fascism

[Jerky]

Point taken on the semantic issue. Let's just retroactively re-label fascism to more accurately describe what it is, regardless of historical context, which is atavistic amoral corporatism.

However, if the documents cited by Howard Zinn in his People's History of the United States are to be trusted, it took a lot of hard work (and government intervention) for the southern establishment to get the "poor white trash" (whom they held in lower esteem than their chattel Africans) to hate and fear the negro. 

I quote: 

"Black and white worked together, fraternized together. The very fact that laws had to be passed after a while to forbid such relations indicates the strength of that tendancy. In 1661 a law was passed in Virginia that 'in case any English servant shall run away in company of any Negroes' he would have to give special service for extra years to the master of the runaway Negro. In 1691, Virginia provided for the banishment of any 'white man or woman being free who shall intermarry with a negro, mulatoo, or Indian man or woman bond or free.'"

What would "the government" have to do before you admitted that they were, indeed, down on the plantation, making sure that massas were properly cruel?

YOPJ



  <<Let's start off with the peculiar institution of African Slavery and the genocide of North America's native peoples.>>

  I thought this was where you'd start.  If it wasn't clear to you, my argument from the start was semantic.  Since I don't think the word "fascist" was in currency at the time, perhaps not even coinied, it's ahostirocial (if I'm correct) accurately to call America, at that time,"fascist."  

  That aside, I think you're confusing a rampant racism or a lack of enlightenment around the issues of race with a national racist governmental policy.  There was never a single, unified government in place that made racism its policy.  Racism wasn't a police state, with government officials down on the plantation making sure that the massas were properly cruel.  

  That slavery ended was entirely a result of the US not being fascist.
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