One key strategy for excusing evil and evil in American's history specifically is to treat it as an "unfortunate" inevitability, something to have sorrow over but nothing that could have reasonably been avoided-- so there is no point in making a moral judgment or seeing parallels with moral choices made in the present. In comments, offensivetoyou makes this argument in regard to genocide against Native Americans:

no government could stand against the land hunger of the people. ALL the people...Nor do you deal with the issue of disease, or of the impossibility of coexistance of two very different cultures, a problem which has existed all the time and everywhere.

Yet, of course, many contemporaries at the time DID stand against the supposed land hunger of the people.

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That few people in America even know the facts that Blackmon documents in my earlier post is astonishing--but this reflects a toxic "patriotic" denial of truths about American history that we see in contemporary politics today.

In fact, the core facts of continuing slavery in the South were repeatedly investigated and, for a short time starting in 1903, the federal government brought indictments over the issue with cases going to the Supreme Court--but the court proceedings came under such assault by southern politicians that they were shut down, all in a hail of denial of the problems of not just 20th century slavery but of the pre-Civil War version as well. The following quote sums it up:

As the twentieth century neared, though, the orthodoxy of southern patriotism was mutating virulently...The South now demanded in public forums an increasingly rabid level of absolute adherence to a baroque new mythology of the honorable southerner, the contented slave, and the tragically defeated secession.

In this, we see the same toxic DNA that twists any criticism of the government policy into hatred of government--and the metaphorical kissing of the flag that Michelle Obama was forced into.

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Let us talk this Labor Day about slave labor in the United States. No, not the antebellum kind before the Civil War but the slavery that persisted well into the 20th century, the slavery that was integral not only to the southern economy but slaves owned by northern corporations and used to break strikes and keep the South a union-free reserve. And I don't mean some metaphorical slavery, but, as Douglas Blackmon writes in his recent Slavery by Another Name, the slavery of brutal forced labor, whips, death and sexual rape of black women--in many ways worse than that of the older form of slavery.

The author is not a leftwing journalist but Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, but what he documents is seven decades of a southern gulag- and I use the word "gulag" deliberately for what his story shows is that the U.S. had within its borders as brutal a regime of degradation as the worst that Stalin could dish out. This southern gulag involved millions of black workers enslaved through a combination of capitalist employers, farm owners and a legal system that promised a brutal fate for anyone defying their de facto masters. And it is a key story for understanding the ultimate weakness of the overall U.S. labor movement, since having a deunionized Southern region was an essential tool in disciplining Northern workers who feared loss of jobs to a region without labor rights. That is the story that Blackmon tells. I urge every person to go out and read the book, but the following gives the highlights (or lowlights if you will).

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