Re: Made in China

From: Michael Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Wed Apr 18 2001 - 13:34:01 MDT


Mike Linksvayer wrote:
>
> On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 10:21:48AM -0400, Michael Lorrey wrote:
> > The North waged war on the South primarily to provide cheap labor for
> > northern factories in the form of 'freed' slaves.
>
> That's one I haven't heard. I suspect you would've been hard
> pressed to find a white northerner of any stripe who wanted to see
> a migration of blacks into the north. Most had no intention of
> ending slavery anything but very gradually, as it had ended over
> the previous half-century or so in northern states.

There was already migration of blacks to the north well underway prior
to the Fugitive Slave Act. While free blacks were treated as poorly as
Irish and Italian immigrants at the time, the northern upper class had
no trouble employing them, their problem was in socialising with them.
The FSA stripped the north of free blacks, either by forcing them into
Canada or else shipping them back south, which led to a labor shortage
in the north. Not so much that an uptick in immigration wouldn't fix it
(and French Canadian immigration did pick up at this time), but enough
to teach northern industrialists the value of cheap minority labor.

Of course, fighting a war over labor supply is a crass and unhonorable
thing to do. It obviously needed to be prettied up to be sensitive to
their sensitive Brahmin/Quaker noses.

>
> The north's reasons for waging war to prevent secession include
> mostly bad ones (as "paloeolibertarians" love to point out, though
> I'd be hard pressed to name a war not fought mostly for bad reasons),
> though the south's primary reason for firing the first shots was
> simple: preserve slavery. Read the letters and oratory of
> pro-secession southern politicians as the campaign for secession
> was under way: the arguments are all about protecting huge investments
> in slaves, protecting women and children from supposedly barbaric
> Africans, and protecting the southern economy and way of life,
> which they believed, or argued anyway, could not exist without
> slavery.
>
> And the reason the south seceded in 1861? They lost control of
> the federal government, which they had a lock on for nearly all
> of the nation's short history up to that point. VERY quickly
> pro-slavery southerners switched from using arguments for federal
> power to enforce slavery to using state's rights arguments to
> maintain slavery. Most unfortunate, as mostly-meritorious arguments
> for devolution of power are now tarred with racism in the US.

Funny how that is, while states rights arguments against the Fugitive
Slave Act are ignored because it offends the Democrat agenda.

>
> See http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?20010412028R
> for a review of some recent books on these topics.
>
> > > * Affirmative action and "multiculturalism" are undermining western
> > > civilization
> >
> > Which I agree with entirely.
>
> I'm no fan of AA and perhaps not of multicultralism depending upon
> how it's defined, though I'd say western civilization is much more
> resilient than to be threatened by giving special privileges to
> small minorities. After all it survived for almost its entire
> history giving special privileges to roughly half the population
> (men) and expositing racial theories at least as bogus and destructive
> as today's most virulent "multiculturalist", so defined as to
> include such people.

That depends on your opinions of those who received special priviledges.
Tis a pity that a woman's sole sense of honor revolved around her
virginity, perhaps they'd generally be far better citizens if they were
included under US Code Title X from the moment women's sufferage was
enacted.

>
> > > For reasons I do not understand paleos fawn over wholly inconsistent
> > > cultural conservatives, curmudgeonly kooks, and Pat Buchanan while
> > > castigating mere economic conservatives and culturally liberal
> > > libertarians as handmaidens of the fall, more or less.
> >
> > Well, I don't fawn over any cultural conservative, or kooks, and I
> > despise Pat Buchanan. So you need to come up with another theory...
>
> I can't find any record of you calling yourself a paleolibertarian
> either.

I am a libertarian, and I have been called a neanderthal before, so I
assumed that it was implied.



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