>
>
>
> On Jul 28, 2011, at 9:26 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> (A remarkable piece by someone who took part in a debate with Doug
>> Henwood over Obama's candidacy, urging support. As far as I know,
>> Coates would probably support Obama again in 2012 but this does not
>> prevent him from writing a very astute take-down of the president.)
>>
>>
>> NY Times op-ed July 27, 2011
>> Obama and His Discontents
>> By TA-NEHISI COATES
>
>> ...The president invoked Abraham Lincoln, noting that the
>> Emancipation Proclamation was a compromise that freed only the
>> slaves in rebel territory. “Can you imagine how The Huffington Post
>> would have reported on that? It would have been blistering. Think
>> about it, ‘Lincoln sells out slaves.’ ”... “Never before had so
>> large a number of slaves been declared free,” writes historian Eric
>> Foner in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history, “The Fiery Trial.”...
>> it’s true that the Proclamation was a compromise...
>
> Coates is as much an ignoramus as Obama. The proclamation was the
> very opposite of a compromise: compromise in 1862 meant the end of
> secession with the maintenance of Southern slavery. The proclamation
> made compromise impossible and committed the Union irrevocably to
> total military victory. That it freed the slaves "only" in the
> Confederacy is no sign of "compromise"--slavery was enshrined in the
> Constitution and Lincoln had no legal authority to end it except in
> the context of suppressing the insurrection.
>
> And he is equally an ignoramus when he quotes Foner in his totally
> false “Never before had so large a number" claim: only a year before
> Lincoln's proclamation Czar Alexander II had declared the freedom of
> a far larger number of slaves ("serfs," the word is the same as the
> Latin servus, or slave!)
>
>
>
>
> Shane Mage
>
> "scientific discovery is basically recognition of obvious realities
> that self-interest or ideology have kept everybody from paying
> attention to"
>
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