Abcarian: Enjoyed the Benghazi hearings? You’re gonna love the coming Republican era of “angertainment”
Tuesday, September 29, 2012
The Republicans have made themselves the heroes of the American Right. In the wake of their Benghazi hearings, the only people who could now claim that the Democratic Party was “the party of slavery” are the GOP. To understand what has been going on here, it is necessary to understand what slavery was. I will not bore you with the details, but merely summarize. There were five types of people in America in the 18th and 19th centuries: slaves, indentured servants, free slaves, free men, and free white people. Indentured servants were servants who were, in effect, bonded in an agreement with their masters. The indentured servant was promised that if the masters wished to have him or her returned to them, the masters would pay the indentured servant’s passage and would also pay the master’s expenses while the man or woman was gone. This was the main reason for the indentured servant being indentured: to make sure that the people who hired them did not have to pay for their passage to the other side. In return for his or her release, the indentured servant agreed to pay the master’s expenses while the man or woman was away from the masters. Slaves (or slaves) were people who were captured as criminals or as the result of war. The problem was that the slave owners did not have to worry about their slaves escaping. It was their problem, not the masters’. The slaves were their problem to deal with. Slavery was far, far more than chattel slavery, and for the most part it was a negative institution. Slavery was the opposite of what Christ meant by the word “slave.” Slavery meant the enslavement of people for their labor and the master could get his or her way. Slavery meant more than that. The master was the slave’s owner. The master had the right to dominate the servant. The master was the servant’s master. For the servant, it meant the