All Too Successful Dodges: Praising Slavery With Faint Damning Of It.

The aptly named Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas gave an interview to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in which he attacked an initiative to teach American history, telling some of the truth about the role slavery played in the founding of the United States by, idiotically, admitting the truth of what the 1619 Project reportedly says.  

The Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton has called the enslavement of millions of African people “the necessary evil upon which the union was built”.

Though the "necessity" of Americans doing such monumental evil produced what it produced, a different choice by the people who introduced and accepted the evil of slavery into the United States would have produced a future as well, there was no necessity in doing it. They could have chosen a far different path and the results would have been based in morality instead of the immorality that Tom Cotton praises with faint damning.  

The funniest thing about this is that even as the highly touted 2024 Republican-fascist presidential candidate (whether touted by him or by others, I don't exactly know) is introducing a bill to prevent federal funds to go to that educational initiative BY CONFIRMING WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE CENTRAL PREMISE OF IT! he is calling his call to deny that "saving American history".  

The double-speak coming from the more than slightly ironically named "Tom Cotton" (as some have also pointed out) is a good example of how American history is now taught.  

Cotton’s Saving American History Act of 2020 and “would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts”, according to a statement from the senator’s office.

“The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project … is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable,” Cotton told the Democrat-Gazette.

“I reject that root and branch. America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.”

He added: “We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as [Abraham] Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”

First, the last statement was disproved in the most dramatic of ways possible by the bloodiest war in our history (if you don't count the slaughter of the Native Americans) disproved that fraudulent ass-covering by the Founding Fathers.  That view of the drafting and peddling of the original Constitution is, itself, a falsified, hagiographic view of history because if there is one thing that is bleedingly obvious it is that the American Constitution was drafted with the full intent of the slave powers, the slave owners AND NOT ONLY THOSE FROM THE STATES WHICH WOULD BE LED BY A CLASS OF ARISTOCRATIC TRAITORS TO FORM THE CONFEDERACY to maintain slavery, certainly for as long as it was possible to retain it but in perpetuity if its abolition could be thwarted.   That is obvious from the writings of the slave owning Founders who, occasionally, talked out of both sides of their mouth as their spiritual descendant, the slavery excusing, lying about slavery insisting Tom Cotton trying to ride this insane wedge issue to the presidency.  

The irony in him using the Republican-fascist hobby horse of slamming the  New York Times in this is that the Great Gray Drab has promoted a similarly false and romantic view of the same history,  its part in promoting the lying musicial Hamilton covers up the incredible sleaze of one of the worst of the Founders who, as well, spoke out of both sides of his mouth on the issue, pretending to favor abolition of slavery as his own wife and in-laws AND HIMSELF owned slaves and as he as one of the writers of the Federalist Papers sold the slavery enabling Constitution on the benefits that Northerners, especially those with money and power and the vote, that came from slavery.   

Cotton calls slavery a "necessary evil".   Well, someone else said "Necessity is the mother of invention." which is apropos if you remember that "invention" can mean a lie.   Alfred North Whitehead said it well when he said,  

"Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb, "necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is nearer the truth. 

The popular history of the "Founding fathers" and the adoption and life of the Constitution, and also not anywhere near a little of its official AND ESPECIALLY LEGAL ARTICULATION is one such dodge.   In 2020, with the state the country has gotten into through the Constitution and its mythologization, we can't afford anything but the most exigent AND ACCURATE criticism of all of them.   If we don't get past it, the same Constitution that has produced and maintained Trump will lead us into slavery and I am afraid the bloodshed that was necessary to merely end the legality of slavery will be outdone in the bloodshed which will be necessary to end it in reality and to try for egalitarian democracy.  

The Constitution of the Confederacy is worth looking at because the kind of double-speak that Cotton engages in is the language it is written in.  I might do that,  whenever the talk is of "liberty" and "freedom" as slogans, you should always be looking for the dodge because not all of those dodges are futile except in so far as people buy those words that so often cover up slavery and similar evils.  Our history is full of that.   So is our present.