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steve2470

(37,457 posts) Sat Sep 6, 2014, 12:09 PM Sep 2014

Economist article alleges slavery wasn't all bad

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/national/economist-article-alleges-slavery-wasnt-all-bad/nhHCQ/

The Economist has been getting an earful after it published a book review claiming a book unfairly portrayed slave owners. Yeah, you heard me right.

The article published Thursday is a review on Edward Baptist's book, "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism."

This is the line that has people particularly fired up: "Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy."

The Economist didn't waste any time in getting out an apology Friday morning. "There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so. Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil."

WTF.

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Economist article alleges slavery wasn't all bad (Original Post) steve2470 Sep 2014 OP

By common observance PATRICK Sep 2014 #1

PATRICK

(12,228 posts)

1. By common observance

Reply to steve2470 (Original post)

Sat Sep 6, 2014, 12:26 PM

Sep 2014

in the days of slavery, the effect on whites themselves was also evil, degrading the whites, impeding society and progress. Simply crossing a river showed ill effects on white society making it backward and fearful and divided from the rest of the nation.

The "benefits" of slavery can be reverse argued with implacable logic as an indictment on the economic system itself- whether it subsists by the forced unemployment of a certain percent of the population or the entitlements of the upward flow of wealth in a legally enforced and hypocritically regulated Ponzi pyramid. And all the squeezing, insecurity and unjustices in between.

If money exists and has value for its own sake, where corporations are the only Uber citizens, then we are all slaves to our real failure anyway.

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