Tag: slavery

Up from Demoktesis

Last week was Independence Day, but I was still celebrating Juneteenth.

The June 19th date hasn’t quite kicked in as a holiday for many Americans, despite a bipartisan House and unanimous Senate effort — along with President Biden’s signature — making it the “Juneteenth National Independence Day” and giving federal workers the day off.

It marks the day in 1865 when federal troops landed in Galveston, Texas, a rebel state, to announce that slavery had ended and the enslaved must be freed.

The day is about freedom. Other days could have been chosen, but for years it has served as an apt enough marker for the end of chattel slavery in America.

And slavery’s cessation is worth celebrating!

Americans are used to big July 4th celebrations, having reveled for nearly 250 years in our wonderful Declaration, announcing our separationfrom the British Empire on that day!

Actually, it was two days earlier that the Continental Congress voted to secede — and August 2, 1776, that the Declaration was finally signed. There was no sure separateness until Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781, and it took nearly two years for the official peace treaty to be signed.

There are many dates we could have chosen to honor. We settled on July 4.

We liked the words of the document.

Similarly with Juneteenth. We need a holiday commemorating the end of slavery and I like the play on words in the very name.

Arguably, the 15 days from the 19th of June to the Fourth of July should be a celebratory period for liberty more generally, starting with slavery’s abolition and ending with the creation of an independent America dedicated to equal liberty. (Backwards, of course.)

Maybe somewhere in the middle we can find a date to push the necessary third step, the cessation of “demoktesis,” the institutional philosophy of our time where “everyone owns everyone else.”*

Until personal freedom is generally respected — where nobody, not even the government, owns pieces of others — the American experiment in independence is incomplete.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The term was coined by Robert Nozick (1974, p. 290), who defined it as “ownership of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

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Freedom Festival

https://thisiscommonsense.org/pdf/CS5994.pdf

“Should white people celebrate Juneteenth?” National Public Radio’s Destinee Adams asked last year at this time, before advising, “Just don’t interrupt Black folks who are just trying to have a great time.”

I like to see folks have a good time.

“Each year,” offers The Wayside Youth & Family Support Network in Massachusetts, “Juneteenth is a day for Black people to celebrate freedom.”

The article sports the headline, “10 Things We Want White People to Do to Celebrate Juneteenth.”

Sounds like there’s a test.

In “The Caucasians’ Guide to Celebrating Juneteenth,” The Root claims, “we created a CRT-free educational curriculum to help colonizer Americans resist the urge to gentrify this celebration.”

“Hold up, white people,” urges The Root’s Michael Harriot. “Before hopping on the Juneteenth bandwagon, you first need to realize that you have no say in driving the narrative about this special day.”

Thank goodness I have my own commentary program.

Juneteenth celebrates enslaved people in Texas being freed on June 19, 1865 — the very last in our country to be held in bondage. Now that’s cause for jubilation for every man and woman who breathes free … of every race.

How was that “peculiar,” perniciously evil institution of slavery stopped? To put slavery in its grave, more than 360,000 American men “gave the last full measure of devotion,” as Abe Lincoln put it, to the “cause.”

These men, mostly white but of both races, deserve a moment on Juneteenth.

So do the abolitionists from Frederick Douglas and William Lloyd Garrison to John Brown and Harriett Tubman … and all those (white and black) who risked so much to run the Underground Railroad. And eternal thanks to the white juries who voted to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act, refusing to send slaves back.

Slavery is forever deserving of condemnation, certainly. But Juneteenth isn’t about slavery; it’s about emancipation, the triumph of freedom.

At my shindig, anyway.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Look Around

Yesterday marked the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Not in China, where the Communist Party (CCP) has always clubbed down any public remembrance of the thousands murdered on that day by the bullets from the so-called People’s Liberation Army.

While Hong Kong long witnessed massive June 4 vigils — even under COVID restrictions — that changed after the draconian National Security Law in 2020. Still, this year public silence required the Chinazis to arrest more than 30 Hong Kongers, some for “suspicion of carrying out acts with seditious intent.”

Seems our “leaders” quite quickly forgot about the Butchers of Beijing … and only now are waking up to the threat the CCP poses via their embrace of totalitarianism, their military build-up, the biggest since World War II, and their claims to Taiwan as well as the entire South China Sea.

“China has been bullying its neighbors for years,” explains Chris Chappell, host of China Uncensored on Rumble, before adding: “Now its bullying is coming back to bite it.”

Chappell notes that “[e]ven countries that kinda hate each other, like Japan and South Korea, have been teaming up because of the China threat.”

Mr. Chappell offers:

“Thanks to China, last year Japan announced a plan to double its military budget.”
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol recently called Taiwan “a global issue” and joined President Biden in “[opposing] any unilateral attempts to change the status quo.”
“Australia is beefing up its military — specifically in response to China.”
“The Philippines … has moved back to closer ties with the United States, allowing the U.S. to expand its military presence there.”
“India is also increasing its defense budget.”

This allied response has been spurred not by U.S. arm-twisting, but good old-fashioned fear.

Chappell also applauded open collaboration with the U.S. and NATO by South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. But he dubbed NATO’s declaration of China as “a security challenge” “the understatement of the year.”

Attested by the weekend’s near collision of Chinese and U.S. naval vessels in the Taiwan Strait.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: China Uncensored also plays on YouTube, but, as Chappell complains, “YouTube frequently demonetizes, suppresses, and secretly unsubscribes people from this channel.”

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Apocalypse California

Gavin Newsom, California, reparations, racism

The Democratic Party is a victim of its own success. Nowhere can we see that more clearly than in California.

Democrats have succeeded by pushing “victimhood,” gaining power by focusing on special groups, declaring them oppressed and offering compensation — though still never comes the day of full escape from the burden of this oppression.

Many stories of oppression are true.But no sized sliver of truth can guarantee that compensation attempts will redound to the liberation of the aggrieved.

California’s Democrats will face this soon.

Over slavery! And racism.

Never a slave state, California has been flirting, officially, with reparations. Several cities have “explored” the idea. An official “Reparations Task Force,” established by state law, has recommended a formal apology for slavery (in other states, over a hundred-and-fifty years ago). It’s also talking about giving away hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation to Black Californians, descendants of slaves or not.

The task force is scheduled to make explicit and detailed recommendations — on July 1.

Which puts Democrats on the spot.

Powerful Democrats such as Governor Gavin Newsom. Considered a rising presidential aspirant should the current 82-year-old decide not to run again, Newsom signed the law to officially look at reparations … but then seemed less than fond of the price-tag. More than twice the yearly state budget!

Now the governor is keeping his mouth shut awaiting the final report.

And, as George Skelton at the L.A. Times asks, then what? Well, that is when “the governor and lawmakers will need to emerge from cover, face the public and devise a better response.”

But up until July they can still pretend.

Then, Democrats will have to face the reparations issue squarely — and in the context of the complete failure of their state, the blame for which they cannot place upon Republicans, much less long-dead racist slave-owners.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture

Okay Not to Harm

A recent appeals court ruling means that (some) doctors and other medical practitioners won’t be forced to violate their ethical principles against doing harm.

The Fifth Circuit ruling affirms a lower-court decision “permanently enjoining [HHS] from requiring Franciscan Alliance to perform gender-reassignment surgeries or abortions in violation of its sincerely held religious beliefs.”

What is troubling about the decision is its apparent incompleteness.

In a truly free society, no private professionals or organizations would be coerced to offer their services to anybody. Everybody would be free to participate or to decline to participate in any transaction with a prospective customer related to any medical procedure. Just as any person is now (mostly) free to patronize or not patronize any provider of a good or service.

We don’t live in that free society. But at least we can hope that no person will be compelled to provide the types of services that violate the person’s moral conscience.

Like services they believe harm others.

That harm children … including the unborn.

So the court’s ruling is fine — as far as it goes. But it seems to protect only persons making religious objections, or only members of the Franciscan Alliance, not also non-religious medical practitioners who also morally object to providing abortions or sex-change operations.

Which means that there is more legal work to be done to protect the rights of all of us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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To Emancipate

On this very day 162 years ago, federal troops re-captured the armory building at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, where John Brown and what was left of his raiders were holed up.

Brown and 21 men — 14 white, seven black — had arrived on Oct. 16, 1859, to seize weapons to arm the slave revolt they attempted to spark. Even before federal troops arrived, townspeople and militiamen had trapped Brown.

Battling against the raiders, a Marine and four townspeople lost their lives, including the town’s mayor and a free African American. Ten of Brown’s men were killed, five escaped, and seven were captured, tried, convicted and executed, including Brown. Two enslaved African Americans who joined Brown also died in the fighting.

Though the raid itself was a failure, it heralded that slavery could not stand.

“Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain,” Frederick Douglass spoke decades after the Civil War ended. “The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises.

“When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared.… and the clash of arms was at hand.”

School kids learn that Brown was something of a madman, and indeed he was accused of atrocities in Kansas and elsewhere. But how long must a person allow a crime as serious as the enslavement of 4 million people to continue before taking up arms?

“It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave,” argued Henry David Thoreau in “A Plea for Captain Brown,” adding, “I agree with him.”

Peaceful democratic means are always preferred over violence. But had I been on John Brown’s jury, I would have voted to acquit.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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