The blogosphere is abuzz with Michael Medved’s op-ed at Townhall arguing how slavery in the U.S. wasn’t such a big deal and people shouldn’t make it out as such. Clearly he’s trying to win an award as the most idiotic pundit in print (though he still has a way to go to beat John Stossel), and numerous people have already commented, and torn to shreds, his six bullet point arguments:

1. Slavery was an ancient and universal institution, not a distinctively American innovation.

2. Slavery existed only briefly, and in limited locales, in the history of the republic – involving only a tiny percentage of the ancestors of today’s Americans.

3. Though brutal, slavery wasn’t genocidal: live slaves were valuable but dead captives brought no profit.

4. It’s not true that the U.S. became a wealthy nation through the abuse of slave labor: the most prosperous states in the country were those that first freed their slaves.

5. While America deserves no unique blame for the existence of slavery, the United States merits special credit for its rapid abolition.

6. There is no reason to believe that today’s African Americans would be better off if their ancestors had remained behind in Africa.

I won’t go into detail on why all of this is ridiculous, as others have already done so (point#5: why do we deserve ‘special credit’? Every European country had outlawed slavery long before us, without having to wage a war to make it happen). What really bugs me about Medved’s arguments is the moral relativism that is inherent in pretty much every sentence, something the right wing is usually unfairly accusing the left of.

Point 3 in particular really bugs me: “Slavery wasn’t genocidal.” Apparently even though possibly millions of slaves perished in the transit across the Atlantic, it’s not so bad because the slave owners weren’t trying to kill them – they just didn’t really care whether they made it or not. As long as we don’t attach the ‘G’-word, it’s okay. This argument seems akin to me to the right-wing argument that the number of U.S. deaths in Iraq are acceptable, because so many more people died during WWII!

For my money, bad is bad: I don’t think the Iraq War is acceptable because WWII was far worse, and I don’t think millions of slave deaths is acceptable because the slave owners weren’t trying to exterminate the race.

Point 1 makes essentially the same kind of argument: U.S. slavery isn’t so bad because other people also had slavery. As long as you compare it to something worse, it’s okay. “Everyone was doing it.”

Finally, point 6: “There is no reason to believe that today’s African Americans would be better off if their ancestors had remained behind in Africa.” This is a wonderful bit of intellectual dishonesty: Medved looks at the state of African countries today and concludes that the slave descendants are better off than they would have been in Africa. Reading his argument, he suggests that colonialism didn’t have a significant negative effect on these countries but completely ignores the possibility that maybe abducting millions of people from their native countries and turning them into slaves had some sort of negative impact on the development of those countries!

In the end, Medved is another right-wing revisionist: he can’t stand the fact that people might think that America isn’t “The Land Where Nothing Bad Ever Happened to Anybody Unfairly”, so he’s got to make slavery sound like not such a big deal.

What an asshole.