It appears the US congress has just proposed (edited) a bill that declares “Antifa” a terrorist organization.

This doesn’t even make sense as Antifa isn’t an organization, but just a shared name for anyone that self-identifies as a person opposed to and willing to fight fascism 🤦‍♂️

Stay safe out there!

Note: SLRPNK is an EU based service and we are openly Antifa here, and proudly so!

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    32·
    3 days ago

    you must also admit is an improvement over monarchist genocidal patriarchal slave owners

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunmore's_Proclamation

    Formally proclaimed on November 15, its publication prompted between 800 and 2,000 slaves (from both Patriot and Loyalist owners) to run away and enlist with Dunmore. It also raised a furor among Virginia’s slave-owning elites (again of both political persuasions), to whom the possibility of a slave rebellion was a major fear. The proclamation ultimately failed in meeting Dunmore’s objectives; he was forced out of the colony in 1776, taking about 300 former slaves with him. The 1779 Philipsburg Proclamation applied to all the colonies. During the course of the war, between 80,000 and 100,000 slaves escaped from the plantations. While Dunmore’s Proclamation freed many slaves and enlarged the size of Lord Dunmore’s army, it alienated slaveholders and caused many of them to turn against the British.

    Lincoln would employ a similar gambit four score and seven years later, to a more successful end. Confederates would call him a monarchist genocidal patriarchal slave owners in response.

    • DragonTypeWyvern
      2·
      3 days ago

      I don’t think it’s a bad point of order, but I do think it’s disingenuous to compare the Emancipation Proclamation from an abolitionist (and Lincoln was, no matter the spin confederates try to put on it) to a ploy by a British governor that most historians agree was a practical maneuver and not related to his beliefs on the topic.

      It certainly didn’t free all slaves in the Empire, meaning the rebellion was still against another slave state. And Dunmore was himself a slaver, and would after his Proclamation buy more slaves for himself.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        3 days ago

        I do think it’s disingenuous to compare the Emancipation Proclamation from an abolitionist (and Lincoln was, no matter the spin confederates try to put on it) to a ploy by a British governor

        I’d probably conflate Dunmore’s Proc with the First and Second Confiscation Acts. They both served as tools to undermine rebellious states without upsetting slavers still in their purview. The Emancipation Proclamation, and then the 13th Amendment, were expansions of the policy made afterwards by Congressmen who recognized there couldn’t practically be a thin sliver of slave-legal states in between the abolition states and the confederate ones.

        It certainly didn’t free all slaves in the Empire

        The UK abolished slavery in 1803, following a domestic wave of abolitionism that spilled over into the Northern US states. The abolitionist movement didn’t end at any one border. Activists recognized abolition as a global struggle, one big reason why the UK failed to align with the Confederate States despite doing a lucrative textile trade on the backs of American plantation captives.

        And of course its worth noting how post-abolition colonialism largely exported the brutal practices of slavery outside the view of UK/US consumers. That doesn’t change how public disdain for slavery as a practice influenced governors like Dunmore, Kings like George III, and eventually Presidents like Lincoln to employ abolition as a weapon against political enemies.

        This wasn’t one thing or another. The moral revulsion generated by slavery made slave liberation and instigated slave revolts a popular tool of foreign powers and local dissidents. The politics of abolition were never exclusively a strategic or exclusively moral decision.