was very much a matter of national policy once the United States became the United States. The Fugitive Slave Act was just one example. I could just as easily have used the 3/5ths Compromise, but there are zillions of others.
Anyway, I'm not trying to pick a fight; I'm just saying that I don't think private versus public is the key variable in American memory and forgetting.
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database shows a much higher number than Slate:
The most comprehensive analysis of shipping records over the course of the slave trade is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, edited by professors David Eltis and David Richardson. (While the editors are careful to say that all of their figures are estimates, I believe that they are the best estimates that we have, the proverbial "gold standard" in the field of the study of the slave trade.) Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America.
And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That's right: a tiny percentage.
60: I should let VW answer since he's the one who recommended it to me and I haven't finished it because I don't know, depressing and I suck, but The Price for their Pound of Flesh has a lot of good data and insight as far as I could tell.
61: Comity. I don't think private/public is key either, but that it's one variable among others.
Also, just in case anyone gets heated, all I'm saying is this: the Holocaust and US slavery were very different things, with very different contemporary emotional resonances, and making simple 1:1 comparisons will be fraught. I don't doubt de-Nazification, or the construction of public morality, in the FRG (and GDR? I've no idea) likely holds lessons, they'll have to be applied with caution.
There is also some truth to 44, it is moral framework that easily lends itself to moral priggishness. Of course it's a side effect that has to be weighed against other worse ills.
They should salute the flag while fellating a first responder!
We're having a local micro-scandal right now due to a city councilperson (pgh contingent won't need two guesses as to who) liked a FB post saying our mayor likes to ride firemen. Apparently it isn't as American as you'd think it would be.
On to the point, if the state--or the States--had directly own huge slave plantations, we would probably hear fewer "well I/my family didn't own slaves" arguments, which I detest. They wouldn't all go away, given the late 19th century peak of European migration, but still.
65 last: If anyone can recommend reading on those lessons I'd be grateful.
I guess I'm not sure why now things can't change.
Well that's a totally different thing. One is simply that people don't like their traditions changed. Italian-Americans have spent 125 years telling each other that Columbus is one of their heroes, and nobody human is going to turn on a dime on that.
A second thing is that Italian-Americans have been, for my entire life, more or less the embodiment of ethnic backlash in America. At this point, their political identity primarily revolves around ethnic pride and resentment of anyone who'd challenge that. Point being, it's a group that would be very specifically resistant to anti-Columbus arguments.
Here's a useful documentary on the topic.
Maybe, it's a rabbit, hole, but I think the private/public thing does have (some, limited) salience. Think about the shitstorm when Michelle Obama noted that the WH was built by slaves: sure, some of the pushback was generic "they should be grateful" nonsense, but news outlets had to run explainers that, yes, the WH really was built using slave labor.
I think most white Americans believe, in good faith, that slavery was something done by private individuals for their own gain. And most people don't accept complicity arguments along the lines of "slavery was legal in the US, therefore all Americans at the time were guilty." I'm not saying they're justified in that, I'm just saying that's how it is. You can barely get people to admit that atrocities committed by US troops in the present day are their fault, let alone that a random Northerner in 1845 was at fault for slavery.
And let's not forget the bonus difficulty that it's very easy to go from "all white Americans were complicit in slavery" to "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism."
I assume that the ELCA was apologizing specifically or maybe primarily for the (fairly extreme) anti-Semitism of Martin Luther himself, which had a real if obviously highly attenuated connection with the holocaust.
AFAIK, the major protestant denominations have all "apologized" for slavery -- even those, like the Southern Baptists and Southern Presbyterians, that literally and directly owe their organizational existence to a decision to split off and defend slavery. Of course such apologies only go so far -- the Episcopal Church, who had a bishop who was a Confederate General, apologizes constantly and is now extremely progressive, but it's not like they are going to liquidate the assets of Sewanee (prob the major Church seminary, founded as a refuge for ex-Confederates) and give the money to the NAACP. I'm not even sure that they should. It's just one example of how slavery is so deeply built into the American fabric that it's hard to even think of without going insane.
Remember the slogan for cotton -- "the fabric of our lives".
On the public/private Holocaust/slavery thing, maybe this is too lawyerly but one key difference is that it's difficult to figure out which corporate legal personality one could hold responsible for slavery in a way that's not true for the Holocaust. After WWII the new West German government publically took on the corporate debts of the Nazi regime, paid war reparations, etc. In that context it would have been bizarre for the German state not to pay reparations. And private German businesses had enough institutional continuity with pre-war businesses so that it made perfect sense to hold eg Daimler or Siemens directly and corporately responsible for the sins of their corporate forefathers, which was largely done by the 1990s. In the US you have the problem that the ongoing government is the one that (perpetuated but then) fought at great cost to abolish slavery, and the problem that for a variety of reasons it is difficult to trace corporate liability of ongoing corporations back to slavery and the slave trade. Interestingly, the debate has been different in places where tracing that institutional continuity is more direct -- universities like Brown or Georgetown. But beyond that, and a few predecessors of existing railway companies, your mostly left arguing that eg Citibank should pay because some predecessor companies profited from loans backed by slaves as collateral. And maybe Citibank should pay, but the institutional continuities and lines to immediate corporate responsibility are more opaque. And without those lines of responsibility and institutional continuity it's harder This isn't a justification, just an explanation.
What about the promise of 40 acres and a mule? I know it's a bit more complex, but that was a promise of restitution made by a still-extant institution--the US government.
There is also the issue of race discrimination wrt government programs like the New Deal stuff and the GI Bill where culpability can be traced pretty directly to the US government. It's not slavery per se, but it's part of the apartheid system that developed post slavery.
But anyways, actual legal culpability and moral obligation are of course different. I don't think we need to show legal culpability to issue a formal apology for either slavery or Native American genocide, or to issue some sort of reparation.
74
It also seems a key difference is that the West German government willingly took on an obligation of debt that they didn't have to, legally. They weren't the Third Reich any more than the Union was the Confederacy. It's a bit odd 150+ years later and never politically going to happen, but I don't see why we couldn't take on the debts of the Confederacy vis-a-vis descendants of former slaves.
They weren't the Third Reich any more than the Union was the Confederacy
Is this true? It's complicated, with the partition, but I think the FRG was the generally recognized successor to the Reich. Also, I don't know how much choice they had; they were still on the hook for WWI reparations which were renegotiated in the 1950s. Having accepted liability for those debts they could get sucked into others.
Aren't there also pragmatic reasons for the sovereign power to take up debts, to keep the financial ecosystem healthy or something, regardless of the predecessors' level of popular consent or institutional legitimacy? The US federal government assuming the state's debt was pragmatic as I recall, for example.
In any event both Germanies paid reparations for WWII, so succession isn't really disputable, one way or another.
78: The US taking over the Revolutionary War debts of the states?
Anyway, if all those Dixie states want the stars and bars on their flags, they can pay slave reparations too, since they're indisputably the successors of the pre-Civil War states. They can pay reparations for the Civil War while they're at it.
I think White America thinks that there's a statute of limitations on slavery - enough time has passed that reparations aren't relevant. In a way, I think it's a shame that so much of the conversation about race relations focuses on slavery at the expense of all of the other shitty things that were done post-slavery.
81: "The Case for Reparations" is all about post-slavery shitty things.
Yeah, the benefits are extraordinarily diffused. E.g., the accumulated profits and infrastructure from slavery and slave finance helped us develop our industrial sector, etc.
And in terms of legal liability, the redlining is much more promising. Banks and their successors exist and are well documented, so are victims' descendants, IIRC many of the practices were illegal at the time.
82: But that is what makes the argument for reparations seem so quixotic.
"Isn't it good enough that we oppress you so much less than we used to? Shouldn't we get a medal for 'Most Improved' instead of a bill?"
A condition set by the allies for the creation of the FRG was the assumption of debt and liabilities of pre-war regimes (including but not limited to the Nazis -- the new German government was also supposed to pay down the interest on the Dawes Plan loans dating from the 1920s). Much of this debt was negotiated downwards in the 1950s, but there was never any question that the FRG was legally a successor state to the previous regime.
To 82, the US, the Fourteenth Amendment specifically prohibits both the US AND the individual states from paying back any Confederate debt, or from paying compensation to the ex-slaveholders for the emancipation of the slaves. This was in response to claims from ex-Confederates that they should be compensated under the Takings Clause for the loss of their slaves,as well as to their idea that re-paying confederate debt would help the ex-Confederate states get access to international bond markets. To be clear, the amendment doesn't prohibit the US government from providing reparations to former slaves -- reparations aren't unconstitutional -- but it does absolutely prohibit the US (and individual US States) from more broadly assuming the financial obligations of the Confederacy.
Obviously this is all pretty legalistic but there you go.
It turns out that the rise of Columbus is much older and more interesting than I thought. Believe it or not, Phyllis Wheatley was a big part of it.
87: Complicated! But anyway, to Buttercup's 76, the FRG maintained under its own constitution from 1949 that it was the successor to the Reich, and so was bound to accept those debts.
Here's a 2010 case, which I was reading for unrelated reasons, concerning an attempt to collect on bonds (now valued at $400,000,000) issued in the 1920s (in New York) by the state of Prussia for loans to Prussian farmers. The attempt to collect eventually lost, but there are considerable live or only very-recently-dead issues concerning repayment of pre-1945 German debt.
Redlining and GI Bill benefits are pretty cut and dried examples of fairly recent wrongs. Maybe free in-state tuition and low-interest 0% down mortgages to the descendants of black WW2/Korean/Vietnam War veterans and anyone from a redlined would be doable?
Interestingly enough, my grandparents were redlined because they lived in a black neighborhood. It's one of the reasons they built their house piecemeal.
The whiteness of Norwegians presumably had not yet been clarified.
Interestingly enough, my grandparents were redlined because they lived in a black neighborhood.
I was browsing through the recently-digitized redline maps, and what struck me most was the breadth of judgment: not just black neighborhoods, but also too many of the wrong kinds of Jews(!), comments about building stock and topography, etc. Intensely subjective stuff, and insane that it held de facto force of law.
Also interesting to see that, in some cases, the future was very poorly foreseen. That is, a given area would be downgraded for physical conditions, but 60 years later we know that no decline ever happened.
93
Weirdly enough, no publisher has yet accepted my manuscript, "How the Norwegians became White."
It looks like the issue of taking on debt and offering reparations were two separate things, and it was the latter the Germans did voluntarily. (I know about this via a family friend who was Adenauer's personal assistant in the 50s, and it is corroborated by wikipedia).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Adenauer
"Adenauer recognized the obligation of the German government to compensate Israel, as the main representative of the Jewish people, for The Holocaust. Germany started negotiations with Israel for restitution of lost property and the payment of damages to victims of Nazi persecution. In the Luxemburger Abkommen, Germany agreed to pay compensation to Israel. Jewish claims were bundled in the Jewish Claims Conference, which represented the Jewish victims of Nazi Germany. Germany then initially paid about 3 billion Mark to Israel and about 450 million to the Claims Conference, although payments continued after that, as new claims were made.[69] In the face of severe opposition both from the public and from his own cabinet, Adenauer was only able to get the reparations agreement ratified by the Bundestag with the support of the SPD.[70] Israeli public opinion was divided over accepting the money, but ultimately the fledgling state under David Ben-Gurion agreed to take it, opposed by more radical groups like Irgun, who were against such treaties. Those treaties were cited as a main reason for the assassination attempt by the radical Jewish groups against Adenauer.[71]
On 27 March 1952, a package addressed to Chancellor Adenauer exploded in the Munich Police Headquarters, killing one Bavarian police officer. Investigations revealed the mastermind behind the assassination attempt was Menachem Begin, who would later become the Prime Minister of Israel.[72] Begin had been the former commander of Irgun and at that time headed Herut and was a member of the Knesset. His goal was to put pressure on the German government and prevent the signing of the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany, which he vehemently opposed.[73] The West German government kept all proof under seal in order to prevent antisemitic responses from the German public."
obligation of the German government to compensate Israel, as the main representative of the Jewish people
That points to another important difference: it's not clear who would be the main representative of people who were victimized by slavery.
One could come up with proposals, but I think that's part of what causes a gap in thinking through how reparations would be handled.
95 - the article you point to goes to another key issue -- immediately after 1945, and continuing through the 1950s and through to today, the German government (first as run by the allies, then as the FRG after 1949) had to decide what to do with actual claims for looted property brought by survivors of Holocaust victims. The decision was made quite early on that there would be some form of state-paid reparations by the German government for lost property stolen from Jews. The issue of broader reparations to Israel developed in the context of resolving those actually-existing legal claims (with, of course, considerable disagreement from both the individual survivors, the Israelis and the Germans, with various degrees of grossness, about exactly what should be paid, and who should pay it).
In general, Adenauer regarded the reparations paid for the Holocaust as a tremendously good deal for Germany, as a long-term solution to the uncertain property issues produced by Naziism and as a relatively cheap price for restoring Germany's strategic position in the world. He was right about that. This isn't to say that Adenauer, who is a complicated guy, had no moral sense of obligation, just that repayment occurred against the backdrop of a German government already obligated to pay out on a wide range of war-related claims which also necessitated some immediate need to settle payment for Holocaust crimes.
By contrast, in the United States after 1865 the primary people claiming a financial loss for which they needed compensation were not former slaves, but former masters. They wanted compensation from the US Government (or the States) for the loss of their property. The Fourteenth Amendment explicitly forbade both the US and the States from doing so.
The US Government did draw up plans to put the property of former masters, or of land that was being held by the federal government, into the hands of former slaves (i.e., "forty acres and a mule"). This was largely, though by no means completely, a failure. But even in its most radical iteration, I believe that federal land grants to slaves were always seen as a social welfare program/means for integrating ex-slaves into national life/punishment for the rebels, not as "reparations," i.e., providing payment on a moral debt accrued by the US Government itself.
Again, this is all a means of explaining different attitudes towards repayment of reparations as debt, not a justification or an argument against US reparations. The long-term absence of black wealth in the United States is an ongoing problem and one that there is indeed an obligation to solve. This is true even if I am extremely doubtful that financial reparations will ever be paid in the United States to African-Americans.
94: The superficial, subjective preferences of an especially vain set of white people given the force is law is pretty much Trump's campaign promise.
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I am going to park here my anxiety that mum & sister are between 2 fires in no bay, so if wind continues onshore they are at risk from 1, and if it turns offshore they are at risk from t'other, and haven't been able to raise them by text or phone since midday.
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If they just tell the king their names he'll unchain them and put the fires out. Stupid Scandinavian pride, gives nothing but trouble.
94: It's all part of a cunning plan to pay reparations:
1. Impoverish rural and working class white people while stoking their racism.
2. Blow up the Republican Big Tent o' Tax Cuts and Racism by offering those people -- and only those people -- social insurance along with their racism.
3. ????
4. After a party realignment, reparations are rolled into a New New Deal that also aids the fine people discussed in Ogged's We Suck thread yesterday.
The slaves probably learned a valuable lesson about how family is more important than money. Since liberals want teachers to be well paid, I think we have to consider maybe black people should pay instruction fees to the ancestors of their owners.
Is this the thread where I can rant and rave against the Irish Americans, and their creepy, last-redoubt-of-white-ethnic-nationalism grievance culture, and etc.? I'm thinking of changing my name to Mary Anne Smith, I hate those Irish American arseholes so much.
I would say my larger argument is that, true to the particulars or not, a moral narrative of responsibility has largely shaped how Northern Europeans think of the WW2 and its effects, and this has had some on policy outside of actual legal obligations. Even if the postwar Germans didn't see their obligation as primarily moral at the time, the fact they have in retrospect remembered them as such has an impact today on Northern European policy towards reparations and formal apologies. There was no pressing legal or social/pragmatic obligations for the Norwegian government to provide reparations to the Roma in 2015, but I would argue they did out of a sense of it being the "right" thing to do, a pervasive narrative which has framed post-war constructions of morality. I would argue that Scandinavian* self-conception as both self-righteous AND guilty in the postwar has been responsible for much of the overt "do-gooder" foreign policy, including contributions of aid, involvement with the UN and similar organizations, etc.
Changing pervasive cultural and moral narratives about ourselves as a nation is extremely tricky, but as far as I can see it's the only way America can change as a fundamentally and inherently racist nation. This would be most easy to enact through the schools, but obviously the political obstacles seem overwhelming at this time.**
*Yes I'm oversimplifying the intra-Scandinavian differences.
** Though, I grew up in an ultra white racist city and attended one of the first afrocentric elementary schools in the US. The black community was small enough that a committed group of individuals could successfully advocate for its establishment, and the city was willing to let the school in "the black neighborhood" try out this experiment. So sometimes opportunities are possible in unlikely places.
Have the Danes apologized or provided reparations for slavery in the Virgin Islands? Serious question.
109
Looks like no/not yet. There was a meeting in 2005 to open a dialogue on the topic, but it hasn't gotten that far:
There is this:
When will the French answer for what they did to Haiti, I want to know.
107:
Is this directed at USans, as opposed to No. Americans generally? If so, I can see where the long history of proximate contention, at least from the Civil-War draft riots onward and famously in Chicago's 1919 riots would mean a different history from their cousins in Canada. Or are there other factors, if you're in fact implying that distinction?
This is tangentially related, but thinking about Italians and terrible things in the past, I just learned that Italy only outlawed honor crimes in 1981. Until then, if a man murdered a female relative for illicit sex that brought shame upon the family, suggested punishment was 3-7 years. "Reparatory marriage," i.e. being forced into marrying your rapist, was also legal until then. In fact, the first time a Sicilian woman refused to marry her rapist wasn't until 1965, and it remained an anomaly even after then.
Changing pervasive cultural and moral narratives about ourselves as a nation is extremely tricky, but as far as I can see it's the only way America can change as a fundamentally and inherently racist nation.
I've only read reviews, but I feel like this is related to the ideas in The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen>
93.last I hadn't realized Menachem Begin's conventional terrorist career continued into the 1950s (as differentiated from his state terrorist career which went on until the early 1980s).
The implications are possibly less fraught.
An awful lot of folks took the opportunity to come to Banff National Park this weekend.
Buttercup, what do you mean by "Northern European" exactly?
120
Here I mean Germany and Scandinavia. I don't know enough about the Netherlands to talk about the Dutch, and I think the UK is significantly different. (Geography is of course social and contextual, and I might use Northern Europe differently in a different setting.)
Seconding 118
On topic, here's a cartoon on Columbus:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day
Thanks, Barry. Sister had intermittent connection to text this afternoon, no power or regular cell access & neighborhood chock full of firefighters, so she was judging stress of evacuation on ill elderly mum and frankly pretty decrepit pets not yet worth it, so they'd wait for orders. I wish they would just come stay with us but have to trust sister's judgment. Haven't heard from her in hours, and the fires are spreading, new ones starting. Will be a worrying night. Hope their gas isn't cut as 1 would mean danger closer and 2 no hot food/cups of tea.
72: "but it's not like they are going to liquidate the assets of Sewanee (prob the major Church seminary, founded as a refuge for ex-Confederates)"
Ladies and gentlemen, my undergraduate institution!
And though I should just be happy that anyone knows about the place, a few quibbles. My impression is that it's one of several Episcopal seminaries, rather than the major. It was founded not long before the war (1857) so that sons of the South would not have to go to college in the North. A cornerstone was laid in October 1860, but that was obviously not a good time to be building a college in Middle Tennessee. The second founding (1868) was a bit hurried, because a mining company's gift of 10,000 acres would have expired if no classes had been held. Plenty of notable ex-Confederates did turn up there, because many of them were still barred from public life, college professor was respectable enough for a former high-ranking officer, and the location was not generally susceptible to yellow fever.
The university now has a Project to Study Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation. Several faculty were closely involved with the Highlander Folk School, a key training place for activists in the civil rights movement. Rumor has it that in the late 1980s, the university turned down a major gift intended to establish a center for Southern studies because of racist conditions attached to the gift. Just this fall, at the request of a family member, key parts of the Kirby-Smith memorial were moved from the memorial's location on University Ave (not quite as prominent as it sounds; people I know recalled it mainly as a place to catch a breather from drinking at the Sigma Nu house) to the Kirby-Smith plot in the cemetery.
Anyway, it's a complex and contradictory place. It's working to grapple with its institutional responsibility, in many facets. The more liberal views of those responsibilities are stronger in the institutional Episcopal governance. Conservative alumni donors are probably still a majority, though only a slight one.
(1) the crime of slavery was mostly in exploitation,* where the Holocaust was mostly killing; so it's easier for white Americans to say they didn't benefit from the crime
Of course white Americans benefited from the crime, that's what exploitation is all about. I'd say what makes it hard for white Americans to face up to slavery isn't because the benefits are easy to deny, but because they're so pervasive, so much a part of the development of the United States that acknowledgment becomes a threat to identity.
Maybe if all the states where slavery was legal seceded, and all the states where it was not remained in the Union, and the pro-slavery Confederacy successfully became a separate nation, and then lost a catastrophic war, and then remained a separate, but defeated nation where slavery had been abolished as a consequence of that war, maybe then there'd be some facing up to the legacy.
125.1: My point was this: with the Holocaust, Germans are faced with, "My ancestors gratuitously killed a whole people." The crime is heinous, and guilt accrues to the perpetrators mostly on account of the act itself, not on account of gains accrued from the act. With US slavery, Americans are faced with "My ancestors enslaved a people in order to steal the fruits of their labor." The crime is heinous, but guilt accrues largely, if not mostly,* on account of the proceeds of the act, not the act itself.** Given the proceeds were mainly private sector, and accrued directly to a small minority of white Americans' ancestors, I would expect it's easy for most white Americans to deny that they benefited from the crime, and thus that they today are not obliged to make restitution. More clearly,
(1) Slavery is remembered mostly as theft, not harm;
(2) Most Americans can easily deny having benefited from the theft.
*Whether the theft is actually worse than the enslavement itself, and/or the associated abuses, is obviously debatable.
**I'm guessing slavery is remembered mostly in these terms by most Americans. I don't know.
what makes it hard for white Americans to face up to slavery isn't because the benefits are easy to deny, but because they're so pervasive, so much a part of the development of the United States that acknowledgment becomes a threat to identity.
To what extent is this true?
(1) Factually, to what extent was slavery actually critical to US development? In previous discussions people have mentioned The Empire of Cotton (?), which argues slavery was absolutely central, but others said the historiography isn't settled.
(2) More importantly, do most Americans remember slavery as being central to development? My impression is that slavery is mostly presented as a backward institution that actually retarded development, and US prosperity presented as the result of natural resources, entrepreneurship, and technology.
For comparison, take Germany again. In 1870 Prussia (legal predecessor of the current German state) instigated a war with France and won it; it extorted from France a huge indemnity and the Alsace coalfields, which together were the foundation for German industrialization. Therefore all the wealth of all German citizens today is quite directly traceable to the robbery of France; a similar case can be made for Japan regarding the indemnity it extorted from China in 1895. Questions, (1) how are these events taught, remembered and atoned for in Germany, Japan, France and China; (2) How does US slavery compare, in terms of collective US action and collective US benefit? For the second, obviously everything is far, far murkier.
a similar case can be made for Japan regarding the indemnity it extorted from China in 1895
That sounds pretty shaky. Japan was already industrialising at a tremendous pace by 1895; if it hadn't been, it wouldn't have been able to defeat China so easily.
129: The indemnity accelerated the process. It allowed Japan to go the gold standard, and so increase foreign borrowing, which paid for development and for imports (excluding WWI, Japan ran a current account deficit continuously until the 1960s).
dairy queen, I hope everyone is OK.
Re: reparations, I saw a talk be Ta-Nehisi Coates last winter, and he had what I thought were some good and concrete suggestions. He suggested that solutions might vary by state. The one I remember specifically was that anyone who could trace ancestry to slaves in the Mississippi Delta should be entitled to free college education at the public university in the state where their family was enslaved. In perpetuity. The audience sort of gasped when he said that. I think he suggested that since the state, not federal government saw much of the economic benefit, the state government should shoulder most of the cost. He also suggested federally backed, low interest housing loans for any descendant of slaves. There was something about elementary education as well that I can't remember.
127: I think it's too narrow to look literally at the economic benefits of slavery. I agree with 125.1. Pervasive benefits include our lasting legacy of racist government policies from disenfranchisement (which means I have a better chance to elect an official who represents my views and make laws that benefit whatever interest I am voting for) to housing policy (which means I got honors classes and went to the better high school in town while the other had to give up extracurriculars and school buses) to the justice system to health disparities. The example of the Holocaust in some ways is too limited in time (thank goodness) for comparison. I think that most folks don't like to admit that they are stepping on others, even inadvertently. I am sure one could imagine an alternate history US, with no slavery and steampunk agriculture, it what we did is now so totally baked in to being an American, it's like a thought experiment where we founded the US on Mars.
Er, be =by in 131, -it in 132. Corrections not exhaustive. I blame racism for my bad typing.
Can we start the United States on Mars with slaves?
131: That seems...kind of deliverable? (Even though it's fairly obviously designed to troll Harvard about legacy admissions.)
Slavery and serfdom aren't quite the same things, but this still seems related: https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-moldbug-variations-pein
I don't see anything wrong with trolling Harvard about legacy admissions.
131: I would be okay with that, but there'd have to be some sort of clause to let them get education elsewhere. If the federal government required states to educate descendants of local slaves, I could them nuke their own universities, much like they did to public schools after desegregation. The urge to destroy public goods to hurt the other is strong.
health disparities
Municipal water systems in the south systematically excluded black communities. Predictable consequences followed for infectious disease. This from Robert Gordon's Rise and Fall of American Growth, which has some excellent chapters but is a brick of a book.
They also systematically put the freeways right through the middle of any prosperous black community.
126
Except the number of Germans who actually killed Jews were quite small. Camps were built outside Germany and much of the day-to-day dirty work was outsourced to Slavic locals and prisoners. The vast majority of Germans can rightfully say their ancestors were not involved in killing Jews, in the narrow sense. The reason why all Germans take responsibility is that there is a narrative of collective responsibility that the Germans agreed to accept, postwar. They accepted to take the blame for the holocaust in its entirety, even when, in certain places (i.e. the Balkans), the killing had little to do with Nazi policy. In fact, IME Germans whose family had very little guilt (e.g. resistance members) are even more willing to identify as guilty than people whose family were, say, SS Officers.
The South fought a war to keep slaves. Millions of Americans are descended from Confederate soldiers. The US let in white ethnics so that they didn't have to use black labor in the factories. Millions of Americans are descended from late 19th-early 20th century immigration. The original colonies had slaves in the North. I can keep going, but the number of white Americans implicated in slavery and racial apartheid in one way or another is basically all of us. We don't take responsibility because we don't have a national narrative of collective responsibility.
In fact, IME Germans whose family had very little guilt (e.g. resistance members) are even more willing to identify as guilty than people whose family were, say, SS Officers.
That's an interesting observation that I bet has wide applicability.
138
Yean, this is a larger problem. White Americans in certain places would rather live in utter poverty than provide public goods to black people.
I agree that free college and accessible homeownership through no interest mortgages should be at least hypothetically doable (some white Americans apparently already think black people get to go to college for free) in the here and now. I do feel like, if we're going to suffer white rage no matter what, we might as well go big.
That was supposed to end in a question mark. I think it's more the case that if white people are enough of a majority that they can control the political outcome but not enough of a majority that virtually all the public goods to go white people, white Americans as a class would rather live without public goods they need than provide public goods to black people.
131: That seems...kind of deliverable?
Seconded. Ideally it should be structured so that HBCU can benefit. But that proposal makes sense as a way to build up capital within the African-American community (and would presumably have to be continued for decades).
It would be a hard sell, and would inevitably have some implementation challenges, but it seems worth having that debate.
I occasionally mull the prospect of the United States government simply issuing reparations to literally every citizen. If the value of the reparations were somewhere near the accumulated wealth of white people, even though white people would still come out ahead, it would still represent a substantive gain for people of color.
I mean, sure, it would precipitously devalue the currency, but I'm not entirely convinced that would be bad either as a matter of principle or effect.
I occasionally mull the prospect of the United States government simply issuing reparations to literally every citizen.
This is a point that came to mind with regard to China. Japan may well have profited from defeating China in 1895. But China - the Empire and its successor states - profited far more from brutalising its peasant population from 1000 BC to date. Should China pay reparations to the Chinese?
147: I think at that point it isn't really reparations per se, but a UBI funded by a wealth tax. Arguably the same would hold for the hypothetical in 148.
148 is the truth. Not just China, but all civilization, and all its benefits, track back one way or another to some heinous shit. Progressivism as payment.
128: The French claim to Elsäss is the sort of thing that looks settled by time, but it's as shaky and dependent on conquest as pretty much anything else in Europe. Strassburg was flat-out seized in 1681. So German industrialization being based on Alsatian coal...
128: Also, Han Napoleon III shot first.
152: Extra points for the Man from U.N.C.L.E. subtext.
Also I would need to see some very strong evidence that annexing Alsace-Lorraine was particularly significant to German industrialization. Germany already had tons of coal. Alsace-Lorraine was a fairly industrialized area but so were other areas of Germany and much of the benefit of that industrialization flowed to the inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine more than it did to either Germany or France as a whole. So ... wait, why are we talking about this in the context of the international slave trade, one of the worst events in himan history, again?
Sadly, we're nowhere close to a society that can give free college to the descendants of slaves; the more realistic ask right now is free college for everyone.
We do seem to be capable of funding efforts by universities to recruit and serve Native students, as well as African-American students. Lots more of that is good and possible.
If it's a connection between German wars and the international slave trade the people want, I recall reading somewhere that it was a clause in the Peace of Westphalia that really helped the trans-Atlantic slave trade take off by removing a bunch of restrictions on trade with West Africa that had applied to most countries except Portugal and Spain.
So it's really all Elector Palatine Frederick V's fault.
I was going to comment on "This is true even if I am extremely doubtful that financial reparations will ever be paid in the United States to African-Americans." but I wanted to see where things went, but then 131 lays things out very much along the lines that I've considered:
For a zillion reasons, Uncle Sam will not be cutting million dollar checks* to every African-American citizen (nor billion dollar checks to every Native American). BUT there are all sorts of things that could be done to comparable effect.
This has been particularly top of mind because of the PR situation: if I ran the zoo, my long-term response to Maria would be A. forgiveness of debt/ forcing private creditors to take a haircut, B. massive, return-free investment in PR infrastructure**, and C. a once-and-for-all resolution of status. I know that local opinion is divided, but it's clear to me that the current statues is, or should be, untenable. State or independent status; if they want some sort of commonwealth status that they define, so be it. But no more of this shit where they're basically ruled by a Congress they can't vote for. And, at the same time, resolve the other territories (and DC!).
Doing that would go a long way towards putting right 120 years of shittiness. By the same token, Europeans should be taking the lead in doing in Africa what China has done: use Euros to build solar and wind factories in Africa and train the locals to run them and build wind/solar farms. Zero expectation of return: this is what we do to make up for colonialism and slavery***, plus it addresses climate change. I suppose the UK owes India a few trillion.
But anyway, my point is that, while there's a paternalism in this, there's also just enough in there for the 1st world countries to justify it all. Just as Adenauer dealt with Israel to simplify some of the property claims against Germany, this development investment smooths the path to a less unstable and less climate changey world. If you create enough jobs at home (e.g. making the equipment that goes into solar factories, or creating a well-paid version of the Peace Corps for infrastructure workers), it's not politically disastrous.
I know this is all pie in the sky, but my point is that it's less so than literal reparations.
*honestly, that's probably on the order of magnitude we should be thinking; I don't know/recall whether Coates ever put a dollar figure on it. Certainly deep into the 6 figures.
**take advantage of current Treasury rates to just flat-out borrow for a state of the art grid, modern roads, and sewers. Spend a billion dollars on the island, plus a billion dollars in mainland factories, and leave a status that's viable for 100 more years
***ideally the US is doing its part for the slavery injury done to the ones brought over; maybe the US kicks in a bit towards Africa as well, or maybe Latin American to make up for all the banana republics
The US let in white ethnics so that they didn't have to use black labor in the factories.
I've literally never seen anything like this claimed. Is it ex recto, or is it a real claim by a historian?
Is this directed at USans, as opposed to No. Americans generally?
Basically (if unfairly): yes. Though I'm willing to extend my rant to cover Canuckistanis of Irish ancestry, to the extent that they cast themselves as the world's greatest world-historical victims while supporting and voting for right-wing extremists who victimize everyone else. And also to the extent that they manage to produce such thoroughly detestable media personalities as O'Reilly, Hannity, Bannon, etc.
Anyway, I don't really hate Irish-Americans, of course, nor Canadians of Irish descent (who don't generally call themselves Irish-Canadians), just the truly loathsome ones like Paul Ryan and his ilk.
And there's a slave trade angle to my rant: I've recently been reading about John Mitchel, the Irish nationalist 'Young Ireland' firebrand who moved to the States and became a pro-slavery apologist, and who likened the landless and dispossessed Irish cottar class to the slave-holding planter class of the Confederate South [?!]. And much more recently (as in, very recent and still ongoing), the Irish slave myth, which I find truly appalling and rant-inducing.
151-154: Not exactly Alsace, but in general the French insist(ed?) that the left bank of the Rhein is properly French, which is hard to justify except at roughly 3 moments in post-Roman history.
141/160: Yeah, I thought labor was the more precious commodity in the 19th century, so it wasn't so much that we chose which ethnic groups to let in or out, as it was that we let in virtually anybody who made it over. (It is true that some free states tried to exclude free blacks specifically - Ohio, Oregon, etc.)
I believe that the correct answer is that total sharecropping wages (while abysmal) through the late 19th C were not substantially lower than unskilled-labor factory wages in Northern factories (which were also abysmal and not rising much, remember Marx's immiseration thesis seemed plausible at roughly that point), giving black people little wage-differential reason to move North. Then that changed in roughly WWI and the First Great Migration happened. So that would make the "US let in white ethnics so that they didn't have to use black labor in the factories" claim largely false (not to deny that many US employers and employees preferred white ethnic immigrant labor to black labor, but black labor was used once it made sense for black people to move for wage labor). But I don't have any source at hand.
Though I suppose that to the extent mass foreign immigration acted as the depressor on wages (I'm unclear about the extent to which that is accepted as actually true for the late 19th C) then some version of the statement might be true. Certainly some decline in immigration levels in the 1920s corresponded with part of the First Great Migration, and that continued to be true through the 60s (ie, people moved from the South). But that's more of a claim that US open immigration policy depressed industrial wages for all unskilled workers, black or white, not quite the original point.
In any event I thought the bigger issue was (especially after 1910 or so when the wage differential ramped up) that white interests in the South tried to keep blacks (and also some poor whites) from leaving -- bans on recruitment agents, strict prohibitions on hiring competing labor, criminal or punitive penalties for breach of sharecropping contract -- all in an attempt to keep the low-wage agricultural labor supply in the South.
That sounds right.
But story-wise, I was pretty sure another prompter of the Great Migration (from Warmth of Other Suns), is that 1910s-1930s were the nadir of racial oppression in the South. Black people didn't just want better wages, they wanted the fuck out of the place they feared for their lives, if they could manage it. (Overdetermined, certainly.)
I don't know how much Alsace mattered to Germany; its loss is commonly said to have mattered for France, though of course those things aren't the same. In any event the indemnity certainly did matter.
And yes, Napoleon III did shoot first, but AIUI he is generally agreed to have been tricked into it by Bismarck. Something about a telegram.
The tenuousness of the French claim to Alsace underlines the point in 150.
158 is plausible (and source would be welcome, for curiosity); but the Iberians were never fully able to enforce their monopolies in any of their colonies. Also, IIRC the Portuguese failed at Westphalia to get a settlement with the Dutch, who were the ones intruding most on their trade everywhere.
It's weird how we continue to fret over Alsace-Lorraine. As if, Prussian militarism: was it really that bad?
Would also need to see some solid evidence about the effect of the French indemnity. My rough understanding was that while the paper value was huge it was financed fairly easily by France and that much of the benefit to Germany was an asset-price bubble, not meaningfully responsible for a long-term national wealth difference.
161: I was going to chime in about the conservativeness/racism of Polish-Americans, but the reference to the nineteenth century reminded me that, at the very least, Poland's "Christ of nations" schtick led a number of Poles to go around the world volunteering on behalf of other revolutionaries.
My Polish-American relatives are still AFAIK a lot more racist than my Irish-American relatives. I think it's largely a class thing.
And yes, Napoleon III did shoot first, but AIUI he is generally agreed to have been tricked into it by Bismarck. Something about a telegram.
Seems like Napoleon III was a belligerent buffoon who allowed himself to be trolled into starting an ill-advised war for the sake of nationalist pride. Sure, you could blame Bismark for being the troll, but a sensible head of state wouldn't lead a country into disaster for the sake of an insulting tweet telegram.
How about we pay reparations in advance for what North Carolina Republicans are going to do in the next couple of years?
170: Claims 1 and 2 are true, IIRC the last isn't. Maybe more later.
Some of my mother-in-law's relatives moved to Lothringen at the end of the 19th century -- to work in the mines, possibly -- which was apparently quite common. (She snuck across the border to visit and smuggle in some sausages -- the food situation there was worse than Germany -- just after WWII.) Between that and attending a funeral my brother-in-law's Alsatian wife's family -- country people who spoke Elsaessich -- I'm having no trouble at all thinking of folks on each side of the border as pretty much the same. Down at the lowest level, anyway.
I've mentioned before that for decades (centuries?) an international boundary passed between my wife's hometown and her mother's hometown 3 km away. Countries now long forgotten.
(NB I've just spent 4 days in Canada, so nationalism is kind of funny.)
169: People talk about denazification as if it had been an enormous success, but jfc was demilitarization orders of magnitude more successful. It wasn't just Prussian militarism that got eradicated, it was Prussia itself. There are only the faintest institutional echoes left of a state that re-shaped Europe for several centuries. There's the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz (they use the German name on the English part of their web site, sorry), the Prussian Foundation for Palaces and Gardens in Berlin-Brandenburg, two soccer clubs whose names include a Latinized form of Prussia. And That's It.
Well most of it was annexed to Poland and the USSR, and the Junker estates with it; and the remainder in the GDR. Anyone want to annex Alabama?
For better or worse, Alabama hasn't played anything like the role in American history that Prussia did in German history. But if we did want to get rid of it, the country with the closest historic ties is France.
Well most of it was annexed to Poland and the USSR, and the Junker estates with it; and the remainder in the GDR
Prussia's territory in 1932 extended all the way to the Rhine and even onto the other, western bank in places. The Ruhr was in Prussia. About two-thirds of Germans lived in Prussia.
The federal states of Niedersachsen* and Nordrhein-Westfalen in ex-West Germany were created entirely out of Prussian territory when the Allied Control Commission abolished Prussia in 1947 in an occupation order signed by none other than Labour Party icon Herbert Morrison after the Attlee cabinet authorised him to do so.
*The name is almost a troll - in creating it, we were reversing the long rise of Prussia versus Saxony as the major state in northern Germany, an idea the French floated after WW1 but didn't get to implement.
We did send all the Nazi rocket scientists to Alabama.
181: where they were apparently quite shocked at the level of racism on display.
158 is plausible (and source would be welcome, for curiosity)
I believe it was in one of the later chapters of Peter Wilson's massive doorstop history of the thirty years war.
I have been making a good faith effort to read that but my god I got to about chapter 10 and the war had still not started and we were still learning about the administrative structure of the Holy Roman Empire and frankly there is a limit to how many Kreises and Bunds and Freistadts I can take.
You could try reading Habermas. Everything is a page-turning thriller after that.
177: Historical Prussia was basically ethnically cleansed of Germans.
They all went to Alabama, thus lowering the average level of racism in both places.
CV Wedgwood is far more readable, far more portable, shorter, and available in a lovely Folio Society edition for a very reasonable price.
Oh, on the subject: "How the War was Won" is great. Thanks Alex.
we were still learning about the administrative structure of the Holy Roman Empire
You're in luck, since he's now written a massive doorstop book about that. All Kreises and Bunds and Freistadts all the time!
my god I got to about chapter 10 and the war had still not started and we were still learning about the administrative structure of the Holy Roman Empire and frankly there is a limit to how many Kreises and Bunds and Freistadts I can take
I like my history the way I like my women: more action, less foreplay.
In fairness, I had that exact same experience with Wilson. I'll try again soon. Wedgwood is really old, and I understand the field has moved forward greatly. No doubt she's right on the narrative, but the interpretation will suffer.
I like my history the way I like my women
...accessible, easy to interpret, and slim enough to be carried easily.
I'm sure Wedgwood is out of date, but still a good read.
180: Ok, fine, be like that. You know what I mean. To what extent was the Prussian military class not from historic Prussia, in the east?
I like my history like I like my women:
Thick, dense, and about 50 years out of date.
...articulate, contrarian, but not gratuitously iconoclastic.
A little crunchy, plenty of surprises, and just a little more than I can manage.
Or you can just read my 1500 words or so on Wedgwood.
http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/05/05/the-thirty-years-war-by-c-v-wedgwood/
tl;dr on the book, if not on the war, "The book itself is clear and, at just over 500 pages, as concise as can be expected."
194: The Red Army did most of that job. Then the Nazis helped after July 20, 1944.
I've read at least two entire books on that war and have only the vaguest sense of wtf happened.
Wedgwood is certainly the place to start for someone curious about the subject. I think a pre-established confirmed interest in the topic is necessary for someone to make it all the way through Wilson's mammoth tome.
198.3: Indeed. "Clear" and "as concise as can be expected" are pretty much the opposite of the war itself.
199 to 192/5
I like the Red Army in 1944 like I like my women:
Underfed and drunk on rubbing alcohol.
I like the Red Army in 1944 like I like my women:
How many Red Armies (circa 1944) are there to chose from?
I like my women like I like army group centre: enclosing my front
Somewhere of my left shoulder I have the Cambridge modern history of the thirty years' war. That's the one in which Gustavus Adolphus could do no wrong because he rescued the Protestant cause. You're probably safer with wedgewood.
But if merely being wrong were a disqualification for a historian no one would read Gibbon or Hume-the-historian. That would be a huge loss.
Somewhere of my left shoulder I have the Cambridge modern history of the thirty years' war.
That is one hell of a tattoo.
The Christopher Clark Prussia book (the Iron Kingdom) is really, really good. In my top 5 history books I've read in the past 10 years, for sure. It's mildly pro-Prussian, or at least anti-anti-Prussian. One of the points that it makes is that the primary killers-off of Prussia as an independent entity were reunification and especially the Nazis. When it was abolished as an independent federal entity in 1934 it was the primary site if insitutuonal resistance to the Nazi regime and had long been governed by the SPD (to be sure while consisting of most of Germany including the Rhineland, not just historic Prussia, which in any event didn't include Berlin, but, but). Of course some Junkers confirmed the stereotype but the story is way more complicated.
207: Gibbon should be disqualified for his overuse of nested clauses. (I kid. It's beautiful writing, despite being so out of style.)
209: I once saw a woman with the whole of St. Paul's "Love is..." thing on her thigh. Much shorter and still pretty hard to read at a respectful distance.
I like my clauses the way I like my women: nested, elaborate, and voluminous.
OT: Roy Moore for Senate: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/undisclosed-deal-guaranteed-roy-moore-180000-a-year-for-part-time-work-at-charity/2017/10/11/5f56679e-a9de-11e7-850e-2bdd1236be5d_story.html?tid=pm_pop&utm_term=.79a98048bc29
I probably could have done that better.
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Um, have people seen Eminem's rap on Trump?
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216: Worth the time. (NSFW)