rigorousintuition.ca

publius wrote:As for South Africa, the ANC has a problem of triabalism and crony corruption.

So what? How is that responsive to the observation that the ANC did not fucking originate racial conflict in South Africa?

Apartheid. Heard of it?

Sounder wrote:The thing about insisting on maintaining slavery as a dominant frame for understanding the CW is that it belittles other causal influences. Perhaps slavery was a major aspect, but publius and anyone else ought to also examine other causal elements freely and without the imputed baggage of them being in support of slavery because they choose to leave slavery out of their analysis.

I tried to make a similar point over at AD’s TIDS thread. The point was made clearly and without rancor as a suggestion for a different flavor of causal chain.

AD’s putting me on ignore right after this is another indicator, to me anyway, that AD has more interest thinking he knows what is going on, than he has an actual interest about what is going on. That is, he is a slave to empty forms and cares nothing about the essence or the actual causal drivers of any given category.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32959&start=345

poke a statist and get tarred with all manner of thought-crime.

some people think some people (usually people like themselves) are fit to govern others. whether they're of the left or right doesn't really matter.

*

vanlose kid wrote:

Sounder wrote:The thing about insisting on maintaining slavery as a dominant frame for understanding the CW is that it belittles other causal influences. Perhaps slavery was a major aspect, but publius and anyone else ought to also examine other causal elements freely and without the imputed baggage of them being in support of slavery because they choose to leave slavery out of their analysis.

I tried to make a similar point over at AD’s TIDS thread. The point was made clearly and without rancor as a suggestion for a different flavor of causal chain.

AD’s putting me on ignore right after this is another indicator, to me anyway, that AD has more interest thinking he knows what is going on, than he has an actual interest about what is going on. That is, he is a slave to empty forms and cares nothing about the essence or the actual causal drivers of any given category.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32959&start=345

poke a statist and get tarred with all manner of thought-crime.

some people think some people (usually people like themselves) are fit to govern others. whether they're of the left or right doesn't really matter.

*

ditto. the thread was interesting when it started but successfully got pulled into gutter. instead of exploring the constitution and its connection to corporate interest it became "you support slavery, no I don't, yes you do, no I don't", etc...

C2W, The race problem of Soth Africa is not as big problem as you seem to think: South Africa: The Grand Disillusion http://www.archipelagobooks.org/page.php?id=12

publius wrote:England had a slave population abroad and they ended slavery.

Yes. I know. That doesn't make England itself a country that can be compared with the United States in terms of how well it handled racism after abolition. Because, unlike the United States, England did not have a large population of freed slaves after abolition.

There aren't actually that many white-ruled countries with significant black populations some or all of whom were formerly slaves. That's why I chose South Africa. There's a pretty long stretch of history in the British Virgin Islands that might also kind of qualify. But the British Virgin Islands aren't a sovereign nation the native culture of which was expunged and/or suppressed by western imperialists to the extent that South Africa and the United States are. So South Africa is probably the best comparison culture there is. Canada didn't have much involvement with the Atlantic Slave Trade, although it did have slavery.

We could discuss serfdom, but that was not slavery.

If you mean serfdom in Imperial Russia, it was close enough. But I agree that comparing the freeing of the serfs in Russia to the emancipation of slaves in the United States wouldn't yield many useful insights.

Had you read the post on Lincoln's Republicans I think your view would change.

I did read it. The reason it didn't change my views is that it's insanely revisionist.

Tariff's caused the war.

No. They didn't. That's absurd. The seceding states were quite, quite clear in stating that the conflict was over slavery.

The Union could live with slavery.

In order to avoid disunion and war, the northern and western states (later the Union) made every attempt to accommodate the continuation of slavery in the southern states (later the Confederacy). So you could certainly say that they would have preferred to live with slavery in the south than go to war over it.

But it's flatly untrue that they could "live with slavery" in the plain sense suggested by that phrasing -- ie, that they were A-OK with and had no problems with it. Slavery was generally regarded as an abomination by most of the 19th-century Christian west. And by 1861, it had already been legally abolished in every precinct of it outside of the United States apart from Brazil.

WRT how well the states that later fought on the Union side could live with slavery:

* Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana were all free states before there even were any states (ie -- both before the Constitution was ratified, and also before they stopped being part of the Northwest Territory and became states, which they variously did between 1788 and 1848).

* New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Rhode Island all abolished slavery within five or six years of ratification.

* Maine, Iowa, California, Minnesota, Oregon and Kansas all entered the union as free states between 1820 and 1861.

And....I appear to be missing two of the twenty states that had already abolished (or never had) slavery by the time they joined the Union.

But you get the point. Apart from the power-and-wealth elites that dominated the eleven states in the Confederacy, plus their less wealthy and powerful counterparts in the five slave states that fought for the Union, there was just about nobody in the world who could truly have been said to be just fine living with slavery at the time of the Civil War.

Because, to the great credit of humanity in general, it had been a painful and divisive issue virtually since the inception of the Atlantic Slave Trade.

The Federal government being starved of revenue though-this cannot stand.

The issue was disunion.

publius wrote:It is not so much admiration for slave owners as the self determination of the South to free their politics from the North.

I see. What distinguishes it as uniquely more admirable than the self-determination of the ANC to free their politics from those of the apartheid government? Or the self-determination of the American revolutionaries to free their politics from those of the British Empire? Or the self-determination of the Haitian slaves to free themselves from their owners? Or the self-determination of the Bosheviks to free their politics from both Imperial power and the interests of their fellow revolutionaries (and most of the rest of the population of pre-revolutionary Russia)?

Or, if you want to confine it to failed attempts to achieve political self-determination in the United States, the actions of the AIM?

Exactly?

publius wrote:That is why this was the wrong war to fight. Only the War State won that war.

There was no war state. The Confederacy started a war.

publius wrote:C2W, The race problem of Soth Africa is not as big problem as you seem to think: South Africa: The Grand Disillusion http://www.archipelagobooks.org/page.php?id=12

There's not one word at the other end of that link that suggests that race was not and is not a huge problem in South Africa. It's about the ANC having failed to correct the massive problems created by the 150 years of apartheid that followed two horrendously bloody wars that followed several centuries of European colonialism in seventeen years.

Further, I didn't say anything about how big a problem race was in South Africa, although (obviously) it's a huge problem. What I said was that the ANC did not originate it. And you still haven't acknowledged apartheid. I notice.

vanlose kid wrote:

Sounder wrote:The thing about insisting on maintaining slavery as a dominant frame for understanding the CW is that it belittles other causal influences. Perhaps slavery was a major aspect, but publius and anyone else ought to also examine other causal elements freely and without the imputed baggage of them being in support of slavery because they choose to leave slavery out of their analysis.

I tried to make a similar point over at AD’s TIDS thread. The point was made clearly and without rancor as a suggestion for a different flavor of causal chain.

AD’s putting me on ignore right after this is another indicator, to me anyway, that AD has more interest thinking he knows what is going on, than he has an actual interest about what is going on. That is, he is a slave to empty forms and cares nothing about the essence or the actual causal drivers of any given category.

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... &start=345

poke a statist and get tarred with all manner of thought-crime.

some people think some people (usually people like themselves) are fit to govern others. whether they're of the left or right doesn't really matter.

*

FWIW, I am fighting for historical truth, and not the governance of some by others. And I accuse nobody of any thought crime. There's no such thing, afaic.

Well let me see. Apartheid ended. ANC took over an intact prosperous country and ran it in the ground. As the link explains, the ANC has issues. Prosperity does a lot to ameliorate hostility between racial groups. As does education. Political corruption does not.

I think we are just seeing the CW from different perspectives. Evidently your and others position suggests that the moral idealism of the North required the South with it's slaves to be crushed by the pious Northern government as the Mormons had previously. A perpetual union enforced by war.

How ironic that the South left over the tariff and Republican one party rule. The very thing they feared from remaining in the union occured because they tried to leave it. Not that much unlike the War of the American Rebellion. Ironic also that it is the Declaration of Indpendence cited constantly by Lincoln and not the Constitution. Virgina and several other states kept the right of secession in their admission to the union. Until the war, the presumption was that states could leave the union. Do you recall Herbet Spencer? He expressed anxiety lest the state should by violence force the individual to submit to it. The South was a seperate region so comparing them to revolutionary movements does not work. That is, they had no interest in imposing their rule on the North. They wanted independence and self determination and of course slavery, and of course trade and no tariff. The North had to impose it's rule on the South-not due to slavery-but due to money. This is not very idealistic. It is however quite PRAGMATIC. Yes and only a few years later a Mr. William James comes along and taking Hume's idea of a philosophy of values-we need convictions to help us live and in regards to which we do not ask if they are true but are they necessary for our life-strips out ethics and simply says any idea that helps me is true.

Moral idealism is not a sufficent cause for this war. The absence of income for the Federal government and the fact that Southern ports would get the trade is a sufficent reason. After all, everyone thought slavery would vanish soon. So I place slavery as maybe a 3d reason or 4th

compared2what? wrote:

publius wrote:O how about England. South Africa is a bad example because the ANC is stuck on stupid.

England never had much of a slave population at home. None of the Western European/Christian countries did. It was a New World/colonial phenomenon.

So England is not just a bad example, it's simply not an example. Besides which, South Africa's racial issues weren't fucking originated by the ANC.

Well apart from the Irish of course AFAIK the first slaves in the West Indies were Irish rather than African.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in ... nd_Ireland

Following the Irish uprising in 1641 and subsequent Cromwellian invasion, the English Parliament passed the Act for the Settlement of Ireland in 1652 which classified the Irish population into one of several categories according to their degree of involvement in the uprising and subsequent war. Those who had participated in the uprising or assisted the rebels in any way were sentenced to be hanged and to have their property confiscated. Other categories of the Irish population were sentenced to banishment with whole or partial confiscation of their estates. Whilst the majority of the resettlement took place within Ireland to the province of Connaught, Dr William Petty, Physician-General to Cromwell's Army, estimated that as many as 100,000 Irish men, women and children were transported to the colonies in the West Indies and in North America as indentured servants.[14]

With England, slavery was about business and / or punishment. In some other areas, it was about booty and about military recruitment. For example the Mamluk Empire in Eqypt was based on slaves who were harvested from all over Central Asia, Crimea, The Caucasus, Middle East.
The heroic Beybars, who stopped the Mongols in Palestine, was a slave captured as a boy in Crimea and worked his way up the ranks.
Hundreds of years leter, the Ottoman Empire built an elite fighting force called the Jannisaries from slaves taken by the Crimean Tatar khanate (whose expression for their slavery expeditions was 'the harvesting of The Steppe" ). Three quarters of the Crimean Khanates population was slaves.
One of the great figures in Turkish history was a Ukrainian slave girl who the Sultan Suleiman The Magnificent fell in love with and ended up being freed and becoming his wife and virtual co-ruler - the amazing Roxalana.

publius wrote:Well let me see. Apartheid ended. ANC took over an intact prosperous country and ran it in the ground. As the link explains, the ANC has issues. Prosperity does a lot to ameliorate hostility between racial groups. As does education. Political corruption does not.

Wow, publius- you told us very recently about how you have a long, long history of activism for left wing, internationalist causes.

It's difficult to believe that this describes the extent of your analysis with regards to concepts related to neocolonialism, dependency theory, world-systems analysis and related ideas.

Can't you do a little better than that?

Hah. Words. Men are men in every clime. Melville writes-"It's a wicked world in all meridians."
The ANC fucked up. They self sabotage via corruption. However, this is not at all a-typical in Africa. Many very good African writers from across the continent talk about the problems of their country internally. Political corruption is a constant. In a way this is also because Western ideology does not fit African cultures even as African states too do not fit ethnic groups as they actually exist.


I am fundamentally by temperament an anarchist. No state suits me. No political organization/party fits me. I was very involved in the anti-nuclear movement because I was quite concerned over Western belligerency towards the USSR. I am not a communist, a fascist or a technocrat. I disliked the USSR. In my political work with Central America I wanted the US to stop supplying death squads and Contras and to cease funding blasting and bombarding. In my South African work I was interested in ending US support of apartheid. That apartheid existed and ended does not give the ANC the right to whine. It is their nation. They had goodwill. It can be a very prosperous nation. I think someday Africa will lead the world. The resources are there. Naturally there are obstacles from the existing powers including China, but i suspect the time of the global North is ending.

The fact is that internal causes and external causes combine. Naturally there are force at work hindering progress, but not all of this can be ascribed to the wicked whites.

So that describes the extent of your grasp of principles of political economy?

This from a fellow that cannot tie two thoughts together?

AD, are you doing a parody on intelligence?

One picks words audiences grasp. Always adjust your language to the level of understanding. For you AD i seek only to assure you that I am uninterested in narrowing my thought. I am not progressive, not reactionary, not liberal, not conservative. I simply am not interested in victimology, and I wrote a very nice paper in college on the African Refugee Crisis and First World munitions sales. Naturally food exports play a role in Africa also. Andre Gunder Frank writes all about this. Read him.

The ANC will either destroy itself and a new political coalition emerge or it will reorganize itself internally. Change takes time. While many players are involved in subverting freedom everywhere, they are in the end less powerful than the People. Now that end may require 5,000 years or 500, or Bog willing only another 5 I cannot say.