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Workers Vanguard No. 1111 |
5 May 2017 |
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The Civil War Smashed Slavery! (Editorial Note) God only knows what Donald Trump understands about the Civil War. But his comments on May 1—that the war could have been averted if Andrew Jackson were still president—had little to do with his plentiful ignorance. Rather, they were a repudiation of the Second American Revolution and the Union soldiers, including 200,000 black troops, who crushed the slaveowners; an attack on black people, who won their freedom from slavery through that war of liberation; and a slap in the face of Abraham Lincoln, who led the Union to victory against the Confederacy.
That Trump described Jackson as having had “a big heart” is typical for a man whose administration is littered with types who flirt with Holocaust denial and embrace the Confederacy. Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act led to the Trail of Tears and the deaths of thousands of Native Americans forced off their lands. A staunch supporter of slavery, he owned 150 human beings when he died in 1845. Trump’s claim that things could “have been worked out” by Jackson means maintaining America’s “peculiar institution.”
The Civil War was America’s most formative and defining event. It was in reaction to emancipation that the Klan and other race-terrorist outfits formed to bloodily suppress the newly freed slaves. Today, the fascist scum emboldened by Trump dream of reversing the outcome of the Civil War. Although the war smashed slavery, the promise of black equality and integration remains unfulfilled. Its unfinished tasks demand the sweeping away of the capitalist order through proletarian revolution, a third American revolution in which black workers are slated to play a leading role. Finish the Civil War! For black liberation through socialist revolution!
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