Juneteenth--

Many Matters Remain to Ponder

by 

Eric Paul Nolte

Happy Juneteenth!

Slavery has been practiced everywhere in the world by nearly everybody enslaving nearly everybody else, since the dawn of history.

Do I overstate the matter?  Whites, Blacks, Yellows, Reds—mix and match any of them at your leisure!  Nearly every culture enslaved other groups of people.

Hmm. How does this bear on slavery in America?

Well, Juneteenth is the celebration of the end of slavery in America.  

Hallelujah!  A truly wonderful thing!

And yet many matters remain to think about slavery.

How many people believe that slavery itself is largely a matter of white Europeans harpooning hapless Black Africans and shipping them off to oppressive and horrible lives in the Americas?  

I would wager that it is a majority of people who believe this idea.

But this idea is far too narrow a picture of slavery in the history of the world.

As for slavery in the United States, July 19th, 1865 was the day that slavery was officially ended, 

This proclamation finally put an end to the official hypocrisy of slavery that continued in the face of Jefferson’s personally conflicted struggle with his own contradictory thoughts on slavery. 

On the one hand, was Jefferson's guilt-ridden approval of slavery, and on the other hand, the unprecedented eloquence of his soulful opposition to slavery. 

It took a godawful civil war to end slavery, officially.  There can be no doubt that the Civil War was essentially a matter of the South’s assertion of its right to keep slavery.  

Keep in mind here, that the enslavement of one group of people by another was practiced by nearly every culture.  Outright slavery is illegal today everywhere in the world, except for countries ruled by dictators where everyone is ruled as if they are the property of the dictators.  However, in many countries, including the US, there remains de facto slavery, in the form of human trafficking—the capture and abuse of persons by means of coercion and deception for sexual and other forms of forced labor.

Now, to those who continue to condemn solely white people for slavery, let the record show (these numbers are coming from history.com) that, of the approximately 620,000 soldiers who died in the war, more than 360,000 were Union soldiers (some of whom were freed Black slaves), and 258,000 were Confederate soldiers (surely none of whom were willing slaves.)  

These figures show that Union soldiers died at a ratio of 3:2— three Union soldiers died for every two Confederates.

Of course, the terrible aftermath of the Civil War has left scars to this day. 

As an old man who grew up in the Jim Crow South (I'm from Richmond, Virginia, which was, let it not be forgotten, the capital of the Confederacy) I witnessed more of the ugliness of this legally racist segregation than did many who lived outside the south.  

But now let’s turn our attention to the nature and morality of slavery itself.

All those who enslave others must believe that it is acceptable to force others to work against their will for a predatory advantage.  

Suspend your doubt for a moment, when I will return to government behavior in the public sphere.

It is axiomatic that those who enslave others are predators.

This matter raises the question of evil itself.  What is right, what is wrong?

The heart of the matter here is that the essence of evil is exactly this idea of using other people against their will for a predatory advantage.

Is it moral to use other people against their will?  

I think not.  

And while any decent person would agree with this assertion, I doubt that many people actually appreciate how widely this abomination shows up in the world.

Every horrible action against other individuals is an example of this formulation of evil.

What else is murder, if not that a predator uses others against their will?  (That is to say “murder,” meaning the unprovoked killing of another person, which is not to be confused with killing a predator in self-defense.)

Rape?  What is rape?  Again, here is a predator forcing someone to be sexually used against their will.

Mugging?  The same.  A predator using victims against their will.

How about taxation?  Even if you are happy to pay the government for their services, the fact is that if you do not pay the taxes demanded of you, they will come after you to make you pay, and if you resist, they will send legal documents demanding payment.  If you resist these, they will send agents to your house, and if you resist intensely enough, they will ultimately kill you on your own property.  Whose property is it?  Hah!  Clearly not yours.  You are being used against your will.

What about conscription?  

I was drafted during the Vietnam War.  I sent letters to my draft board to object to my impending induction into the Army during that war.  As a matter of conscience, I objected to the war and to the draft.  Would this objection make me a conscientious objector?   No!  It did me no good to say that I objected to the draft as a matter of conscience.  Why?  Because I would have needed to prove that I had a long-standing association with one of the “approved” religious groups, like the Quakers or Shakers, or the many others.  My individual conscience was not sufficient to prove the legitimacy of my opposition.

What is the draft, if not the explicit assertion by the government that the nation’s interests trump your own beliefs?  

The importance of the collective is held above that of the individual.  I was to be used against my will, by the predatory will of the government.

What is slavery, if not the assertion by the rulers, that the nation’s interests, or in other words, the interests of the plantation owners, are more important than the interests of the ill-fated slaves in chains?

What of the regulations issuing forth from the myriad agencies of the government—these armies of unelected bureaucrats who are empowered to demand your obedience to everything they regulate?  

Resist with enough confidence, and you will surely wind up in jail, or worse.

Slavery means being forced to live against your will for the sake of those others who dictate how you are allowed to live.

Governments everywhere dictate how we are allowed to live in an ever-encroaching circle of control.  

This dynamic is surely a kind of slavery, properly understood.

Therefore, a legitimate Juneteenth—the spirit of Juneteenth—the spirit we wish to celebrate, must lie at some point in the future, after governments free their citizens from being slaves of another form.

As with so many other areas of cultural and intellectual improvement, we await the day when a growing and deeper consciousness can lead us to making the world a better place.

E  P  N