Spokane7
62°
April 19, 2010 in Opinion
Outside Voices: Can’t ignore slavery’s role
Los Angeles Times, April 11: What was Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell thinking when he declared April to be Confederate History Month without mentioning slavery?
Whatever the explanation, the proclamation, pegged to the fact that Virginia joined the Confederacy in April 1861, has been hastily revised after a public protest. It … now … contains a paragraph – one that easily could have been included in the original – that “the institution of slavery led to this war and was an evil and inhumane practice.”
Anyone familiar with the Civil War knows that the preservation of slavery was not the only motive for secession and that Confederate soldiers saw themselves as defending hearth and home. Nor did every Union soldier feel called to battle by a commitment to emancipation.
Still, slavery was at the heart of the War Between the States, an irreducibly brutal reality that generations of revisionists have attempted unconvincingly to efface.
Like the flying of the Confederate flag, a sanitized portrayal of the Confederacy inspires anger and uneasiness that once would have been regarded – and not just in the South – as oversensitivity. We know better now, and so, we hope, does Robert McDonnell.
Philadelphia Inquirer, April 15: President Obama’s leadership of a 47-nation summit on nuclear weapons was focused on the right goal – preventing terrorists from getting their hands on nukes.
Just two months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden met with the former operator of a plutonium reactor in Pakistan. They discussed how to build a nuclear weapon, but the Pakistani man told bin Laden that it would be too difficult to develop materials that could be used in a weapon. Bin Laden reportedly replied, “What if I already have them?”
If he didn’t have them yet, the world has plenty of locations where he could try to get them. Russia alone stores uranium and plutonium at more than 200 sites. At least eight nations have nuclear weapons, and dozens of countries possess more than 2,000 tons of plutonium and uranium.
Russia and the United States announced that they will move ahead with a long-delayed agreement to dispose of 34 tons of plutonium each – enough to build 17,000 nuclear weapons. …
These voluntary agreements won’t affect Iran’s push to develop nuclear weapons, the prospect that keeps Gen. David Petraeus of U.S. Central Command awake at night. …
Pakistan, a base for al-Qaida, said it will resist international efforts to ban production of more bomb materials. …
North Korea, a wild card as usual, did not participate in the nuclear summit. …
Obama is showing needed leadership by focusing the world’s attention on nuclear security. But he will need to put more pressure on foreign leaders to produce further tangible results on this critical issue.
Don’t fudge fish standard 
ChefGus/ John Olsen on April 19 at 5:31 a.m.
Regarding the Confederate Flag… I wonder what the revisionist history books being touted in Texas have to say on the subject of the Civil War. Anyone out there have a title of the suggested history books that will replace the old ones in Texas and elsewhere? John
liarsinnews on April 19 at 7:24 a.m.
Two years after the civil war started, Lincoln decided to free the slaves. When the war commenced it was a tariff money issue. Its time history books tell it the way it was.
misjustice on April 20 at 4:56 p.m.
This nation, and the South in particular, would never have grown into the financial leviathan that it is without the labor of those held in bondage; through not only the “formal” institution of slavery but also through the denial of equity via segregation and “informal” forms of bondage, such as unequal sentencing in the criminal justice system.
Slavery is the stain of regret that continues to inform how we think of our collective selves (even though we may try to deny its influence or pretend that we are not “racist”)…we have not moved beyond this influence on our society; even as we try to pretend that we have.