Black People 'Benefited' From Slavery, 'Useful' Jews Survived Holocaust ... Just Another Day At Fox News
Black People 'Benefited' From Slavery, 'Useful' Jews Survived Holocaust ... Just Another Day At Fox News
Yeah, normal people think this is bonkers.
Here’s what we know about the much-discussed swing voter: They decide elections. They broke for Donald Trump in 2016. They helped install faux-moderate Republican Glen Youngkin as governor in Virginia. They backed Joe Biden in 2020.
Swing voters believe cops should exist and that parents should have some say in what their kids are taught in school. Republicans leveraged to their advantage “defund the police” and “critical race theory,” but now they’re the ones alienating swing voters with extreme positions. Look at Florida, where Republicans went from supposedly fighting mandatory gay-making classes in public schools to declaring that slavery had its upsides.
Democrats at least had the sense of mind to admit it was a bad move when Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe said — in public — “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." Republicans have senselessly defended Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s repulsive remarks about Black people “benefitting” from their enslavement.
National Review writer Charles C.W. Cooke railed against Vice President Kamala Harris who denounced Florida’s slavery curriculum. “This is a brazen lie,” Cooke said. “It’s an astonishing lie. It’s an evil lie. It is so untrue — so deliberately and cynically misleading — that, in a sensible political culture, Harris would be obligated to issue an apology.”
Yes, the Black lady should apologize here. Cooke, who’s white, was born in England, and apparently thinks he knows more about US slavery than Harris. No, I’m not surprised.
Fox News devoted most of Monday to Cooke’s screed, and Jesse Watters — the network’s economy brand Tucker Carlson — declared, “This is historical fact, that slaves did develop skills while they were enslaved and then used those skills as blacksmiths, in agriculture, tailoring, in the shipping business, to benefit themselves and their families.”
Enslaved people weren’t able to “benefit themselves and their families” on account of slavery. Watters is also promoting the pernicious myth that Africans arrived in America as blank slates, like a computer with zero software installed. We weren’t just mindless brutes that enlightened white people “trained” in useful skills.
The historical reality, as the Washington Post’s Gillian Brockell states, is that “Africans already were skilled before they were enslaved.”
And, in many cases, enslavers sought and purchased people coming from specific African societies based on skills common in those societies. Decades of research — slave ship manifests, plantation ledgers, newspaper articles, letters, journals and archaeological digs — by dozens of scholars supports this, much of it compiled in the 2022 book “African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Freedom,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer.
Watters claimed that Harris doesn’t want “African Americans and white Americans to know that Black Americans did learn skills despite being enslaved,” which isn’t what she said, but this is Fox News, so of course he’s lying.
Co-host Jessica Tarlov dared suggest that she was “fundamentally uncomfortable with this sentence that Blacks benefited at all from [slavery.]”
“And, you know, it made me think of, as someone, obviously, I’m not Black, but I’m Jewish,” she said. “Would someone say about the Holocaust, for instance, that there were some benefits for Jews? While they were hanging out in concentration camps. You wanted a strong work ethic. Right. Maybe you learned a new skill.”
That’s when wannabe insult comic Greg Gutfeld offered his opinion.
“Did you ever read Man’s Search for Meaning?” he asked, doing his best Tom Buchanan. “Vik Frankl talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful. Utility. Utility kept you alive.”
No, it didn’t.
Millions died at concentration camps as soon as they arrived. Yes, the young and strong were exploited, but they eventually succumbed to starvation and disease. Responding to Gutfeld’s malicious ignorance, if not his implicit claim to be on a nickname basis with Mr. Frankl, the Auschwitz Memorial responded:
Viktor Frankl's observation about the specific situation in Auschwitz, which at some point became a camp that connected the functions of a concentration camp and extermination center and where deported Jews went through the selection process, highlights how some Jews became registered prisoners and might have used their skills to gain favor or prolong their lives in that particular setting.
Yet, it never gave them complete protection. However, we must not overlook the larger picture of the Holocaust. Nazi Germany's ultimate goal was to exterminate all the people it considered Jews (Nazis created their racial definition of a Jewish person). Millions of Jews were brutally murdered in execution sites, mainly across the east of occupied Europe, with entire communities wiped out regardless of their usefulness or contributions to society. While some of the ghettos seemed to have the goal of being productive and Jews were used as slave labor there, being "useful" did not guarantee safety, as the Nazis eventually decided to liquidate them, leading to the murder of those considered valuable as well.
There is a sign above the gate at the main entrance to Auschwitz. It reads, “Arbeit Macht Frei" (work makes one free). That was a perverse lie, just like Fox News programming.
If Republicans and right-wing media want to spend the next year before the election arguing the benefits of slavery and racial genocide, that’s on them. However, it’s not gonna impress most swing voters.
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My father's family used to get letters and postcards in Yiddish from their relatives in Poland until February 1940.
They never got them again.
Maybe these idiots at Fox can tell me why. I mean, I heard the Nazis had this slogan, "Arbeit Macht Frei..."
I recall that Viktor Frankl (not Vik, you fucking moron) said explicitly (and I paraphrase) that survival in the death camps for any period of time was almost completely random and that there was no meaningful way to increase the odds that one might survive through personal action.