Shattered
Yesterday after hours of speechifying, the House of Representatives voted affirmative to impeach the President. There was little if any genuine discussion in the hours leading up to the vote. Nearly all of the majority Democratic members voted to impeach him. The Republican minority voted in lockstep, unanimously, — not to impeach. Impeachment is the lodging of charges that the President has committed actions that betray his oath of office. He will stand trial in the Senate and will be acquitted. The Senate majority leader of the Republican membership is on record that he will work in concert with the Presidents legal team to insure his acquittal.
In the past I’ve read of sham trials in Communist countries, where the verdict was “in the bag” ahead of the trial, the trial being theater for public consumption. I guess this will be a sham-trial-American-style.
I was surprised at how well I slept last night. I anticipated a troubled evening of rest. I turned in, dismayed by the images of Republican members of the House repeating the narrative spin of the presidents attempt to trade vital military support for Ukraine, — in exchange for a personal political favor. Especially weird was the tale generated by Russian propaganda sources that it was Ukraine (not Russia) that interfered with our 2016 election. To my eye the Republican House members believed what they were saying.
On a parallel note here are some of the pro-slavery arguments offered by the South in the run-up to the Civil War.
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- The sudden end to the slave economy would have had a profound and killing economic impact in the South where reliance on slave labor was the foundation of their economy. The cotton economy would collapse. The tobacco crop would dry in the fields. Rice would cease being profitable.
- If all the slaves were freed, there would be widespread unemployment and chaos. This would lead to uprisings, bloodshed, and anarchy. They pointed to the mob’s “rule of terror” during the French Revolution and argued for the continuation of the status quo, which was providing for affluence and stability for the slaveholding class and for all free people who enjoyed the bounty of the slave society.
- Slavery had existed throughout history and was the natural state of mankind. The Greeks had slaves, the Romans had slaves, and the English had slavery until very recently.
- In the Bible, Abraham had slaves. They point to the Ten Commandments, noting that “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, … nor his manservant, nor his maidservant.” In the New Testament, Paul returned a runaway slave, Philemon, to his master, and, although slavery was widespread throughout the Roman world, Jesus never spoke out against it.
- The institution was divine, and that it brought Christianity to the heathen from across the ocean. Slavery was, according to this argument, a good thing for the enslaved. John C. Calhoun said, “Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.”
Those are just a few of the arguments put forth to justify a practice, that from our distant vantage point, is seen as cruel on it’s face. The Southern slave holding “1% percent class” of the day perceived slavery as just the way things were and conjured up an array of justifications for their humanity denying economic practice.
I am reminded that human nature does not change. Or the change is so gradual and uneven in the arc of history that one can take no comfort that we are improving as a species.
When a society forms around any institution, as the South did around slavery, it will formulate a set of arguments to support it. The Southerners held ever firmer to their arguments as the political tensions in the country drew us ever closer to the Civil War.
And so it is with us today in the 21st century. We’d find ourselves right at home in the America of the mid 1800s. The latent monstrosity of being human, the diabolic dimension, the negation of what is inherent to being human — emerges. The core is exploding.
The information on slavery was taken from this US history website.
Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor, and weapons, our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong — otherwise one will never become strong.
— excerpt Twilight Of The Idols by Nietzsche
