12/01/2013
In a previous post about Brian Tashman [twitter] of RightWingWatch, I said that apparently reading Peter Brimelow’s speeches was Tashman’s actual job, in the most recent one, it appears that reading VDARE.com is part of that, too.(RightWingWatch is funded by People For The American Way.)
Derbyshire: 12 Years A Slave Is 'Abolitionist Porn'
Submitted by Brian Tashman on Friday, 11/22/2013 1:40 pm
No, former National Review columnist John Derbyshire hasn’t seen 12 Years a Slave, but he knows it is a bad movie because it is unfair to the poor, persecuted and maligned slave-owners of the antebellum South. In his latest racist column, Derbyshire calls 12 Years a Slave “Abolitionist Porn” and chides the film for not including what he sees as the happier instances of slavery, such as one slaveholder who only doled out beatings “once in a while.”
“Plainly there was more to American race slavery that white masters brutalizing resentful Negroes,” Derbyshire writes. “Slavery is more irksome to some than to others; and freedom can be irksome, too.”
Derbyshire compares slavery in the US to the communist system in China, saying that “while there was much grumbling, and some scattered seething rebelliousness, most Chinese got along with the system. A lot of people were very happy with it.”
“In the matter of slavery, though, I already feel sure that the shallow good North, bad South simplicities of Abolitionist Porn and popular perception bear little relation to the thorny tangles of reality,” he concludes.[More]
Don’t bother clicking on the "More" button — it’s mostly chunks of Derb’s column [John Derbyshire On Abolitionist Porn And Antebellum Economics] with all the links gone. I don’t know why people do that.
As for the "poor, persecuted and maligned slave-owners", they were, as we've repeatedly said, the opposite of poor. Like today’s tech and and agribusiness lobbies, they were incredibly rich, and were organized in a lobby known to their opponents as "The Slave Power."
Maligned? Of course they were, there was a whole slave-owner maligning industry, with newspapers and societies dedicated to maligning them. No doubt some of it was deserved, but there were also a lot of lies. And finally "persecuted" — I suppose that’s true, too, with hundreds of thousands dead in the Civil War, and Atlanta burned to the ground.
I’m perfectly willing to admit that slaveowning was a Bad Thing, but that doesn’t make lying about it a Good Thing.
Movie critic James Bowman who did see the movie, writes
If ever in slavery’s 250 year history in North America there were a kind master or a contented slave, as in the nature of things there must have been, here and there, we may be sure that [Director Steve] McQueen does not want us to hear about it. This, in turn, surely means that his view of the history of the American South is as partial and one-sided as that of the hated Gone With the Wind. That professional historians among others insist on calling such propaganda "truth" and "reality" and condemning anyone who suggests truth and reality might be more complicated than that is one measure of the politicization of historical scholarship in our time — to a level, perhaps, rivaling even that of film studies.
The people who make these movies don’t hate the slaveowners of the past, they hate white people now.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.