Courtesy of Raw Story:
But Burns recommended that Americans read South Carolina’s Articles of Secession to get the real story on why the states went to war against each other. “[T]hey do not mention states’ rights. They mention slavery, slavery, slavery,” he pointed out. “And that we have to remember. It is much more complicated than that, but essentially the reason why we murdered each other — more than 2 percent of our population, 750,000 Americans died; that’s more than all the wars from the Revolution through Afghanistan combined — was over essentially the issue of slavery.”
According to Burns, the racism running through the DNA of America was still present in modern day politics.
“The main American theme, I think, is freedom,” he noted. “But we also notice that race is always there. Always there. When Thomas Jefferson says all men are created equal, he owns a couple hundred human beings and he doesn’t see the contradiction or the hypocrisy and doesn’t free anybody in his lifetime and sets in motion an American narrative that is bedeviled by a question of race.”
“And we struggle with it. We try to ignore it. We pretend, with the election of Barack Obama, that we’re in some post-racial society,” he continued. “And what we have seen is a kind of reaction to this. The birther movement, of which Donald Trump is one of the authors of, is another politer way of saying the N word. It’s just more sophisticated and a little bit more clever. He’s ‘other,’ he’s different.”
“What’s actually ‘other’ and different about him? It turns out it’s the same old thing. It’s the color of his skin.”
So now we have Burns joining Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, in explaining to the mouth breathers that yes their ancestors took up arms against their own country for the sole purpose of hanging onto the right to continue owning human beings.
And that inherent racism is still a part of this country's DNA and continues to pop up here and there especially during speeches given by the living embodiments of their hatred like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump.
Historian and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns explains what was behind the Civil War: "They do not mention states’ rights. They mention slavery, slavery, slavery."
5:11 AM
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