Arthur · 7 answers · 22d

History time: John Locke, the inventor of liberalism and freedom, was a shareholder of a big slave trading company. Thoughts?

Ohhhhhh boy. I think most of the "founding fathers" had slaves. I'm not saying that justifies it, but put into historical context, they probably thought of slaves as less than human, so their philosophical ideas didn't apply to slaves. It's terrible, I know. Similarly, in the UK, there was a man who was part of the NSPCC, an anti-child abuse organization, who turned out to have abused children. Hypocrisy like that exists throughout history.

Not surprising that all these dead white men (“important historical figures) were a bunch of hypocrites.

The entire Athens Democracy was built on slavery as were the Spanish and English Empires and the young US nation. That is the human condition: Rights are limited. By class, social group, wealth, power and race and gender. Still today though slavery is not as common any more than it used to be. Looking to Africa and Asia and some other areas slavery is still an operational part of economy and we all benefit from it as the world market sells those goods everywhere.

there is a saying - scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds...everybody's low-key monsters, all the fighting is simply about who gets to decide what groups are excluded from society and shipped off

Retrospring uses Markdown for formatting

*italic text* for italic text

**bold text** for bold text

[link](https://example.com) for link