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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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The country claiming to have the most “freedom” of any country has the highest incarceration rate of any country.
Not so fun fact: the constitution allows for slavery as long as it's a punishment for a crime.
Hmmm... Nah, those dots don't connect at all.
And many plantations converted to prisons that are still in operation to this day.
And many states can't reduce their prison populations because then they'd lose free labor.
And some states use prison labor to staff the governor's mansion with butlers.
Here in California, prisoners are employed to fight wildfires.
Until very recently, former prisoners were not allowed to be employed as firefighters when they got out. That was corrected by Newsom in 2020.
Man, I fucking love that guy and what he's been doing. Him and my governor, as well as the governor of Michigan have been having a pissing contest to see who can be the best governor, and we're all winning.
Go read about the nightmare this Angola prison in Louisiana.
It's even worse. The original US Constitution does not prohibit slavery. It wasn't until the Thirteenth Amendment was passed seventy years later - after a Civil War tore apart the country - that slavery was abolished. With the express exception of punishment for a crime. No qualifications for the severity of the crime. And that exception gets frequent use to this day in the penal system
The original US Constitution is explicitly pro-slavery. Not only does it explicitly require non-slaveholding states to return fugitive slaves to their oppressors, but it has multiple mechanisms intended to ensure the dominance of slave states in the federal government.
The Constitution was never a unified idealist vision of liberty. It was a grungy political compromise between factions that did not agree on what the country should be. These included New England Puritans (religious cultists; but abolitionist), New York Dutch bankers (who wanted the money back they'd loaned to the states), Southern planters (patriarchal rapist tyrants), and Mid-Atlantic Quakers (pacifists willing to hold their noses and make peace with the Puritans and planters).
As a natural US citizen it took me a while to understand what I was taught about US history in grade school was not entirely accurate. US independence was about corporate interest. The land barons and industrialists did not want to pay taxes to the crown. That was the offense that led to a declaration of independence, everything else was cursory.
At most half the American population was in favor of independence. Those that spoke against independence were labeled as Tories and terrorized into submission (sometimes horribly). The people with money and influence led a campaign of terror against them. If they had actually held a vote and went with majority rule, it's likely we'd still be a British territory.
As far as the constitution, the authors did not consider other races as equals with human rights. When they said, "Liberty and justice for all." they were talking strictly about men of European descent. Even white women were not considered in the term "all". This is how the genocide of native people and slavery was justified. The people suffering these horrors were considered animals same as livestock. This ideology originated in the major Christian churches of the time which were all run by, you guessed it, men of European descent.
Of course in modern times we know that human genetics are one of the least variant of any species on the planet, but back then they relied on the Church instead of science. You can thank those guys for over a millennia of dark ages and unjust human rights.
In order to explain the injustices of the early US, one has to comprehend English common law, the economics of empires bound together by wind-powered sailing ships, Protestant and Catholic Christian doctrine, and the legacies of the Spanish Reconquista that became ideological white-supremacism.
It is really easy to come up with caricatures that say "Jefferson was just a rapist" or "the Articles of Confederation were okay, but the Constitution sucked" or "the colonies would have been fine under British rule forever" or "everyone shoulda just joined the Iroquois".
In fact, everything was worse and more fucked up and lots of people died in misery and horror.
The Fugitive Slave Law wasn't part of the Constitution.
Again, not part of the Constitution. Those were the various compromises that the South kept getting pissy about foreseeing the end of Slavery, so they kept threatening rebellion.
If anyone tries to tell you the civil war was about states rights, not slavery... These are pretty obviously about slavery. But if they don't believe that, just let them read the Southern States Declarations of Secession. They say what the civil war's about in their own words.
The Fugitive Slave Clause, which authorized it, certainly is though!
There’s a great documentary called 13th about this and racial inequality in America
Not even just the highest rate. The highest number of incarcerated people! Countries with over 1b people still have fewer prisoners, total.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarceration-rates-by-country
The Star-spangled Banner (where the phrase “Land of the Free” comes from) was written in 1814, 51 years before slavery was abolished. The idea that America is or ever was the land of the free is a total joke.
The third verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner" is not typically sung today. It refers to "the hireling and slave" among the foes of the Republic. "The hireling" refers to the mercenaries employed by the British crown in fighting the American revolutionaries. It is unclear whether "slave" is intended to derogate all British subjects as "slaves" of the crown, or if it specifically refers to enslaved Africans who were offered their freedom by the British if they fought against the revolution.
That's what Lincoln said! America's enemies point to slavery and use it to call the ideals of liberty lies.
The founders didn’t build the free society. They built the society capable of altering itself, and that grew into the free society.
And the fight continues. The founders were so far down, because basic freedoms for everyone is 0, and we have to fight to get up to that point. The founders negotiated a freeer society, like you said able to modify itself, and the general arc of soiety seems to be the expansion of freedom for the average person.
One day, we may even be able to eat without justifying our food through labor!
Other countries have also altered themselves to become free societies.
Sorry, but freedom wasn't invented by slave masters.
Good for them.
This is actually not true any longer, El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate
Sheesh. Step it up, America
El Guardador
Unfortunately this bonkers truth is so mundane at this point, I didn’t need to read passed “freedom”
… and built its initial wealth on slavery revenue.
It’s a shame because there are a lot of other great things to be proud about when it comes to the US. I guess when people boast about US freedom, what they mean is democracy, and starting the end of the colonial era, inspiring a tidal wave of democratic uprisings around the world, which is accurate. I wish they didn’t use the word “freedom” for that.
That's not all that exciting. All of Europe (and basically every other are of the world) was built on slave labor as well, that's literally what the colonial period was about. Also vikings were primarily about capturing slaves, Rome and Greece were mostly slaves, serfdom wasn't significantly different than slavery.
Sure; but it still bothers me that the US is part of it and yet is often associated with freedom by American nationalists. The same way I’m annoyed that France (my native country, I’m a naturalized American) boasts itself the “pays des droits de l’homme” (“the country of human rights”), despite freedom of speech and of religion having gigantic asterisks, even though they feel like such basic human rights to me. It’s just like, if your national identity happens to not be the greatest at something, maybe don’t boast about being the best at it!
But anyway, this leads me to wonder… I feel like US slavery is discussed and depicted in arts a lot more often, and I genuinely wonder why that is. What do you think? Is it just that American culture chooses to address it head on when a lot of others don’t, or do you think there’s more to it?
So the US was born in a world where slavery was the norm, practiced slavery, and soon became (one of?) the first countries to formally abolish slavery, and fought a civil war with hundreds of thousands of casualties to back up that abolishment.
Let’s look at this question another way: do you think if the USA had never been founded, that there would be more or less slavery in the world today?
I don’t know enough to know the answer to this question, honestly. I know some stuff about the cultural state of slavery at the time of the founding of the US, and how much it already was on thin ice at the time; and that it’s actually very likely that it would have been ended or at least severely restricted by the King of England earlier if the US hadn’t actually won independence (or at least so thought the Southern states). But I don’t realize what was going on elsewhere in the world too, in a way that it would have been abolished there, or not.
What I know: the reason for slavery in the South specifically is that those colonies were funded with much more of a “get rich quick” mentality. Sustainability wasn’t initially the goal, the goal was finding tons of gold and bringing it back to Europe. When the tons of gold didn’t materialize, people had to drastically cut costs to keep those colonies going on other resources; and that’s how, before slavery, indentured servitude was introduced. It initially was a temporary and voluntary state: you’d sign yourself into indentured servitude for a plantation for X years, as a way to pay for your trip to the new world, at the end of which you were free to build the life you want there. Eventually, the plantation owners wondered what it would be like if they didn’t have to set all those people free at the end of the agreement, and obviously it was quite financially successful for them. Eventually, the slave trade and abductions, and all the related horrors, got set up to feed that system.
Anyway, fast forward to the Revolutionary War, and the English crown is showing signs of wanting to regulate that madness. Maybe not abolishing right away, but at least putting serious limits to what people can do. The war starts in the North, with most Southern states not being very interested to join, but what sets the keg on fire was, after the war started, when the King proclaimed that any slave who would escape to join the war effort on the redcoat side would thereby be free. That sent Southerners the message that slavery was on its last leg if the colonies remained English, and is what convinced a number of Southern states to join the rebellion after all.
Eventually, independence is won, but in the 1780s, the King violates the peace treaty of Paris by placing an embargo on America, in order to squeeze them out of money and force them all to join the English empire back (which obviously didn’t quite work!). At the time, the South has most of the remaining funds after a very difficult decade, and little debt (I wonder why!), but if the North goes back to being English, they see the writing on the wall that the South would also eventually be conquered into the English empire again, and therefore slavery would probably end. As a result, the Southern states demand a clause in the US Constitution that forbids the future new US Congress to abolish the Atlantic slave trade (and therefore slavery) at all for 20 years (until 1808). So with that, they have a choice between being sure to keep slavery for at least 20 years, or going back to being English and having it abolished or severely restricted basically any time. That was a key motivator for the Southern states, which tended to be against centralization of government, to still agree to ratify the Constitution.
So to hit it on the nail again: they knew so well that slavery was on its last leg regardless of what they’d do, that they agreed to a very temporary 20-year break to still be sure to stretch it for that time, even if it meant agreeing for the very long-term to something they massively didn’t like the idea of: a federal government. The rest is history.
Anyway, that’s just the US, and even with that knowledge, I don’t know when emancipation here would have occurred if different events had happened; and even less so the rest of the world, of course.
Wow, very informative.
Sounds like maybe the US extended slavery by twenty years, instead of shortening it.
I do know that American slavery was especially bad compared to other societies’ manifestations of it.
Democracy is a prerequisite for freedom, disenfranchisement, in any form, is a policy failure and should be mitigated.
Freedom™
That's sounds 100% right and is 100% right
This doesn't sound false though.
Yeah, of all the words that can follow the legaly declared prohibition of slavery, except might be one of the dumbest you can pick…
You see, the trick is to limit “freedom” to certain people. Then, it can easily be the most “free” country in the world (for those people).
Freedom means guns, and more freedom means more guns. Ur just jealous, commie
sips budlight
They hate Bud Light too now
They never stopped drinking it they just pretended to
Freedom to consume is right there. They don't specify what freedom right?
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not subject guarantees in any United States territories. Misuse of free will may result in the loss of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Symptoms may include mental disease, tissue damage, cancer, and loss of all bodily and livelyvhood functions. Consultation with appropriate legal counsel is recommended before using free will, as complications may occur.
For more information ask your dumbass neighbor what's right for you.
Many companies are making profits off of this. So many states have for profit prison systems and will get fined of they don't have enough people in those prisons. That is above the free labor most people have talked about.