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Tuesday, April 14, 2020

One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

The 1619 Project posits that American history began with slavery

writes Reason Magazine's Cathy Young in the New York Daily News regarding the 1619 project

— the arrival of 20 enslaved Africans in colonial Virginia. But as former Vanderbilt University professor Carol Swain argues in her 1776 Project essay, this narrative is flawed from the start: The Africans were indentured laborers who, like their white counterparts, later gained freedom and sometimes land. Leading black historian Nell Irving Painter also makes this point. Thus, 1619 was the start not only of African bondage in America, but of the free African-American community.

Most contentiously, the 1619 Project asserts that preserving slavery was a principal motive for the American Revolution. … Supporting material mentioned on Twitter by 1619 Project lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones includes University of Houston historian Gerald Horne’s 2014 book, “The Counterrevolution of 1776.” But that volume is riddled with errors — e.g., a 1774 pro-Crown, pro-slavery pamphlet is misattributed to a revolutionary — and Horne is a career Communist propagandist who defends Stalinism. … Hannah-Jones has downplayed the connection …

The real story of slavery and the American Founding is full of paradox. The Revolution’s anti-tyranny rhetoric kindled abolitionist fervor; the British offer of freedom to slaves who fought for the Crown stoked fear of slave revolts. Supporters of the 1619 Project note that the Declaration of Independence referenced such fears, assailing King George for inciting “domestic insurrections amongst us.” Yet the same passage originally included a powerful condemnation of Britain’s promotion of slavery — later dropped to placate slaveholders.

The Revolution’s [immediate] aftermath saw abolition in the North, but also a slavery-enabling Constitution and rollbacks in the rights of free blacks — a shameful betrayal of “all men are created equal.”

Still, the revolutionary spirit of that message remained. It almost certainly helped end slavery in the Western world. It scared slaveholders like Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, who repudiated the Founders as anti-slavery believers in “equality of races.” It inspired abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, who saw it as a goal to fight for.

The 1619 Project admirably stresses black Americans’ role in that fight — but asserts that “for the most part [they] fought back alone,” an inaccurate and polarizing claim that erases the very real history of interracial solidarity.

In a later-deleted snarky Twitter rejoinder to the 1776 Project, Hannah-Jones wondered why any African-Americans would embrace “the year revolutionaries decided to form a new country where you and your people would have been enslaved for another 100 years.” But the dissenters — conservatives like Swain and activist Robert Woodson, but also liberals like Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Clarence Page, scholar and author John McWhorter, Columbia University philosophy student and writer Coleman Hughes — believe that the heritage of 1776, of a political order based on the then-radical principle of inalienable human rights, belongs to all Americans. They deserve to be heard.

RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

• From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!), An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

• Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise

• The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be"

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• Mary Beth Norton: In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

• Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

• "Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• The Secret About the Black Lives Matter Outfit; In Fact, Its Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

• Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

Monday, April 13, 2020

John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

In the New York Post's Twisted History section, John Podhoretz tells the paper's readers "What the NYT’s 1619 Project aims to teach your kids":

“An informed citizenry is the bulwark of our democracy.” The words, attributed to Thomas Jefferson, raise an important question: What are the consequences to our democracy of a misinformed citizenry?

That is the question we parents of school-age children must ask about The New York Times’ 1619 Project. Its overall theme is that “out of slavery grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system.”

This distorted reading is an educational virus, engineered to infect schoolchildren and warp their understanding of our history — to make that history seem poisonous and evil rather than complex, tragic and noble.

The Pulitzer Center (not related to the Pulitzer Prizes) has designed an entire curriculum based on 1619: “The 1619 Project is more than a magazine issue. It’s a national conversation that demands analysis, reflection and insight from students.”

The material invites students to “come together as a class to create a new timeline of US history. Your timeline should start with the year 1619; work with your classmates to order the rest of the events you compiled.” Yes, students who don’t know anything about US history are being tasked to “create a new timeline” of it. This is what propaganda is. This is what propaganda does.

What exactly is being propagandized here? If the root fact of the United States is slavery rather than a centuries-long and tortuous journey toward a new nation, based, for the first time in human history, in liberty — then the country is irredeemable, likely beyond salvation.

Futzing around with history to serve present-day fashions is an enduring feature of the ideologically warped. But the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith.

It incriminates generations who bear no guilt. No one now living was alive when slavery existed, and enormous numbers of Americans didn’t have forebears here when it did. I am one of maybe 100 million people whose ancestors came to this country long after slavery was abolished. How exactly are people like me implicated?

The 1619 argument is that America became an economic powerhouse largely if not exclusively because of slavery, and, therefore, slavery was the lure that led my grandparents to immigrate here. A key academic text used to further that argument, Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told,” claims that 50 percent of all economic activity in the United States in 1836 was due to slavery.

But as the eminent historian Wilfred McClay points out, Baptist’s figure is based on statistical bungling, and the correct number should have been closer to 5 percent, rather than 50. “Now, 5 percent is not an insignificant amount by any means,” McClay grants, “but it’s vastly different from half.”

… The Times project is an effort to alter the composition of the culture’s amniotic fluid, to bathe its most innocent creatures in something they will have no way of knowing is a slander.

The effort is led by a massive corporation comfortably housing writers who are preaching the villainy of the United States on six-digit salaries. What we have here are people at the summit of the elite talking without irony about the injustices of the nation that has garlanded them with fame, influence and power.

In misinforming the citizenry and thereby making it vastly more difficult for parents to raise their children as proud Americans who must continue the great experiment in liberty that began in 1776, the elite hypocrites behind the 1619 Project are damaging the very republic that has made them first among equals.

• The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be"

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

Sunday, April 12, 2020

Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice.

It isn’t an overstatement to describe The New York Times’ 1619 Project as a journalistic declaration of war against America

accuse the Claremont Institute's Ryan P. Williams and Matthew J. Peterson in the New York Post regarding the Twisted History that is the 1619 project

Many of the project’s historical claims are downright fabrications — but in the most decisive respect, that’s beside the point.

The project’s leader, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has tried to brush off the criticism of many distinguished historians by claiming that such disagreement is how historiography always proceeds — as we learn progressively more, a new “narrative” challenges old ones.

The 1619 Project, however, isn’t about new historical scholarship, and insofar as journalism is about the quest for truth, it isn’t quite journalism, either. As eminent scholars and stalwart liberals, such as Princeton University’s Sean Wilentz, have pointed out, the project makes utterly preposterous claims — above all, the notion that protecting slavery was a central motivation in launching the Revolutionary War and thus the American project.

Make no mistake — 1619 is a political project, aimed at piercing the heart of the US regime by overturning the American understanding of justice. As James Madison said, “Justice is the end of government,” it is “the end of civil society.” We seek justice “until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” To transform America, you have first to destroy its understanding of justice.

American justice is based on the understanding that while we are all unequal in many respects — talents, beauty, strength, discipline and so on — our fundamental equality as human beings means that all citizens should be treated equally under the law. And law should be ordered toward the common good of all, rather than classes or groups.

… 1619’s cynical ploy is to write these principles out of America’s story by tracing all of our prosperity and success to slavery’s introduction and perpetuation. But 1619 goes even further. It attempts to transform the principle at the center of America’s Founding into the handmaid of slavery — rather than slavery’s eventual moral and constitutional stumbling block.

The new moral and philosophical foundation for America envisioned by 1619 is based on the abandonment of the individual equality of rights under the law for a racial and identity politics based on group rights. These groups are to be arranged in a new caste system based on the groups’ varying histories of oppression and their possession of more or less “privilege.”

When we adopt identity politics, the identity and the good of our group ultimately defines us, rather than our citizenship and individual humanity — an affront to the vision of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and civil-rights champions such as Martin Luther King.

If the Times and the cultural elites who are promoting 1619 manage to hang racism and slavery around the neck of America’s colorblind Founding principles, those principles will be further delegitimized in our public discourse. That, in turn, will create ideological space for the fundamental transformation of America’s regime.

Abraham Lincoln once said that if America were to be defeated, it would be by suicide from forces within rather than by conquest from without. The 1619 Project is the latest manifestation of an ideology that will destroy us from within — if we don’t sound the alarm and act.

Every American and every political leader — from the local school board to the national legislature — must start thinking creatively and acting aggressively to deny the 1619 Project legitimacy and efficacy. What is at stake is nothing less than the dissolution of America.

• The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be"

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

Saturday, April 11, 2020

Mary Beth Norton: In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

Following his in-depth talks with the WSWS's Tom Mackaman regarding the 1619 project, Gordon Wood now brings us a book review in the Wall Street Journal for Mary Beth Norton's new book, 1774.

Gordon Wood … professor emeritus at Brown University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, as well as Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, and dozens of other books and articles on the colonial period, the American Revolution and the early republic.

[In her account of the long year 1774, from the Boston Tea Party in December 1773 to the outbreak of hostilities in April 1775,] Mary Beth Norton, in her new book, “1774,” … shows conclusively that the scales had been tipped in favor of independence long before [Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, issued his November 1775 proclamation, offering freedom to any enslaved person fleeing to the British army—a military expedient only]. Ms. Norton, who is professor of history at Cornell and a former president of the American Historical Association, does not fundamentally challenge the traditional trajectory of events in that decisive year. What she does do is enrich the narrative, filling in the story with a staggering amount of detail based on prodigious research in an enormous number of archives.

… for Ms. Norton this is the point of her book. She wants to re-create as much as possible the past reality of this momentous year in all of its particularity. Only then, she suggests, will we come to appreciate the complexity of what happened and to understand all of the conflicts, divisions and confusion that lay behind events, like the Tea Party, that historians highlight and simplify. At times she relates events week by week, and occasionally day by day. She seeks to be as inclusive as possible and tries to incorporate all the varying points of view in her narrative. She seems to have read every newspaper in the period, and she delights in describing the give and take of debates between patriots and loyalists that took place in the press.

By the early 1770s, the crisis between Great Britain and its colonies that had begun with the Stamp Act in 1765 seemed to have eased. Faced with mobs and boycotts of British goods, the British government had twice backed away from trying to tax the colonists. It had repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, and, in 1770, it had withdrawn the Townshend duties, keeping only the duty on tea as a symbol of Britain’s authority to tax the colonists. This proved to be a big mistake.

… Ms. Norton painstakingly describes the colonists’ emerging opposition to the imported tea. … On Dec. 16, 1773, the night before the tea was to be unloaded and taxed, a band of men disguised as “Mohawks” threw 342 chests containing more than 46 tons of tea worth more than £9,000 into Boston Harbor. This became the famous “Tea Party.” … Many colonists outside of New England worried that the hot-headed Bostonians were much too rash and violent.

But, of course, the British government came to the rescue of the Bostonians’ reputation. British leaders were furious at the destruction of the tea. They had for far too long appeased the colonists, repealing acts of Parliament and retreating at every sign of colonial opposition. It was high time, the government declared, to show the colonists the power the British nation could wield over its dependencies.

The British government passed a series of acts—acts that were so severe, so uncompromising, so drastic, that they fundamentally altered the imperial debate and forever changed the relationship between Britain and its colonies. The government closed the port of Boston, ordered Thomas Hutchinson back to England, and appointed a military general, Thomas Gage, as the new royal governor of Massachusetts.

The closing of the port of Boston shocked all the colonists, but Virginians especially. They had been upset at the clandestine destruction of private property, but the British reaction was too much to take. George Washington declared that “the cause of Boston. . . now is and ever will be considered as the cause of America.” Many colonists suggested a meeting of all the colonies to deal with the crisis.

The British government followed with two more acts that made matters worse. … The other colonies realized at once that, if Britain could coerce Massachusetts in this outrageous manner, it could do the same to them. … the fever was spreading. No one, [General Thomas Gage] later reported, could have imagined that the acts designed for Massachusetts alone “could have created such a ferment throughout the continent and united the whole in one common cause.”

As the colonies gathered together in a Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September 1774, New Englanders were actually preparing to fight. When a rumor spread that British troops had killed some Bostonians, as many as 20,000 men from various parts of New England mobilized to march on Boston before they learned that the rumor was false. Although Americans in the other colonies were not as jittery as the New Englanders, many realized that the imperial relationship was disintegrating.

… In her detailed descriptions of these debates, Ms. Norton always gives a fair hearing to the views of the loyalists.

The Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia could not have reversed the massive transfer of authority taking place in the localities, even if it had wanted to. The Congress simply recognized the new local authorities and gave them its blessing.

… In January 1775 the colonists learned of the king’s response to their appeal for a redress of their grievances. In his speech to the opening of Parliament, George III put an end to the hopes of many colonists for reconciliation. He spoke of the “most daring spirit of resistance, and disobedience to the law” in Massachusetts and the way in which “fresh violences” there had been “countenanced and encouraged” by the other colonies. He told the Parliament of the determination of his government to uphold its authority.

His ministry sent military reinforcements to Boston and ordered Gen. Gage to use force against the Massachusetts rebels if necessary. The British government thought it was dealing with “a rude rabble” that had no substantial backing in the colony and could be put down with ease. Given this kind of misperception of reality, it was inevitable that a military clash would occur, as it did on April 19 in Lexington and Concord.

“By April 19, 1775,” concludes Ms. Norton, “Americans had not yet formally adopted a Declaration of Independence, but their leaders had long since practiced independence in thought and deed.” The colonists didn’t need Tom Paine in his “Common Sense” of January 1776 to tell them that the time was ripe for breaking away from Great Britain. In 1774 Americans had already in fact become independent, as Ms. Norton’s book makes only too clear. And never once in her detailed account of that long year does she declare that the protection of slavery had anything to do with bringing about that independence.

See also Tom Mackaman's previous Interview with Gordon Wood on the American Revolution

RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be"

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

Friday, April 10, 2020

The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out, they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

400 years ago, the first Africans who came to America were not ‘enslaved’, they were indentured

writes Nell Irvin Painter in the Guardian as the black historian discusses basic mistakes within the 1619 project

– and this makes a crucial difference when we think about the meanings of our past

… People were not enslaved in Virginia in 1619, they were indentured. The 20 or so Africans were sold and bought as “servants” for a term of years, and they joined a population consisting largely of European indentured servants, mainly poor people from the British Isles whom the Virginia Company of London had transported and sold into servitude.

Enslavement was a process that took place step by step, after the mid-17th century. This process of turning “servants” from Africa into racialized workers enslaved for life occurred in the 1660s to 1680s through a succession of Virginia laws that decreed that a child’s status followed that of its mother and that baptism did not automatically confer emancipation. By the end of the seventeenth century, Africans had indeed been marked off by race in law as chattel to be bought, sold, traded, inherited and serve as collateral for business and debt services. This was not already the case in 1619.

… Even in 1700, Africans were hardly the only unfree colonists, for a majority of those laboring in Virginia were people bound to service. They were indentured whites.

… In short, the 1619 Africans were not “enslaved”. They were townspeople in the Ndongo district of Angola who had been captured by Imbangala warlords and delivered to the port of Luanda for shipment to the Americas. Raiding, capturing and selling people was not an exclusively African practice.

Raiding for captives to sell belongs to a long human history that knows no boundaries of time, place or race. This business model unites the ninth-12th-century Vikings who made Dublin western Europe’s largest slave market (think of St Patrick, who had been enslaved by Irish raiders in the fifth century) and 10th-16th-century Cossacks who delivered eastern European peasants to the Black Sea market at Tana for shipment to the wealthy eastern Mediterranean. The earliest foreign policy of the new United States of America targeted the raiders of the Barbary Coast who engaged in a lively slave trade in Europeans (think Robinson Crusoe). Sadly, the phenomenon of warlords who prey on peasants knows no boundaries of time or place.

There’s more to Virginia history, of course, than bondage. There’s freedom, not only after the American civil war, but also in the 17th century, when an Angolan man called Antonio, arriving in Virginia in 1621, became Anthony Johnson, a wealthy free farmer and slave-owning planter in Northampton and Accomack counties. His immediate descendants prospered. His eighteenth-century descendants, living within a hardened racial regime, did not. It is in the eighteenth century that we find the more familiar, hardened boundaries of racialized American identity.

… Within this [American] ideology of race, the Jamestown Africans of 1619 are always already enslaved, so that seeing the 1619 Africans and their descendants as slaves seals them within the permanent identity of enslavement. It says Africans and their descendants are the same as slaves.

Scholars call this kind of thinking “essentialist”– you are intrinsically what you always must be. When enslavement is the essence of black identity, black people cannot figure as American working men and women who play an active role in American history. It is the “settlers” that is, non-Africans, who forge “the timeless traits of the American character”. They, not African workers, belong to the crucial core of this version of American history. …

• The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be"

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

Thursday, April 09, 2020

RT France TV Interviews a Conservative Blogger Regarding the Virus and the 2020 Election

A conservative blogger from No Pasarán was interviewed Thursday on RT France (thanks to KC) regarding the coronavirus and the 2020 election.

Retrait de #Sanders : «Les démocrates ne veulent pas d’un socialiste parmi eux» selon Erik Svane#BernieSanders #Démocrates #EtatsUnis @ErikSvane pic.twitter.com/wglUQvt82a
— RT France (@RTenfrancais) April 9, 2020