The leftist lie about the founding of the US

Mackubin Owens:

The orgy of destruction that has occurred in the wake of George Floyd’s death has been justified by a lie — that the United States is irredeemably racist to the core. Unfortunately, our educational system has peddled this lie for more than a generation. It has now achieved official status by means of The New York Times’ risible 1619 Project, which claims that the United States was founded on slavery and racism.

The truth is exactly the opposite. America’s Founding — the real one, in 1776 — expressly rejected the argument that political systems should be based on oppression, including racial oppression. The essence of such systems was best summarized by the argument of the Athenians at Melos as recounted by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War: “Justice arises only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must.”

Before the creation of the United States, the world was divided between those “born booted and spurred,” with the natural right to rule over others “born with saddles on their backs.” At the time of the American Founding, slavery was a worldwide phenomenon. Africans sold other Africans into the Atlantic slave trade. Philosophers may have condemned such injustice, but rulers continued to rule as they always had — the strong oppressing the weak; the master oppressing the slave.

The United States was founded on a different claim, articulated in the Declaration of Independence — that human beings are equal in their possession of natural rights and that, accordingly, no one has the natural right to rule over another without the latter’s consent.

The dilemma facing the Founders was that the United States had inherited an institution at odds with the principles of the Declaration of Independence — slavery. But as men of the Enlightenment, the Founders — even the slaveholders among them — believed that since slavery was both unprofitable and a relic of barbarism, it was on the road to extinction. With that belief in mind, the drafters of the Constitution compromised on the issue of slavery in order to secure the union necessary to preserve the infant Republic. But slavery persisted, and it took a war to end it.

That war was an attempt to fulfill the promise of the Declaration. As the late Harry Jaffa once wrote, “It is not wonderful that a nation of slave-holders, upon achieving independence, failed to abolish slavery. What is wonderful, indeed miraculous, is that a nation of slave-holders founded a new nation on the proposition that ‘all men are created equal,’ making the abolition of slavery a moral and political necessity.”

The Civil War and the abolition of slavery did not, of course, end racial prejudice and racism. Neither has the expansion of civil rights over the last century and a half. It is undeniable that we as Americans have not always lived up to our own principles. The unpleasant fact is that some people are racist. Many others harbor racial prejudice in their hearts. But while racism and racial prejudice persist among individuals, the founding principles of the United States are explicitly non-racist.
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There were many problems with slavery.  One of the reasons it would inevitable lose its grip is that all the incentives for increased production were negative.  There was no reward for a worker who increased his efforts or developed more efficient ways of producing goods and services.  That turned into a critical advantage for the non-slave states when the Civil War finally came.

One of the ironies of the current upset is that Democrats chose the garb of African slave traders to show their solidarity with blacks.  Africans and Muslims were active in the slave trade and Africans were not the only group that was taken as slaves.  The word is derived from Slav which was Europeans that were prized as slaves by the Muslim Turks.  More European whites were taken as slaves in North Africa than Africans who were brought to America.

The Israelis were Egyptian slaves who helped to build the Pyramids thousands of years ago.  The suggestion that Americans invented slavery is completely false.  One would have to be illiterate of history to make such a suggestion, but the former Democrat nominee for Vice President did so recently.  I recommend Thomas Sowell's Conquest and Culture for the history of slavery.