Why people get history wrong, why we repeat it, and historians are doomed to watch people repeat bad history

So one day I was deciding to go through the archives and I stumbled on a post by u/docdurango

Obviously, I wasn't here 11 months ago and the post is archived. Progressives supposedly get arguments wrong because we forget or ignore history. But then, I noticed that one of the historians I watch and read a LOT would be Gerald Horne and that the history of the Americas means we don't pay attention. According to ONE journalist, and ONE article, Horne's premise is off.

Now for simplicity's sake, I'm not going to do a full dissection of the article. It's split into 29 paragraphs. Written quite well, but the history of the Founding Fathers is far from known and seems to be a protection of them.

Where I begin to see the split is in paragraph 11:

As early as the 1660s—even before slavery had taken deep root—25% of all English custom’s revenue came from tobacco duties. There is no doubt that many slaveholding planters despised and even feared the Somerset decision, but to say that it drove them to revolt is simplistic.

What I'm aware of is that the person making this argument doesn't realize that Gerald Horne talked about the 1660s and how the upending of the English eventually lead to their downfall as a superpower in the 1700s. Mercantilism was on the rise, and if you read my linked interview, you begin to see how the profits of slavery would lead for someone to revolt:

My research has convinced me that we need to look more closely at slavery and the slave trade in order to better explicate the founding of a slave-owning republic in 1776. In other words, in June 1772, in London, there was Somerset's case, which seemed to suggest the case’s initial meaning, which of course was for England, could be extended across the Atlantic to the colonies. This caused great consternation in the colonies, not the least since the colonial economy was underpinned by slavery. It was not only the slave trade itself which brought spectacular profits, sometimes as much as 1,600 percent ... But it’s also that these profits are reported to allied industries including banking, shipping, insurance, et cetera. And that, in itself, was developing the productive forces of the colonies, which then began to strain at the colonial leash, and the combination of these factors led to a declaration of independence on July 4, 1776.

Emphasis mine. The ones profiting the most from slavery would be the Patrick Henries, the Thomas Jeffersons, and the like. The slaves were constantly revolting, and this entire narrative ignores the Caribbeans which were a hotbed of slave revolts and stronger conditions for those being manacled to actually poison their "masters" and such. It's not that the narrative isn't noteworthy, but like a Howard Zinn, the stories of the slaves and those fighting at the bottom is also being told. The next paragraph continues to tell the tales of the top:

Keep in mind that Virginia’s House of Burgesses adopted Patrick Henry’s radical Virginia Resolves in that same year—1765—fully seven years before the Somerset decision and ten years before Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation. Colonial resistance to British rule grew enormously thereafter, though the fighting didn’t begin until April 1775 (a few months before Dunmore issued his Proclamation).

Yes, the conditions were primed against British rule, but look how other people that were in British rule have faired. Australia? Canada? Both have healthcare. Both have far better parliamentary systems than the US that decided to go it alone to oust the Indigenous and manacle every African they could to be their labor force. Wanna see how bad Brexit could be? Look at the US if it can't find cheap labor. Essentially, Horne is telling us that the Founding Fathers debates is a myth:

The usual story runs — and you will hear it in profusion in about six to eight weeks — is that these Olympian Founding Fathers—capital O, capital F, capital F — in their utmost wisdom, revolted against tyranny from a despotic monarch in London and established a glorious republic with freedom and justice and liberty for all, as embodied in a wondrous Constitution that emerged subsequently. Quite frankly, in a stunning array of ideological diversity, scholars and ideologues from left to right have basically bowed down before that creation myth.

Unfortunately, our friend here has also bowed to it by ignoring the larger context.

To suggest, then, as do Horne/Street, that the Revolution was nothing more than a defense of slavery is inaccurate and one-dimensional.

"If you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it."

That's the saying here. Unfortunately, with such a distortion and belief in the Founding Fathers myth, you aren't getting a strong understanding of the history of slavery. That profit motive, 1600% profits, is a STRONG reason that people wanted to keep a gravy train flowing until it ended in Civil War. Why create slave patrols? Why create racial anxieties and suppress class in this country? Why destroy the Indigenous?

Because at the end of the day, what those Founding Fathers wanted was a human commodity that gave them more profits. Thomas Jefferson was not that great of a man

Everyone knows Jefferson was a slave owner, though few people understand the scope of his operations at Monticello, his own private plantation and mountain. At its peak, around 1817, Jefferson’s elegant palace on a hill was home to around 140 slaves. Some of these slaves lived very well — Jefferson wrote of paying some house servants and shop managers “gratuities” — while others lived under conditions that were appropriate to a gulag.

Child laborer, slave mistress on the side... The man went from abolitionist to not even letting slaves go on his death. But if we want to talk about his economic side, he blocked shipping to both Britain and France during the Napoleonic Wars which created more black markets and near triggered a famine.

And someone wants to defend the Founding Fathers as if they're all seeing and all knowing? It's a myth. Religion. These people abused human beings for their own comfort and profit. So to claim that Jefferson was a progressive when he also created white phrenology in regards to the cognitive dissonance he emitted from slavery is laughable.

Then there's George Washington... If you truly want to know about George, look up Thomas Paine and his stinging critique of the man. That was a true abolitionist. His letter of criticism to George gives him the least amount of respect of the Founding Fathers but the man stood up to power on principle by being an abolitionist instead of a slave owner.

But don't believe me. Here's Cornel West & Chris Hedges discussing his critiques.

Also, George Washington freeing his slaves on death is in stark contrast to Jefferson who didn't. That's true. But what you don't know is that one of his favorite slaves went with him to the Constitutional Convention where the Constitution was being created and decided to leave when she got back. All those notions of freedom and liberty in the Constitution? Not one word of it for slaves of the time and they took matters into their own hands. My critique is of the system of slavery which created its critics in the abolitionists that worked to upend it with the culmination of the Civil War, not one or two people having some ounce of moral character after they are near death.

What progressives need—what all Americans need—is a history that allows for nuance and contradiction, a history that offers room for celebrating old heroes as well as adding new ones.

No, people need to read the history instead of believing the myths. The history of the Indigenous, the poor, and those that suffered at the bottom. What was done in this post was glorify the rich and ignore what went on to protect the Founding Fathers from the criticisms of class.

This history ignores the Indigenous, the Irish, the Scots, the slaves (black and white), and focuses almost entirely on the machinations of the plantation owner class. How are you going to understand America as a settler-colonial project unless you read more? Where's your comments from CLR James? What other historians did you look into and coordinate arguments with?

This is merely based off wrong impressions of Street and Horne without looking at the books they wrote in strong detail. How about the fact that most of the confederate statues were built in the 50s?

Yes, these monuments were put up to honor Confederate leaders and soldiers. But the timing of the monument building makes it pretty clear what the real motivation was: to physically symbolize white terror against blacks. They were mostly built during times when Southern whites were engaged in vicious campaigns of subjugation against blacks, and during those campaigns the message sent by a statue of Robert E. Lee in front of a courthouse was loud and clear.

And this is how history repeats... People don't see other building narratives, focus only on their own, and create these monuments of myth without any sort of understanding of the actual history as people lived through it.

If anything, if you want a counterveiling narrative, please do read Gerald Horne's "Counter-Revolution of 1776" which goes over most of this in detail. Also pick up "Indigenous People's History of the United States" by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

History is never one narrative. And it's beyond foolish to think it is. Learn from a lot more than the Founding Father myths so we can put the history of capitalism and slavery into proper context.