slavery

Anthony Conwright argues in the New York Times that the Civil War should not be called by that name because it never was so called during its fighting.

Conwright is angry that back on the anniversary of Appomattox, President Trump marked the event by quoting Ulysses S Grant’s magnanimous statement that the “rebels are our countrymen again.” Never mind that Grant was carrying out Lincoln’s explicit policy of magnanimity toward the rebels as a means of reuniting the country (“with malice toward none, with charity for all” and all that).

Even more ridiculously, Conwright argues that calling the conflagration the “Civil War” somehow diminishes the evil of slavery abolished after the North’s victory. From “It Wasn’t a ‘Civil War:’ It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion“:

As Mr. Trump and his allies try to whitewash the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, we should return to an older and far more accurate name for the Civil War. We should once again call it the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. If a country unquestioningly adopts language that obscures its bloodiest crimes to absolve their worst perpetrators, how can we expect successive generations to remember the new assaults on democracy without deploying equally forgiving language?

The medical establishment continues on its march to irrelevance. In the current edition of The Lancet, a Yale history professor named Timothy Snyder inveighs against what he apparently sees as totalitarianism of contemporary health policies. Frankly, it’s mostly gobbledygook. Take the lede, from “Health and Freedom”: We are free as bodies, or not at all. And so health care is a right, one of the most basic. Huh? Snyder then castigates all of Western civilization as essentially thousands of years of continual tyranny: Plato put us all in a cave. In the darkness of the succeeding two millennia and more, western philosophy has had trouble seeing—and feeling—what needs to be seen and felt. A long history of empire and slavery, from that moment Read More ›

Human exceptionalism imposes duties as well as rights. A crucial obligation of each and every one of us is to treat each of our human brothers and sisters as equals. Hence, slavery is evil and the antithesis of human exceptionalism because it treats equals as unequal and human beings as objects to be exploited for the benefit of those with the power to control the enslaved. Ditto, forced labor camps filled with people imprisoned due to political or religious persecution — as occurs with appalling efficiency in the “Fourth Reich” that is Communist China. Internationally prominent companies are being charged in the media with benefiting from forced labor in China. From the AFP story: China is transferring tens of thousands of Uighur Read More ›