Thread by @usacsmret

This Juneteenth, Read 'The Real History of Slavery' frontpagemag.com/fpm/273992/jun…

Historically, powerful people enslaved their neighbors. Africans enslaved Africans while Turks and Arabs enslaved Europeans. Indeed slave derives from Slav, reflecting the many Slavs sold into slavery by their conquerors, even into the 20th century.

American’s founders were unusual not in owning slaves, but in their misgivings about owning slaves. Avoiding controversy, George Washington quietly freed some slaves by leaving them in the north when he returned to Virginia post-presidency.

In his will, Washington freed all his slaves and funded their fresh start, while regretting that he had ever owned people.

Slave owners like Washington, Jefferson, and Congressman John Randolph pondered ways to end the evil institution without breaking apart their new nation or causing a race war, all the while cognizant that for those enslaved, “slavery was a very poor preparation for freedom.”

Accordingly, Lincoln favored incremental ends to slavery, as had happened in Great Britain. For that reason abolitionists refused to support him in 1860. Even after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, abolitionists split on whether to back his reelection.

Finally, Sowell explains slavery’s end. Globally, more peoples became part of nation-states protected by national armies, so those raiding territories to enslave unprotected others increasingly faced military retaliation.

Anyone proposing replacing modern nationalism with postmodern, UN-run globalization should imagine a world where slavers like Boko Haram face UN resolutions rather than national armies.

Non-Western people generally did not end slavery on their own; indeed, most fiercely resisted abolition. Great Britain played the indispensable role in ending slavery, choosing ideals over interests in the process.

In Sudan, for example, British General G.C. Gordon fought slavery, imposing the death penalty on those convicted of castrating enslaved men to market them as eunuchs.

After Mohammad Mahad defeated Gordon at Khartoum, human trafficking again went untroubled until British soldiers returned, among them a young Winston Churchill. Under British pressure, Sudan eventually formally abolished slavery, though informally it exists there to this day.

Sowell attacks the hypocrisy of criticizing the 19th century West for falling short of modern standards, while far more culpable non-Western societies get a free pass.

Today, universities rebrand buildings named after long dead slave owners, while courting wealthy sheiks who may have owned people in their youths.

President Obama, who removed a bust (in fairness, one of two) of Winston Churchill from the White House, probably never learned at Harvard that Churchill fought slavery in traditional Sudan, Nazi Germany, and Communist Russia.

Obama should read "The Real History of Slavery."