Eturnalshift wrote:
Never learned about the black slave owners who bought blacks for labor or to buy their freedom.
This is a myth.
Dred Scott vs Sanford explicitly established that this was illegal and impossible because Southern blacks had no civil rights and therefore no basis to own property or sue in court.
You may want to think that what you claim is true, but historical fact establishes that it isn't.
Eturnalshift wrote:
Never learned about how many of the slaves were treated well.
If any significant number of slaves were treated well, that relationship would have endured post-slavery. That didn't come to pass. Why?
Do you have evidence this was the case on any significant scale?
Eturnalshift wrote:
Never emphasized that the blacks enslaved, and sold, other blacks in Africa... it was all the evil white mans doing.
American slavery was uniquely brutal and racist. African (and Classical) slavery was not.
It is also worth nothing that this is why the Yankee Founding Fathers who owned black slaves were not comparable to the Southern rednecks who also did. Proof: Northerners practiced manumission and Southerners did not.
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What's your frame of reference, your facts?
What's yours? Give the rundown.
Sure thing.
Following a series of general strikes in 494BC, the Romans established an office called the plebian tribunate with powers to protect the rights of the lower classes. This office had no equivalent in any other culture until modern times, and even in our own times it remains in many ways superior to the institutions which perform the same role (small claims court and calling up your local representative). Plebian tribunes could only be of the lower classes, and anyone who physically accosted one could be killed on the spot, regardless of social class. Proof that this office was effective is that we have written records by aristocrats who feared and hated its power (and also particularly assertive tribunes like the Gracchi that were mobbed to death towards the end of the Republic).
We have many books about Roman politics by different authors that revolve around the role of rule of law in the Roman decision-making process. Proof that these are credible is that the dynamics remain constant from author to author. Caesar and Cicero certainly didn't see eye to eye, but both their writings argue in terms of what was or was not legal, proving that Roman notions of lawfulness remained constant irrespective of author bias. This concept of lawfulness is fundamental to the Western way of life and is a major enduring strength of the West against modern China.
Roman legions were by law comprised of citizens, which meant that the loyalty of the armed forces of the Roman nation were ensured its capacity to provide its citizens with rights and legal protections. This is in stark contrast to many other cultures both East and West that were heavily reliant on mercenaries. In addition, excepting for very serious crimes such as desertion or striking a commanding officer, Roman legionaries could not be beaten with an object thicker than a willow branch (hence it became a common legionary symbol). It is important to note here that this approach to military discipline (ensuring discipline via respect for authority rather than corporal punishment) fell out of favor for many centuries until being revived by the Americans, for the same reason: populist traditions that made authority respectable.
We know this worked because we can compare various accounts of classical-era wars as well as the wars of China. Defection and treachery were very common in ancient warfare, and the Romans were the first culture to have the kind of national loyalty we take for granted in today's armed forces, in large part because we adopted many of their methods such as drill, uniforms, chain of command, and esprit de corps via unit traditions etc.
By contrast, look at armed forces in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, where they don't have those traditions, and people just change sides or do whatever they want.
We also have a bunch of inscriptions and other information about Roman political life which established the give-and-take of Roman government that has no comparison in Eastern culture. You can easily Google images of a bunch of political inscriptions from Pompeii. This also proves something else very important, which is that the Greeks and Romans had mass literacy, something that no other culture achieved until the rise of Napoleon. This was in turn attributable to their populist traditions.
By contrast, you can go read the works of Lao Tzu or historical accounts of the Three Kingdoms War, which emphasize the fundamentally despotic ideology of Chinese culture. Lao Tzu explicitly opposes mass literacy, populism and progressive ideology. Confucianism is also a fundamentally anti-populist ideology, proof being that it emphasizes the non-accountability of superiors to inferiors, and advocates measures of aptitude that are arbitrary by design such as calligraphy.
Also note that Chinese writings about politics and war (including the
Art of War) contain no mention of rational relationships between army and people and state, something that are common themes in the writings of Caesar or Livy about Roman wars and statecraft. To Sun Tzu, loyalty stops with the commander; Roman authors consistently express the same principle of subordination of the military to the civil that we continue to observe today.
Is that satisfactory to you? Or what are you asking?
