Amerika

We live by myths that are not myths but symbols, since to rule the herd you need carrot and stick. The carrots must be virtuous and always right, regardless of context, therefore means-over-ends; the stick must be a demonic visage like Emmanuel Goldstein or Adolf Hitler that causes the sheep to scurry away.

However, some of our historical figures had contrary ideas to their current image, like Abraham Lincoln who wanted to repatriate former slaves:

The issue of slavery divided the country under Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency. The national argument was simple: either keep slavery or abolish it. But Abraham Lincoln, known as the Great Emancipator, may have also been known as the Great Colonizer when he supported a third direction to the slavery debate: move African Americans somewhere else.

Long before the Civil War, in 1854, Lincoln addressed his own solution to slavery at a speech delivered in Peoria, Illinois: “I should not know what to do as to the existing institution [of slavery]. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land.” While Lincoln acknowledged this was logistically impossible, by the time he assumed the Presidency and a Civil War was underfoot, the nation was in such duress that he tried it anyway.

Four days before his death, speaking to Gen. Benjamin Butler, Lincoln still pressed on with deportation as the only peaceable solution to America’s race problem. “I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace, unless we can get rid of the negroes…I believe that it would be better to export them all to some fertile country…”

Slavery is insane-stupid for a number of reasons. It requires a hostile population be settled among you, near your families. It is low-quality labor. It requires administration of force. It also introduces a pervasive ugliness that will eventually sap your spirit.

However, diversity is even more insane-stupid for the exact same reasons. We might see it as inverse colonialism and inverse slavery; this time, however, everyone suffers. Lincoln recognized this on some level but was told it was impossibly expensive to ship slaves back to Africa in a humane way.

A century and a half later, we marvel at how much less expensive it would have been.

Tags: abraham lincoln, diversity, remigration, slavery