Oct 20 2009
I Stand With Charles Johnson, And In Total Opposition To Robert Stacy McCain
Addendum: Sadly I have lost one reader I respect a lot. So I want to put some perspective on this decision to make a stand. I grew up amongst a lot of racists during the 60’s and 70’s. They are family members whom I care deeply for, despite their serious short comings. But I can never abide their hate or hold them up as exemplary Americans. Â They are seriously flawed people, to their own detriment.
They are good people – to a point, a tragically limiting point that doesn’t allow their goodness to shine through to all human beings. McCain has friends and family, but he too clearly has tragic limitations as to where any positive side of him will travel. This flaw is his to bear, not mine. And no amount of goodness can offset even one act of racism. He cannot be a standard bearer for conservatism. He has not earned the right.
It is important that we as a people deal with irrational hate front on, and not let it become a cancer in our society. McCain’s own words indicate he is not worthy of respect or following. Those who side with him make their own choices, but first decide if McCain is even worth the commitment. – end addendum
I have seen the blog wars ongoing between Charles Johnson over at LGF and too many top conservative blogs who seem to be backing one Robert Stacy McCain. I am a centrist conservative who tries to be tolerant of differing views. But I have to say I must make a stand here between two camps. One camp promises hope for the conservative movement, the other is a cancer leading to its inevitable death.
I disagree with Johnson on many subjects (e.g, he and I are on opposite sides of the Global Warming debate – but I swear I could demonstrate to him how the science and math are clearly against the alarmists). But we also agree on many other areas (e.g., the mythology of Creationism in its opposition to Evolution and Biology – personally I don’t see why Evolution is anything other than the handwriting of God).
But when I look at what The Other McCain has written over time, I find myself repulsed well beyond my moral limits of tolerance. Anyone who thinks “race” verses “human beings” is off track. Way off track. And anyone who defends slavery is plain insane. LGF noted a detailed analysis of McCain blathering which has pushed me to the point I must make a public stand. Some disturbing excerpts of the thinking of a sick mind:
The problem, you see, is that slavery as an institution rubs roughly against some basic premises of republican government, contrasting the right of liberty to the right of property. It is only to egalitarian or collectivist social theory, really, that we may turn to find a critique of slavery. It was not subject to criticism by the Constitution of 1860, which recognized it. Nor is slavery condemned, per se, in Judeo-Christian scripture. So by the basic political and religious tenets of Americans in 1860, the existence of slavery should have been no evil, had it not been for the egalitarian phraseology of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration, thus, is in direct conflict with the Constitution and Judeo-Christian scripture.
Studying the rise of abolitionism after the Missouri Compromise, I think we should be able to see that it was in mimickry of the British abolition of colonial slavery that the American fanatics came to their position.
Anyone who cannot distinguish between ‘property’ and a ‘human being’ is sick. There is no rub at all. And note those who see humans verses races are simply “American fanatics”.
Certainly, chattel slavery was no ideal economic or social system. [You think?! ~SR] Even many slaveholders such as Thomas Jefferson recognized that by stigmatizing labor, slavery encouraged sloth in both master and slave. Though most 19th-century white Americans, North and South, subscribed to racial theories that consigned blacks to an inferior status as “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” it is incorrect to say that slavery was a system based upon racial hatred. Indeed, both white and black Southerners of the era have left us testimony to the cordial and affectionate relations which generally existed between the races in the Old South.
Warped and sick logic. Slavery is not an “economic system’ it oppression. McCain seems to be saying that love of one’s ‘property’ negates the interest of basic human rights. He continues this madness into other streams of ‘logic’:
Do I expect Pitcavage or Brooks or Epperson to suddenly repent, join their local SCV chapter and start reading Dabney and Calhoun and Davis? No, I fully expect them to continue in their current opposition to Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition, feeding the wolf and hoping to be eaten last.
You need to read the analysis to see that McCain equates “Western Civilization” and the “Judeo-Christian tradition” with these white supremacists. Davis is Jefferson Davis, and there is quote from Davis I can only assume McCain wishes to be a cornerstone of “Western Civilization” and the “Judeo-Christian tradition”:
In the meantime, the African slaves had augmented in number from about 600,000, at the date of the adoption of the constitutional compact, to upward of 4,000,000. In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction. Under the supervision of a superior race their labor had been so directed as not only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of the wilderness into cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people; towns and cities had sprung into existence, and had rapidly increased in wealth and population under the social system of the South
This is not Western Civilization. This is not America. McCain even seems nostalgic to the dark days of slavery in America:
Whipping and branding, Axel? How common were whippings? How common was branding? Did the slave who had proven his dilligence, honesty and trustworthiness — and I think it would be racist to say that slaves were not generally so — really have to face such treatments? I doubt it.
Read the whole thing. And realize the GOP and conservatives cannot be a force of good in today’s America with such Neanderthals holding any place of respect or leadership in the movement. He should go the way of David Duke. One last sick statement from a sick mind:
[T]he media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion. The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us.
I see two human beings sharing their lives. McCain sees races and is repulsed. I have made my decision. I stand with Charles Johnson, and I will stay away from any party or group that this person is connected to.
I must agree with a number of comments here.
First, the comments that you posted from McCain were probably proper in the 18th century when the mindset of “right of kings” was still devolving, but I too find them not disposed for this century.
But I too must caution that Charles Johnson is “weapons-grade crazy”
Neo,
I am standing with CJ in comparison to McCain. It is more about McCain’s grotesque writings than fawning CJ (and he knows it).
Convert,
You seemed to miss the point – I opposed McCain and defended Johnson. Anyone who goes the other way is supporting McCain. So I had to pick one side or the other and I chose to oppose McCain.
Anyway, CJ is good company for me.
Harold,
Really sorry to see things get that bad. It is sick.
You know I am not a fan of Beck at all (he and Olberman turn my stomach).
Thanks for the support, hope you hang around.
AJStrata
jimharlow,
never said I was the only one. The point is racist can seem quite nice when they are among ‘their own’.
[…] What the right-wing blogosphere is currently condoning – not only not standing against, but at times engaged in active defense for – definitely frightens me. See here and here. […]
SBD,
“I say to those who believe that Judaism and Christianity in some way support or accepts slavery that they read the Bible and educate themselves.”
You have been misled – none of your citations stipulate the slavery is a crime or unacceptable to any religious philosophy.
It was Anglican Christians who sold Irish into slavery,
It was Roman Catholics who ran Jasenovac death camp
It is Sunni Muslims who take slaves out of Africa today.
It was Jews who, in smaller proportion, participated in the slave trade of Colonial America.
Slavery was outlawed in USA in 1865 – england in 1807
The only truly disturbing thing written by RSM, as claimed by AJ is:
“In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction.”
The intelligence of those enslaved, of course, was not elevated by the institution of slavery. Knowledge was gained, but not intelligence. (Knowledge was also lost, much like my inability to speak the Slovak tongue of my ancestors). And we can still find young “savages” (of all colors) roaming the streets of Chicago today. I don’t know how old RSM is, but his argument is unfortunately phrased in an archaic 1950’s terminology.
I remember a black American scholar who visited Africa around 20 years ago looking for his heritage in a Garden of Eden — and came back thankful that his ancestors became slaves in America. I have read little written by RSM but much of what I’ve read here suggests he is primarily guilty of holding a contrarian opinion.
I spent over a decade as a field archaeologist/crew chief/field director and completed the course work for an M.S. in Anthro (CRM). I’ve seen eighteenth century (1700s) ceramics, the kind of stuff Thomas Jefferson gave to his slaves when it got chipped. I’ve pulled it out of the ground. Jefferson’s slaves may not have had complete sets of pristine wares but they ate off of dishes that would dazzle you today. The archaeological record is also replete with evidence contrary to the modern legend of slavery. Slates and slate pencils, for example, indicating not only literacy but the teaching of it. Firearms, firearm parts and related items (lead balls, etc.) recovered along with skeletal remains of game animals near slave quarters indicate a far more benevolent relationship between slave owners and slaves than is generally believed. The same thing is true with fish remains. The archaeological record suggests that at least in some instances slaves were allowed the time, technology and freedom of movement to supplement their diet. Slaves were not cheap, easily replaced disposable items.
My own grandfather escaped as a youngster from a coal mining camp in northeastern Pennsylvania. The camp was totally fenced in, the workers were paid in company script and an entire family couldn’t leave the camp at the same time. At least one family member always had to be left behind. That amounted to a perpetual hostage situation. My grandfather’s family hid what they needed to survive near the fence over several months and then dug underneath it to escape. Since coal was then King, his father was able to get work outside as a miner.
As I said before, I’m not an RSM fan (barely knows the guy) but I do know that Prince Charles has gone totally wacko rubber room mad, jousting at windmills Cervantes style. Anybody who even considers joining his loony team needs to take a big time out. CJ, simply put, is now totally insane.
i take no side on this one because I haven’t been paying attention to this feud. But it sounds like both went to far on slavery and racism. I want no part in racism and slavery at all.
AJ:
I have been a victim of that kind of thing. I have been called an amnesty shill, a leftist, a RINO…all kinds of crap just because I thought it was better for McCain to win than Obama..I understand what you are saying..but Charles Johnson is no angel here and I am sure he would be the first to make some snide comment about you being a global warming denier.
And if you do not think he is against Tea Party people or whatever, you should look at his site and check out some of the things Johnson had said. I heard he was getting into it with some people on the right and so I went over there and looked at his site, I did this several times over a few weeks and without fail he was nasty. He was nasty to conservatives, nasty to Republicans, nasty to the Tea Party people, nasty to people who do not believe in man made global warming.
It might have started with him being upset about creationism or something, but it spread way beyond that. I don’t know what he said when he talked to you AJ, but spending time at his site was enough to turn me off.
Why take sides at all? They both deserve each other as far as I am concerned.
I don’t know anything about this McCain guy, but I know Johnson has gone over to the far left. Be careful who you associate with.
Chuck might even be right, but he’ll stab you in the back.
Plus, the blog you linked to, http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2009/10/meet-robert-stacy-mccain-neo.html, doesn’t provide any direct links. It just has a bunch of quotes.
Then you have posted a bunch of quotes, without any direct links.
Your position might be stronger if you provided the direct links to where this McCain fellow posted or wrote this material.
And considering I’ve been bannedd at LGF for questioning his “reasonableness”, I’ll not give Chuck any traffic. Thus the need for you to do the research, provide the links to the offensive quotes, and making sure this is 100% true.
Otherwise, it is just a bunch of quotes.
That is a fundamental rule of blogging. Direct links.
AJ, this is the first comment I have ever made here. I do read you often, agree on some things and disagree on others. Reading the RSM quotes reminds me of reading the Rush Limbaugh quotes, the very quotes CJ put on his site. All false of course and CJ makes no retraction or apology, just bans anyone that pointed out the quotes were false. I’m not sure the RSM quotes are true or that they are in context. I do know that Charles Johnson is guilty of slander of the worst type, printing false quotes. You can be against RSM without being aligned with LGF.
Good God AJ… I “Lived” Jim Crow in the south (WHITES only or NEGROS only, water fountains, bathrooms, etc.,). I don’t really care, nor see the need to dig it up and re-hash it just for kicks. Ya’ll go ahead. Knock yerself out if it somehow makes political points for you.
The truth is..it was democrats…who mostly controlled that at the time. People like G. Wallace. (I was there when he got shot).
Course nobody said him getting shot was “racist”.
As Frank Zappa said…..””s’cuse me mister….who you jivin with that cosmic debris”.
McCain seems to be attempting to relate what the attitudes were of that time, NOT what McCain himself thinks.
And he is correct from a simple forensic approach rather than an emotional or political approach. Slavery was economic not based on racial hatred. Nobody said “hey, we hate those people in Africa, why not send a bunch of boats over there, round them up and force them to work on our farms!”.
There was no farm machinery. A large farm required a LOT of manual labor. All crops had to be picked by hand. There was no such thing as a mechanical picker of any sort. Crops had to be planted and weeded by hand as well. Same with processing after picking. It required a huge amount of physical labor.
The concept of slavery existed in Africa, Asia Minor and Southern Europe for thousands of years. One tribe or city state or king or whatever would enslave the population of a conquered people as a matter of course for manual laborers. Any well-to-do Roman family would have a slave or two as a domestic worker. It didn’t mean they “hated” them, just means they were pretty much at the bottom of the social pecking order and had the least education. The were labor machines who knew enough to communicate and that was about it.
Now at about the time our agriculture was taking off, there were tribes in Africa that would round up people of neighboring tribes and sell them. It isn’t like Americans went over there and actually rounded people up. Slaves would be purchased from tribes who sold slaves.
And yes, there are records of extreme cruelty brought on some slaves by the owners of the farms but there are more instances of people who treated their slaves like anyone else. They were basically employed … labor in exchange for a place to sleep and food to eat and clothes to wear.
Agriculture was the key to the economy of the Southern states. It was the North that was industrialized, mostly due to the amount of water that moved through great changes in elevation allowing a lot of water power and coal deposits in places like Pennsylvania.
If Lincoln could “free the slaves”, he would drive a stake into the heart of the Southern economy. There would be no way those farms could be worked. The civil war was not about slavery until well into the war. The civil war was about state rights verses the power of the federal government and slavery was only one of many issues.
Also, if slavery could be abolished, it would provide huge opportunities for manufacturers of mechanized replacements such as the cotton gin which were made in the North. It would make Southern agricultural prowess dependent on Northern industrial capacity and increase the demand for agricultural machines.
I believe McCain is trying to talk about the conditions that existed THEN, not about what he believes or how things should be now.
Slaves were absolutely required for a large farm to produce anything. Without slaves there would have been no shoemakers or butchers or anything else because everyone would have been working on the farms as laborers to keep the country fed. And then if they all needed to be paid a wage, the cost of the produce would be beyond what people could afford to pay. You would have still been a slave, really, because everything you made would have to be paid out to live.
What could have made a difference is the notion of “free agency” for laborers where rather than being property of someone, at some point they gained the right to decide themselves who they would work for. And in reality that is what happened. Laborers would live on the land owners land, in a shack provided for by the land owner, and collect a wage that was spent on simply getting by from day to day. While they were free to work for someone else, few did and many spent their entire life working on the same farm even though they were “free”. The only (and most important difference) was that the person was no longer “owned” by anyone and had recourse to the law … such as that recourse might have been during that time.
Johnson has been going off on McCain for quite a long time and he is way off base. I don’t read his site anymore. I don’t see McCain as a racist. I believe he is trying to relate what things were like AT THAT TIME.
sbd,
I think your view of slavery and the Bible is somewhat simplistic.
I known AJ does not want to turn his blog into a battleground for biblical exegesis but consider the following passages:
Ex 20:20-21 – If a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod and he dies at his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, he survives a day or two, no vengeance shall be taken; for he is his property (lit – money).
Ex 20:26-27 – If a man strikes the eye of his male or female slave, and destroys it, he shall let him go free on account of his eye. And if he knocks out a tooth … he shall let him go free on account of his tooth.
A Hebrew can only be a slave of another for 6 years and he can go free, but if he has children or takes a wife during that time they stay with his master:
Exodus 21:1-4 – “If you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve for six years ; but on the seventh he shall go out as a free man without payment. If he comes alone, he shall go out alone ; if he is the husband of a wife, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master gives him a wife, and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall belong to her master, and he shall go out alone. But if the slave plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife and my children ; I will not go out as a free man,’then his master shall bring him to God, then he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost. And his master shall pierce his ear with an awl ; and he shall serve him permanently.”
Hebrews were allowed to make slaves of people captured during war –
Lev 24:44:46- As for your male and female slaves whom you may have -you may acquire male and female slaves from the pagan nations that are around you. Then, too, it is out of the sons of the sojourners who live as aliens among you that you may gain acquisition, and out of their families who are with you, whom they will have produced in your land ; they also may become your possession. You may even bequeath them to your sons after you, to receive as a possession ; you can use them as permanent slaves. But in respect to your countrymen, the sons of Israel, you shall not rule with severity over one another.
There are also regulations for having sex with female slaves, selling daughters as slaves, re-selling slaves, circumcising slaves, giving them off on the Sabbath, priests owning slaves, slaves owning slaves and run-away slaves.
I’m not saying we need to agree with the bible on these matters, nor do I say we are justified in using the bible to support modern forms slavery and there are what I consider valid explanations as to why the Bible teaches such things, but to consider anybody who does not say the bible wholeheartedly condemns slavery is a blasphemer is a little over the top and shows a rather simplistic view of the scriptures.
A blasphemer Alert?
Jesus did not come to Earth to promote or sanction slaves. This is the same kind of rot that rightly repulses blacks.
It’s like admiring the engineering of the holocaust and concentration camps around Jews.
There are times when cold calculus is just wrong.
BTW, McCain has taken this well beyond just noting how society operated in biblical times. He thinks slavery is the cornerstone of Christianity and western civilization. I challenge you (and CP) to support or deny that premise. Forget about what is in or out of the bible.
[…] AJ Strata, one of the great voices of reason has joined the war, for indeed it is a war. “…But […]
AJ,
Read what I said. I did not say that Jesus came to promote or sanction slavery. Nor did I call anybody is a blasphemer. I simply said that the issue of what the bible says about slavery is more complicated than what sbd says about it and to call somebody a blasphemer who does not agree with him (as he does) is over the top and wrong.