What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
It’s from the 1800s, when the US was the global capital of chattel slavery.
The Nazis were inspired by the US, by the way. The concentration camps were inspired by the reservation system. There were holocausts in the Americas before Hitler was even born.
It’s a pretty famous speech given by Frederick Douglass, a former slave who was asked to give a July 4th address. He escaped slavery and became a self-taught abolitionist, suffragette, radical reconstruction politician, preacher, and author.
thank you! That is an interesting character to read about. Makes me despise people all the more (if that was possible) who thought / think that they can own other people’s lives.
It’s not only well documented that the American treatment of Black and Indigenous people directly inspired Hitler, but also, segregation and Jim Crow (both direct inspiration) in the US ended over 20 years after the holocaust, and slavery is still legal in the form of the prison industrial complex, which is a white supremacist institution that disproportionately harms already marginalised populations.
I am a decedent of holocaust survivors, this isn’t to make light of it, it’s a statement on just how bad the US is.
E: it’s late and I didn’t notice that queermunist had basically said the same until after I replied, but I’m leaving it, because the point is worth making again.
I am a decendent of holocaust survivors, this isn’t to make light of it, it’s a statement on just how bad the US is.
My point was - no matter how bad the DS is, for the time being, Nazi Germany still was way worse. But yeah, the DSA are working hard on getting there - and if you add Israel’s genocidal bodycount to that of the DSA with all its proxy wars, it will soon be getting dangerously close.
70-85 million dead caused by WW2, ultimately fault of the Nazis (Germans and Austrians), Italy and Japan. I guess the genocide in the DS was mostly lower in numbers because the indigenous population wasn’t as big - for they would sure as hell tried to eradicate the native Americans regardless of how many there were.
Ahum. Without historical context of the quote, that statement sounds quite wrong. /ze Germans
It’s from the 1800s, when the US was the global capital of chattel slavery.
The Nazis were inspired by the US, by the way. The concentration camps were inspired by the reservation system. There were holocausts in the Americas before Hitler was even born.
Lebensraum is just manifest destiny but scarier cause it’s in German
It’s true.
I’m terrified just reading it.
thanks for adding a time period - would you happen to have an author of the quote as well? :)
It’s a pretty famous speech given by Frederick Douglass, a former slave who was asked to give a July 4th address. He escaped slavery and became a self-taught abolitionist, suffragette, radical reconstruction politician, preacher, and author.
thank you! That is an interesting character to read about. Makes me despise people all the more (if that was possible) who thought / think that they can own other people’s lives.
Who do you think Hitler took inspiration from?
It’s not only well documented that the American treatment of Black and Indigenous people directly inspired Hitler, but also, segregation and Jim Crow (both direct inspiration) in the US ended over 20 years after the holocaust, and slavery is still legal in the form of the prison industrial complex, which is a white supremacist institution that disproportionately harms already marginalised populations.
I am a decedent of holocaust survivors, this isn’t to make light of it, it’s a statement on just how bad the US is.
E: it’s late and I didn’t notice that queermunist had basically said the same until after I replied, but I’m leaving it, because the point is worth making again.
My point was - no matter how bad the DS is, for the time being, Nazi Germany still was way worse. But yeah, the DSA are working hard on getting there - and if you add Israel’s genocidal bodycount to that of the DSA with all its proxy wars, it will soon be getting dangerously close. 70-85 million dead caused by WW2, ultimately fault of the Nazis (Germans and Austrians), Italy and Japan. I guess the genocide in the DS was mostly lower in numbers because the indigenous population wasn’t as big - for they would sure as hell tried to eradicate the native Americans regardless of how many there were.