I thought that you were talking about abolitionism leading to the American civil war, and you probably are still talking about it in a more runabout fashion, but with that in mind, I'd really like to know if you're talking about Irish indentured servitude or if this was something more psychotic of the Democrat party's work. I'd also appreciate your literary source.
I'm talking about the radicalization of slavery supporters.
Evil = The default position of Christendom and the position of the Founding Fathers. Slavery is considered a quagmire they have gotten stuck in (how do you go about dismantling it in the first place, and what are the possible problems it will unleash with the newly freed Blacks), but it is a moral evil in and of itself. The early Founding Fathers vary to extent in how proactive they are (Jefferson, I'd argue is the most), but all are anti-slavery at least in sentiment. The Revolutionary generation rides a high tide of anti-slavery agitation that enacts gradual emancipation in the North and nearly does the same in some Southern colonies.
Necessary Evil = Cotton gin gives slavery (a dying institution) a second wind. Condemnations of slavery on moral grounds are made, but mealy-mouthed ones that argue that the system has to be perpetuated because of economic reasons. The idea of a "peculiar institution" emerges. Theologically, Bartolome de las Casas debate with Sepulveda fails to prevent establishment of the plantation system in the Americas. Slavery begins to rejuvenate and become more brutal as it spreads west into the Mississippi River Valley.
Positive Good = As slavery continues to expand, slavery supporters stop apologizing for it as a necessary evil and start defending it as a good in and of itself; this is around the time of John Calhoun and feeds into the Civil War. Scientific racism begins to really develop to defend slavery. Southerners begin to not only defend the peculiar institution but actually promote it as a superior and more humane form of social organization. This accompanies waves of expansion; I'm not an anti-Texas faggot like most academics today are, but this does overlap with the story of Texas, the Mexican-American War and the filibuster expeditions against Mexico, Nicaragua and Cuba. At this point the South also begins to become a pariah internationally, it sort of isolates itself intellectually in a manner somewhat like South Africa and Rhodesia under apartheid.
Enslavement of Whites = George Fitzhugh, top economist of the Confederacy. Fitzhugh's main focus and his mainstream success is his writing about Blacks, but he openly argues for slavery not on racial grounds, which he dismisses as un-Biblical, but as part of a broader rejection of the American Revolution and its values. Fitzhugh is a rabid reactionary (in the feudal/Medievalist sense) and a self-identified socialist; his political philosophy is often considered proto-fascist these days. Fitzhugh argues that every society is built on a "mudsill" of inferior people, which most White people count as and not all Black people count as, and it is the natural and just order of the world. Furthermore, he argues that wage labor capitalism is exploitative of the poor, whereas slave labor capitalism combines the best of socialism (paternalism) with the efficiency of capitalism: by making people into property, you incentivize their owners to take care of them.
Most significantly, again, Fitzhugh wants to enslave Whites as well as Blacks, because his slavery ideology is not racial in character.
In broader society, the hard Medievalist (which was part of Romanticism as a whole) shift in Southern culture includes prioritizing the memory of Merry England over Greece and Rome (both of which were slave societies, but the point is the increasing comfort with authoritarianism and the identification of slaveowners with a caste of nobility), the revival of pageantry like jousts, profusion of honorary titles, the entire concept of "Southern knights" and "Southern chivalry," the retarded practice of calling Southerners "Southron" (a word cribbed from Sir Walter Scott), and so on.
Our Man in Charleston dives (as a side topic to its story about a British diplomatic agent) into how fucking insane the Charlestonians (as the vanguard of Fire Eaters) were getting by this point, including wanting to reopen the Atlantic Slave Trade and possibly colonize Africa and romanticizing the idea of restoring the monarchy.
This is why I compare to abortion. It's an ancient practice that is evil on the very surface of it, but everyone tolerates it out of purest selfishness: I don't want to have to raise that baby. I don't want to have to spend my tax dollars to raise that person's baby. Christendom, and Christendom alone, begins the path to cleaning it up. It never goes away, anymore than murder, prostitution and dealing dope go away, but it begins a very real, long, arduous push against infanticide. In this the Catholics are much more consistent and dedicated than the Protestants.
But at some point we develop safe, reliable ways of aborting babies. It becomes cheap and safe to do so and with women's suffrage and the First and Second Sexual Revolutions you get a cultural climate in which people feel not only that it is permissible but that they are entitled to control their own fertility: fertility is now seen as a private instead of public issue (even though it is, IRL, very much society's business). This leads to relaxing of the laws.
But it doesn't go all the way overnight. First it's evil, then it's necessary evil. Here's twelve pictures that will make you say "fuck having anti-baby-murder laws and shit." It gets its foot in the door with the sort of genuinely morally hard cases, little freaks of nature that will die within days of delivery, twelve year old rape victims, stuff like that. Then they just loosen up. And loosen up more. And more.
At some point, people stop thinking of it as a necessary evil. That little
nigger baby isn't a baby, it's a clump of cells. It's a parasite. It's medical waste. A very much organized campaign of demonization takes a specific chunk of the population and normalizes dehumanizing language so it can then normalize violence. It's just a clump of cells, so you can do whatever to it. It lacks some arbitrary feature of anatomy I have
, like light skin and Aryan facial features, or a beating heart, or whatever, so you can do whatever to it. It lacks the intellectual capabilities I have, so you can do whatever to it. People suddenly magically stop being people if it is inconvenient to me for them to be people.
Now abortion isn't a necessary evil, it's a positive good. There is no downside, because we have handwaved away the humanity of this little early human we're chopping up, and that leaves only upsides. Abortion is now a panacea for every social problem. Crime? Poverty? Teenage pregnancy? Abortion is a magical elixir that will paper over all of these problems. See how readily Rightists on this website drink it when it's used against people they hate, even though it gets their own kind, too, as collateral damage!
And if it's just good, then why act long-faced about it? It's not just that it's no longer taboo, it's as casual as flossing your teeth. So the radicals start to promote it as something to be proud of, like
racial sexual hygiene. You get women (activists) getting abortions repeatedly for show. You get public radio playing audio of abortions on public airwaves on the public dime and calling it beautiful. Abortion becomes a sort of right of passage. You get governors of states calling to allow open infanticide.
And of course, the only people willing to make any kind of organized effort against this - often the only ones who really get the point - is the religious. Because even though it should take no religious argument (although those can be supplied) to oppose something so self-evidently wrong, it seems like a shot of God is necessary inoculation against our own worst natures.
Deep down inside the abortion supporters know that they're part of an evil death cult, and they react to being called out for it about the same as a demon being shown the Cross. They spaz the fuck out. Where once they would have only demonized the
abolitionist pro-lifer that speaks out against them, now they react with violence and censorship. They
invade their mail and pass gag orders rig up the search engines and run media campaigns to shut their voices out. They
lynch them in mobs assault them in the streets. They drag them off to jail on spurious charges. They try to coerce their opponents into participating in, perpetuating, their death factory through
the Fugitive Slave Act public funding.
YOU ARE HERE
And then, there's just over the horizon.
That's what I mean.
