India/western Sociology

[Husky]

^ That was a brilliant find.





This stamement:

Along the way, he nimbly demonstrates that the colonists, though they claimed to be fighting for liberty, were fighting for the sort of liberty that didn't extend to Native Americans or black slaves.

Exactly.

I've noticed many online Indians - in India and overseas - gush over the "founding fathers" and how upstanding they were. Not quite, as Jennings said.



IIRC either Jefferson refused to free his pretty "slave", OR he was tardy with the "hey, let's abolish" because he didn't want her freed (from him). Now where did I come across that... Don't know.



Anyway, indirectly related:

Jefferson in Paris (1995) [film]

One of the obsessive speculations in American history is whether Thomas Jefferson, in the years before he became president, had an affair with (and fathered a child with) his 15-year-old slave Sally Hemings.[...]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/...rson/true/

Is it true?

In 1998, the scientific journal Nature published the results of DNA tests designed to shed new light on questions first asked some two hundred years earlier: Did Thomas Jefferson have a relationship with a woman who was his slave? Did that relationship produce children?



Now, the new scientific evidence has been correlated with the existing documentary record, and a consensus of historians and other experts who have examined the issue agree that the question has largely been answered: Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one of Sally Hemings's children, and quite probably all six. The language of "proof" does not translate perfectly from science and the law to the historian's craft, however. And the DNA findings in this case are only one piece of a complicated puzzle that many in previous generations worked hard to make sure we might never solve.



In this section, FRONTLINE has gathered some of the key scientific and documentary evidence which has led historians to believe in Jefferson's paternity, as well as the "dissenting views" of those who continue to maintain that the evidence is not conclusive. FRONTLINE has also enlisted the help of historians to consider the Jefferson-Hemings relationship in the context of their own time.

Hmmm. 15 is underage isn't it. That would make the by then-ancient Jefferson a... a... a... cradle-robber? (To put it politely.)



But it's his hypocrisy on slavery that I imagine I remember reading about that possibly bothers me more.





Francis Jennings can have all the founding fathers. All except one. That Englishman, Thomas Paine. He's a good man.

http://web.archive.org/web/2003021119084...ution.html

To understand what the state of society [color="#0000FF"]ought to be[/color], it is necessary to have some idea of the natural and primitive state of man; such as it is at this day among the Indians of North America. There is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets in Europe.

Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice

<img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />

He has observed. And just going by that one statement, I think I read a calm admiration for them in his words.





All founding fathers are free to be accused. Thomas Paine should be exempted with special noted exception each time, to remind people that there was that exception.

He had no selfish or myopic reason to do all that he did; it was not purely ideological that he could ever allow it to be at the expense of anyone (this is in contrast with how communists make claims to various high ideals but are ready and willing to sacrifice everyone in the way). Paine was just convinced that mankind was better than how European society was then and tried to bring the improvement about.