September 6, 2007
- Issue 243 |
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Think
Piece Slavery, By David Swanson |
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The
Governor of Virginia, Timothy M. Kaine, has just pardoned Gabriel Prosser
for leading a slave revolt in So seeking to massacre
Americans can come from devotion to the ideals of the American Revolution,
even if it's done by people not quite considered real Americans? Of
course it can. The American Revolution involved killing lots
of people too. Prosser was not hanged for advocating violence
but for opposing slavery and advocating violence against slave owners. Of
course, in the light of history, over 200 years too late we can recognize
the horror that slavery was and see slave rebellions as acts of self-defense. It
is slightly remarkable for a The moral breakthrough
would have been for the slave owners in 1800 to have said, "My
God, they dislike slavery so much they are willing to kill and die
to end it. Slavery must be wrong. We will end it peacefully. We
will make amends. We will share the burden together of moving
past slavery so as to avoid a future war." That would have
been the moral breakthrough. Today, rebelling slaves
are called insurgents. They speak a funny language called Arabic. They
practice a strange religion. They dress weirdly. And almost
every depiction of them on television is negative. But we've
killed an estimated 1,028,907 of them in The moral breakthrough
today would be to recognize that Iraqis defending their country against
an occupying and murderous force – a force, which in fact uses slave
labor to construct its gargantuan embassy - is acting in self-defense. The
moral breakthrough would be to recognize now, before it's too late,
that the Iraqi resistance is, in fact, in line with the ideals of the
American Revolution and is, in fact, destined to prevail in the light
of history - if we all survive long enough to have that history. My friend Dahlia Wasfi
recently said: "Our
so-called 'enemies' in "Last
Sunday, my family's luck ran out, and one of my cousins in Perhaps we can, Dahlia. It
just might take us a couple of hundred years. David Swanson is
the
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