Not a Post Racism Society: Michael Medved
Posted by
Kevin
Via Sadly, No! we find that Michael Medved is trying to argue that slavery wasn’t so bad. No, seriously. Go Read the whole post at Sadly, No because, frankly, they are funnier than I am, and asshattery of this level deserves all the mocking that can be heaped upon it. I just want to point out three things:
First, Medved’s history is atrocious:
. WHILE AMERICA DESERVES NO UNIQUE BLAME FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SLAVERY, THE UNITED STATES MERITS SPECIAL CREDIT FOR ITS RAPID ABOLITION.
Year the British ended slavery throughout the Empire: 1833. Number of wars it took to do so: 0. Year the Spanish Empire ended slavery (except in Cuba, where the ban was not enforced by local governors until 1886): 1811. Number of wars to do so: 0. Year the U.S. ended slavery throughout the country and its territories: 1865. Number of wars it took to do it: 1, the bloodiest one in American history. In fact, all European powers abolished slavery before the United States did. So, no, dear Mr. Medved, we as a nation don’t deserve special credit for a bloody damn thing. We were below average, even by the standards of the day.
Second, and most soul-crushing, this is what Medved thinks is the most horrible aspect of slavery:
Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean.
Savor that quote, let it roll around your consciousness, admire it’s almost perfect inhumanity and complete and utter prostitution to the service of the notion that the measure of a man is the profit he produces. Michael Medved thinks that the “most horrifying” aspect of the Middle passage is that the ship captains were bad capitalists. You know those annoying people who are sunny and cheerful and optimistic all the time, the kind that think group hugs can solve anything and mugs with kittens hanging onto tree branches are an instant day brightener? Those people? Whenever one of them gets on your nerves, just read them this quote and point out that the author is not, in fact, in a mental institution or shunned by society. They wont be able to come out of their house for a week.
And here is the kicker: this is who Micaheal Medved is:
While focusing on the theme of Hollywood vs. America, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh interviewed Medved and then asked Medved to guest-host his talk show. Medved went on to serve as a regular guest-host for Limbaugh on close to thirty occasions. In 1996, Medved was offered his own local show on a major Seattle station. In his 2005 autobiographical book Right Turns: From Liberal Activist to Conservative Champion in 35 Unconventional Lessons, Medved says he welcomed the chance to escape “the movie ghetto” and to speak to a wider audience about politics and morality, which were a focus of his written commentary and books. Medved’s show was aired in Seattle and syndicated through Salem Radio Network.
His three hour daily show is now broadcast on 200 stations coast to coast and reaches more than 2.5 million listeners[citation needed]. For ten consecutive years, Medved has been listed by Talkers magazine as one of its “Heavy Hundred” most important American talk show hosts, and recently tied for eighth place in its ranking of talk hosts by audience size.[4]
Medved writes a regular column for USA Today and is a member of that newspaper’s Board of Contributors. He also writes occasional op-ed pieces for The Wall Street Journal and blogs daily at conservative website Townhall.com.
He is no outlier, no crazy racist uncle locked away in the attic. He is as mainstream a media figure as you can be. He is acceptable and accepted by our media elite.
We are not a post-racism society.
[…] Update: See also Kevin at Lean Left, who has a more substantive retort to “fact” #5 than I did. Year the British ended slavery throughout the Empire: 1833. Number of wars it took to do so: 0. Year the Spanish Empire ended slavery (except in Cuba, where the ban was not enforced by local governors until 1886): 1811. Number of wars to do so: 0. Year the U.S. ended slavery throughout the country and its territories: 1865. Number of wars it took to do it: 1, the bloodiest one in American history. In fact, all European powers abolished slavery before the United States did. So, no, dear Mr. Medved, we as a nation don’t deserve special credit for a bloody damn thing. We were below average, even by the standards of the day. Spotlight […]
Pingback 9/28/2007
Ummm…. nitpick, but make that 1868, with ratification of the 14th amendment. Slavery still existed in the non-rebel slave states until that ratification.
Comment 9/28/2007
You beat me to it. Good post.
Note also that Medved deliberately obscures the facts on some of his claims: he says that only a tiny fraction of African slaves were “brought to North America” without mentioning that most slaves brought to the US transhipped through the Caribbean; he compares total slave captures by all Islamic countries over a thousand years to those by the US alone over a few hundred years; he claims that slavery was involved in only a small portion of the entire country’s economy without noting that it was a huge proportion of the economies of the slave-holding states. He also distorts the facts by noting that many other countries practiced slavery, but not mentioning that few of them developed an entire industry of trading in slaves as property, nor was slavery in most places lifelong and hereditary.
The entire piece is also a defense against straw arguments. The argument against US slavery has never been that it was the only form of slavery, or the worst such form, in history. He pretends that he can obviate criticism of slavery or its effects on US society simply by declaring that it could have been worse. This is both dishonest and obliviously shallow.
Finally, all you need to know, in Medved’s own words: “the War Between the States”. Racist asshole.
Comment 9/28/2007
[…] More from: Michael van der Galiën, Sadly, No!, Lean Left and Crooked Timber […]
Pingback 9/28/2007
[…] I won’t go into detail on why all of this is ridiculous, as others have already done so (point#5: why do we deserve ’special credit’? Every European country had outlawed slavery long before us, without having to wage a war to make it happen). What really bugs me about Medved’s arguments is the moral relativism that is inherent in pretty much every sentence, something the right wing is usually unfairly accusing the left of. […]
Pingback 10/1/2007
The Civel War was not to free slaves.
Do you can really believe that some 600,000 soldiers made up primarily of the common folks: farmers, day workers, cowboys, etc., really cared about those black guys? Do you really think that these white guys would leave their families for years to fight for the rights of blacks? you are living in the politically correct slums of America. If that were the case blacks would have been well received everywhere outside the south. But they weren’t.
It wasn’t the war that freed the blacks, oh you of historical deficiency. It was the 13th amendment.
If you are concerned about black being shipped from Africa, blame the black Africans who plundered villiages, and brought those villagers to the coast for sale. White hunters didn’t hike 50 miles into the jumgle to find them.
If you are concerned about who purchased blacks for slaves, looke east. Africans and Muslims are even MORE guilty than America or Europe.
Comment 10/2/2007
While freeing slaves wasn’t the primary motive for many of those who fought the Civil War on the Union side, many northerners who supported the war were passionately opposed to slavery. And southerners fought to preserve their “southern way of life” — of which the economic benefits of slavery were seen as a vital component.
If the war hadn’t gotten under way when it did for economic reasons, the political balance of free and slave states and Lincoln’s intention to preserve the country, it’s a safe bet that within a few decades at most it would’ve been fought because of the need to end to slavery.
Comment 10/3/2007
Good comparison (sarcasm), countries that were in existence prior to embracing slavery eliminated it before the U.S. which was a wild frontier just 80 years earlier. I’m actually impressed that such a small number of colonialists took slaves in such a primitive land. How about mentioning that slavery (white on black) was eliminated not by black revolt but by white disgust! Why did it take 1000’s of years for blacks to end black on black slavery and genocide? I’m proud of my nations history, I’m proud that whites were able to recognize the wrong-ness of slavery given the primitiveness of humans knowledge at the time. After all 1776 was a time when witchcraft, earth centric universe, bloodletting and monarchies were still considered to be at the forefront of sophistication and knowledge.
How about taking up the real battle of government slavery and murder that’s still legal? It’s call “patriotic Conscription” or “The Draft”. If any other group (blacks, women) were enslaved because of their age and sex we’d see wholesale riots in the streets.
It’s ironic that ken burns “The War” went out of it’s way to bring up the Japanese internment but never made the jump to the male enslavement and murder, not to mention lost of innocence that was forced on this nations male children, to support the countries freedom and standard of living. It’s unfortunate that whites are apparent bipolar ability to forgive The Germans, Italians and Japanese for killing so many of our own but these same whites feel guilt for slavery committed by others, whom share a skin color, 150 years ago. Just another unfortunate reminded of white on white male hate!
Comment 10/10/2007
As a libertarian -economic right, social left- I feel I should also point out that slave labor is an incredibly retarded thing from the capitalist position if you take a look at it.
If you hire a laborer, he does his work, gets his wage, and goes home. He’ll probably also try to work extra hard to get more money, or do something to impress you for a promotion.
Whereas a slave has to be constantly beaten in to submission, will do the bare minimum of work he can get away with, will sabotage your operations, will constantly try to run away, needs people constantly watching him so he doesn’t rebel, and has no incentive to do much of anything. The costs of nursing him back to working health -even just a bare minimum-, hiring overseers and taking care of their food, horses, et cetera, buying shackles, building slave quarters, time and work lost while a slave recovers from some inhuman treatment, paying rewards for a returned slave, and barricading your house against the very angry, very strong, machete-wielding people you’re just pissing off more and more every day, add up to far more than just paying a dude.
However, Lincoln was a racist fuck and he supported laws that kept the Underground Railroad for being as efficient as it could been. If he hadn’t been a genocidal power freak, he could also have used compensated manumission and ended the whole thing pretty peacefully.
With compensated manumission all slaves over a certain age would have been freed and paid for their work, and then as the current slaves got old enough they would be freed and paid. No new slaves would be coming in. That way, the slave-dependent economies would have been able to find hired labor or other ways of staying afloat.
Instead, the South was burned to the ground and the Southern death toll in the Civil War -many of those being civilian deaths, far more than people realize- was the equivalent of 8,000,000 deaths today. And, racism was worse in the North.
And just in case anyone was going to dismiss this as crazy neocon Southerner stuff, I’m a New Englander and didn’t vote for Bush.
Comment 10/25/2007
Sooo…let me get this straight,all slave owners were sadistic bloodthirsty bastards who mercilessly beat up the very people they needed to run their sources of income. Every day beaten down broken men and women day after day, after they were beat up, worked sun up to sunrise only to repeat the cycle over again the next day. I must be soft because I wouldn’t stay around under those conditions and don’t think many slaves would either regardless of the consequences. The mass runaways from the plantations would have crippled any type of enterprize dependant on labor to function and would have challenged the concept of slavery as a reliable form of labor. I suspect many plantation owners knew this and found other ways to entice the slaves to work without resorting to brutalizing them. Considering the amount of white people that died in a war that to them was about the abolution of slavery (they probably couldn’t quote the fourteenth amendment) I would have to conclude that many white people did care about freedom for all peoples and that many plantation owners did treat their slaves humanely.
This arguement that america was the last to abolish slavery and that it took a war to do so doesn’t make sence to me. There have been countless countries that have enslaved others for thousands of years,part of learning from history is not to repeat the mistakes of the past. America righted its wrong, comparing the time it took to do so to european countries is dumb, comparing America to other countries that took much longer to repeal slavery than we did is just more semantics and is an arguement without merit.
Comment 11/14/2007
thanks you.
Comment 3/10/2008