{"id":22868,"date":"2013-11-07T10:32:09","date_gmt":"2013-11-07T15:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22868"},"modified":"2013-11-07T11:01:18","modified_gmt":"2013-11-07T16:01:18","slug":"astounding-historical-ignorance-or-is-he-just-trolling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/11\/07\/astounding-historical-ignorance-or-is-he-just-trolling\/","title":{"rendered":"Astounding historical ignorance … or is he just trolling?"},"content":{"rendered":"

You’d have to go a long way to match the degree of ignorance that the Washington Post<\/em>‘s Richard Cohen<\/a> admits to in this article:<\/p>\n

I sometimes think I have spent years unlearning what I learned earlier in my life. For instance, it was not George A. Custer who was attacked at the Little Bighorn. It was Custer \u2014 in a bad career move \u2014 who attacked the Indians. Much more important, slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks. Slavery was a lifetime\u2019s condemnation to an often violent hell in which people were deprived of life, liberty and, too often, their own children. Happiness could not be pursued after that.<\/p>\n

Steve McQueen\u2019s stunning movie 12 Years a Slave<\/em> is one of those unlearning experiences. I had to wonder why I could not recall another time when I was so shockingly confronted by the sheer barbarity of American slavery. Instead, beginning with school, I got a gauzy version. I learned that slavery was wrong, yes, that it was evil, no doubt, but really, that many blacks were sort of content. Slave owners were mostly nice people \u2014 fellow Americans, after all \u2014 and the sadistic Simon Legree was the concoction of that demented propagandist, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> was a lie and she never \u2014 and this I remember clearly being told \u2014 had ventured south to see slavery for herself. I felt some relief at that because it meant that Tom had not been flogged to death.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No modern American — working in the media — could possibly be so ignorant, so he must<\/em> be trolling. H\/T to Julian Sanchez<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You’d have to go a long way to match the degree of ignorance that the Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen admits to in this article: I sometimes think I have spent years unlearning what I learned earlier in my life. For instance, it was not George A. Custer who was attacked at the Little Bighorn. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28,13],"tags":[52,122,605],"class_list":["post-22868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media","category-usa","tag-absurd","tag-movies","tag-slavery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5WQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22868"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22870,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22868\/revisions\/22870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}