Shocking NYT Editorial today...pro-slavery conservatives?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/opinion/26wed4.html

Evidently, some conservatives really do think that bringing back discrimnation and slavery is a good idea...

If you're going to call a book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History," readers will expect some serious carrying on about race, and Thomas Woods Jr. does not disappoint. He fulminates against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, best known for forcing restaurants and bus stations in the Jim Crow South to integrate, and against Brown v. Board of Education. And he offers up some curious views on the Civil War - or "the War of Northern Aggression," a name he calls "much more accurate."

The introduction bills the book as an effort to "set the record straight," but it is actually an attempt to push the record far to the right. More than a history, it is a checklist of arch-conservative talking points. The New Deal public works programs that helped millions survive the Depression were a "disaster," and Social Security "damaged the economy." The Marshall Plan, which lifted up devastated European nations after World War II, was a "failed giveaway program." And the long-discredited theory of "nullification," which held that states could suspend federal laws, "isn't as crazy as it sounds."

It is tempting to dismiss the book as fringe scholarship, not worth worrying about, but the numbers say otherwise. It is being snapped up on college campuses and, helped along by plugs from Fox News and other conservative media, it recently soared to No. 8 on the New York Times paperback best-seller list. It is part of a boomlet in far-right attacks on mainstream history that includes books like Jim Powell's "FDR's Folly," which argues that Franklin Roosevelt made the Depression worse, and Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment," a warm look back on the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II....

Most ominously, it makes an elaborate argument that the 14th Amendment was "never constitutionally ratified" because of irregularities in how it was adopted. This, too, is a pet cause of the fringe right, one the Supreme Court has rejected. If it prevailed, it would undo Brown v. Board of Education and many other rulings barring discrimination based on race, religion and sex. But Mr. Woods does not carry his argument to its logical conclusion. If the 14th Amendment was not properly ratified, neither, it would seem, was the 13th, which was adopted under similar circumstances, and slavery should be legal.


I checked around, and indeed, this is apparently a favorite pet peeve of conservatives! I thought was only the Klan types..

More links to this nonsense on my blog today.

http://mumonno.blogspot.com/2005/01/this-is-beyond-palethey-really-dont.html

Hitler was a conservative too.

:puke:

Dangerous kooks.

It never ceases to amaze me how they can yell from the mountaintops how "Christian" they are, yet be so hateful.

This pseudo-intellectual movement that is in full swing to propagandize their demented agenda is pathetic, Intelligent Design, Racist *research* that shows blacks are inferior, and now revisionist history. WTF is wrong with these people?

I swear, at this rate holocaust revisionism will be respectable in 10 years...

There is a curriculum being promoted by a white supremacist who claims to also be an expert on Christian education that teaches children that "slavery wasn't that bad."

This curriculum is being used in a lot of private Christian churches and home-school programs. I'll google it and get the name of the group.

Here's a link to a news story about the "good slavery" curriculum in a Christian private school in a predominately white, upper-income suburb of Raleigh, NC.

http://newsobserver.com/news/story/1913619p-8258411c.html

Students at one of the area's largest Christian schools are reading a controversial booklet that critics say whitewashes Southern slavery with its view that slaves lived "a life of plenty, of simple pleasures."

Leaders at Cary Christian School say they are not condoning slavery by using "Southern Slavery, As It Was," a booklet that attempts to provide a biblical justification for slavery and asserts that slaves weren't treated as badly as people think.

PLEASE WRITE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR IN RESPONSE TO THIS ARTICLE. I live in Cary, NC!

If this is how they treated free black men who "got out of line", just imagine the "good treatment" enslaved person who "got out of line".


Jesse Washington
Spectacle lynching--Burned Alive Waco Texas 1916
Souvenir Postcard sold for ten cents

That makes me absolutely rageful. I have a daughter and an African American adopted son, both of whom are growing up in this hateful, oppressive society.

Those people are sick. When my children report some bizarre incident that is racist or sexist, I essentially tell them that racism and sexism are a forms of mental illness and that those who believe or engage in "isms" are limited individuals who seek to control others through dishonest and sometimes violent means. Those types of people are either mentally ill or severely intellectually limited.

It's just this type of situation that has motivated me to volunteer for the Democratic party, as much as I have loathed politics throughout my life and focused my volunteer work in other areas.

These scumbags would say my marriage isn't valid.

At least it would be harder to lie to ourselves about where all our prosparity is coming from.

they will bring in a Klans man with neo-Nazi connections. This should make the right very happy. Racism is alive and well in the United States, especially in the government.

saying how the Communist witch hunts of the 50's were a great thing.

we'd have forced the end of slavery economically