WEBVTT - The Debtor-Slaver, A Study in American Class Psychology 0:00:04.920 --> 0:00:08.640 Welcome to Dick It Happened Here podcast about things being 0:00:08.680 --> 0:00:14.040 absolutely atrocious. I'm your host, Meo Ball, and today we're 0:00:14.040 --> 0:00:17.239 going to do something a little different. Instead of our 0:00:17.320 --> 0:00:20.680 normal sort of escapades through the torment and the sort 0:00:20.720 --> 0:00:24.040 of crumbles of the modern world, We're going to take 0:00:24.079 --> 0:00:27.680 a step back into history to trace through the history 0:00:27.800 --> 0:00:31.600 and class psychology of a kind of guy who is 0:00:31.600 --> 0:00:35.360 a recurring character in the history of North America and 0:00:35.600 --> 0:00:38.360 who are responsible, to a greater extent than you think 0:00:38.560 --> 0:00:42.960 for some of the worst atrocities this world has ever seen. Now, 0:00:43.159 --> 0:00:47.800 I hesitate to use the word class as a way 0:00:47.800 --> 0:00:51.559 to actually describe these people, because the people were going 0:00:51.600 --> 0:00:55.680 to be talking about are from completely different economies, completely 0:00:55.720 --> 0:01:00.320 different class structures, completely different systems of production. So we're 0:01:00.320 --> 0:01:05.720 sticking with the loose term kind of guy. And this 0:01:05.800 --> 0:01:08.000 kind of guy is a kind of guy that I 0:01:08.080 --> 0:01:12.480 have termed the debtor slaver. Now this, at first glance, 0:01:12.680 --> 0:01:16.720 this this is a confusing term. My word processor, at 0:01:16.720 --> 0:01:19.480 the very least, gets very very angry with me every 0:01:19.480 --> 0:01:21.759 time I try to write it and insist that no, no, no, 0:01:22.040 --> 0:01:26.440 I must in fact mean debtor slave. But no, I 0:01:26.480 --> 0:01:30.080 do not mean debtor slave. What I'm actually referring to 0:01:30.240 --> 0:01:33.560 as a kind of guy who is both hopelessly in 0:01:33.640 --> 0:01:37.600 debt and also in command of enormous economic abilitary resources, 0:01:38.000 --> 0:01:41.640 most often slaves. To get a sense of what I'm 0:01:41.680 --> 0:01:44.240 talking about here, we're going to start with the archetypical 0:01:44.319 --> 0:01:51.120 debtor slaver, her Nan Cortes. Her name Cortes is, by 0:01:51.160 --> 0:01:55.600 all reputable accounts, an enormous piece of ship. A broke 0:01:55.680 --> 0:01:59.720 noble born in Spain in five Cortes managed to parlay 0:01:59.720 --> 0:02:02.840 an inn initially successful career as a sort of adventurer 0:02:03.680 --> 0:02:06.480 into a slave plantation in Cuba after he helped after 0:02:06.520 --> 0:02:10.600 he helped conquer the island in fifteen eleven. From there, 0:02:10.800 --> 0:02:13.360 through a combination of I shore you know this is 0:02:13.360 --> 0:02:15.960 this is actually what the historical records say about him. 0:02:16.720 --> 0:02:20.720 Wearing too many gold chains and spending too much money 0:02:20.720 --> 0:02:25.200 on his wife, his finances imploded and he fell into debt. 0:02:26.200 --> 0:02:28.799 This led him to embark on his infamous conquest of 0:02:28.880 --> 0:02:33.040 Mexican attempt to pay office creditors. Here, I'm going to 0:02:33.160 --> 0:02:36.400 turn to the work of the anthropologist David Graber. Rest 0:02:36.440 --> 0:02:42.480 in Peace, Smissy Buddy. Graver describes the absolute horror of 0:02:42.880 --> 0:02:47.040 entire population sold into slavery slaves with faces covered in 0:02:47.080 --> 0:02:51.000 brands indicating who they've been bought and sold by, entire 0:02:51.120 --> 0:02:55.400 populations worked to death, and minds empires drained of wealth 0:02:55.440 --> 0:02:57.920 by men whose lust for gold and silver seemed to 0:02:58.000 --> 0:03:02.160 know no end. And he somehow, both Cortes and his 0:03:02.240 --> 0:03:04.320 men seemed to have come out of the other end 0:03:04.800 --> 0:03:08.840 of one of the most important conquests in human history 0:03:09.480 --> 0:03:14.640 completely broke. Now it's easier to explain how Cortes as 0:03:14.720 --> 0:03:17.200 men came out of this broke. They came out of 0:03:17.240 --> 0:03:21.480 his broke because Cortes and his officers were extorting and 0:03:21.560 --> 0:03:24.480 robbing them mercilessly at literally every step of the campaign, 0:03:24.880 --> 0:03:29.000 by charging them utterly exorbitant prices for everything from bandages 0:03:29.120 --> 0:03:32.480 to like having to buy their own weapons, which were 0:03:32.520 --> 0:03:35.040 being sold by guests who Cortez and his officers who 0:03:35.120 --> 0:03:37.520 had to sort of cabal going on with everyone who 0:03:37.560 --> 0:03:42.200 could sell things. And once the conquest was done, Cortes 0:03:42.320 --> 0:03:44.720 as officers simply seized most of the share of the 0:03:44.840 --> 0:03:47.440 loot from their menness payment for all of the stuff 0:03:47.480 --> 0:03:50.800 that they needed. And I mentioned this not to inspire 0:03:50.840 --> 0:03:54.560 sympathy for the conquistadors like these are These are some 0:03:54.640 --> 0:03:56.640 of the worst human beings who have ever lived, and 0:03:56.880 --> 0:04:00.200 managing to somehow lose money on one of the most 0:04:00.200 --> 0:04:02.640 brutal sackings of a city in human history is like 0:04:02.720 --> 0:04:10.160 the least of the punishment they deserve. But on the 0:04:10.240 --> 0:04:13.800 other hand, their debt and the debt of Cortez himself, 0:04:15.200 --> 0:04:19.599 goes a long way to explain what happened next. Here's graper. 0:04:20.560 --> 0:04:22.960 These were the men who ended up in control of 0:04:23.000 --> 0:04:28.360 the provinces and who established local administration, taxes and labor regimes, 0:04:29.400 --> 0:04:32.440 which makes it a little easier to understand the descriptions 0:04:32.440 --> 0:04:35.240 of Indians with their faces covered by names, like so 0:04:35.279 --> 0:04:39.400 many counter endorsed checks, with the mind surrounded by miles 0:04:39.400 --> 0:04:44.360 of rotting corpses. We are not dealing with psychology of cold, 0:04:44.480 --> 0:04:48.719 calculating greed, but a more complicated mix of shame and 0:04:48.839 --> 0:04:53.320 righteous indignation, and of the frantic urgency of debts that 0:04:53.360 --> 0:04:58.880 would only compound and accumulate. These were almost certainly interest 0:04:58.920 --> 0:05:03.240 bearing loans in the outrage at the idea that, after 0:05:03.279 --> 0:05:05.919 all they had gone through, they should be held to 0:05:06.000 --> 0:05:10.159 owe anything to begin with. Now this is the sort 0:05:10.200 --> 0:05:14.200 of trademark psychology of the debtor slaver. It's an incredibly 0:05:14.320 --> 0:05:20.400 toxic mix of shame, indignation, outrage, and desperation that breathes 0:05:20.440 --> 0:05:25.159 an incredible kind of violence and is determined in large 0:05:25.200 --> 0:05:29.480 part by the conditions of modern compound debt itself. Here's 0:05:29.480 --> 0:05:34.320 Graver again. Money always has the potential to become a 0:05:34.360 --> 0:05:38.440 moral imperative one to itself, allow it to expand, and 0:05:38.480 --> 0:05:41.400 it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all 0:05:41.520 --> 0:05:46.240 others seem frivolous in comparison. For the debtor, the world 0:05:46.400 --> 0:05:50.160 is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potential tools, 0:05:50.240 --> 0:05:55.719 and potential merchandise. Even human relationships become a matter of 0:05:55.760 --> 0:06:00.960 cost benefit calculation. Clearly, this is the way they conquistadors 0:06:01.040 --> 0:06:06.120 viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer. Now 0:06:06.160 --> 0:06:08.960 it doesn't take long until not only human relations but 0:06:09.160 --> 0:06:14.400 human beings themselves become a matter of cost benefit calculation, 0:06:14.720 --> 0:06:19.520 a set of merchandise that value could be extracted from, 0:06:19.560 --> 0:06:28.440 And here emerges the debtor slaver. Now, very clearly, all 0:06:28.520 --> 0:06:32.320 debtors do not behave like this. In fact, almost all 0:06:32.400 --> 0:06:36.480 debtors across all places and all times. Do not behave 0:06:36.520 --> 0:06:38.479 this way, or the world would be a place that 0:06:38.520 --> 0:06:41.120 makes even how we live in now look like a paradise. 0:06:43.080 --> 0:06:46.080 There's another factor at work here that distinguishes the debtor 0:06:46.160 --> 0:06:51.279 from the debtor slaver, and that's power. The debder slaver 0:06:51.440 --> 0:06:57.279 already wields or has wielded, enormous power over other people, 0:06:58.080 --> 0:07:02.680 either through direct violence or, as we'll see later, through 0:07:02.680 --> 0:07:06.240 the command of economic power. This is one of the 0:07:06.279 --> 0:07:10.720 products of the righteous indignation Grapery described earlier. These are 0:07:10.760 --> 0:07:13.360 people who are used to wielding power, who are suddenly 0:07:13.360 --> 0:07:16.720 now beholden in a real and immediate way to someone else, 0:07:19.040 --> 0:07:21.920 and so they set about solving the problem the way 0:07:22.000 --> 0:07:27.960 they've solved everything else in their life, throwing violence at it. Now, 0:07:28.680 --> 0:07:32.040 if you've been paying attention closely, you might realize that 0:07:32.080 --> 0:07:35.640 I've actually been describing two different sort of ranks of 0:07:35.720 --> 0:07:39.680 debtor slaves who sort of fuse into one mass and 0:07:39.760 --> 0:07:47.520 quartets conquissadors on the lower end, the people who kind 0:07:47.520 --> 0:07:51.520 of loosely be called adventurers, essentially a kind of mercenary 0:07:51.720 --> 0:07:54.600 out for a big score. Be that slaves be that 0:07:54.720 --> 0:07:59.080 land be that stolen loot that could vault them out 0:07:59.080 --> 0:08:01.920 of debton into the aristocracy. This is the sort of 0:08:02.280 --> 0:08:06.840 build general military base of the conquistador army itself. On 0:08:06.920 --> 0:08:10.840 the higher end of people like Cortez who having already 0:08:10.880 --> 0:08:13.320 technically who you know who are who are already technically 0:08:13.360 --> 0:08:17.000 plantation owners, but their own ineptitude, have still managed to 0:08:17.040 --> 0:08:21.160 become heavily indebted. Combined, they form a group responsible for 0:08:21.240 --> 0:08:25.160 three centuries of the greatest evil the world has ever seen. Now, 0:08:25.360 --> 0:08:27.760 these two groups, in a broad sense, need each other. 0:08:31.760 --> 0:08:35.640 The adventurers may have weapons, they may have some training, 0:08:36.360 --> 0:08:38.320 but at the end of the day, they have very 0:08:38.320 --> 0:08:42.560 little in terms of liquid capital. At liquid capital is 0:08:42.640 --> 0:08:45.360 something that you need in order to run a military campaign. 0:08:45.840 --> 0:08:48.839 Because in order to keep all of these people, all 0:08:48.840 --> 0:08:50.840 of these sort of adventurers, all of these sort of 0:08:50.840 --> 0:08:54.000 debtor slavers, all of these sort of would be conquistadors 0:08:54.080 --> 0:08:58.079 in the field, you have to produce, you know, things 0:08:58.120 --> 0:09:02.440 like food, things like boots, things like medical supplies. And 0:09:02.880 --> 0:09:06.240 this is where the plantation owners come in, because those 0:09:06.240 --> 0:09:08.880 are people who even though they're enormously in debt, and 0:09:08.920 --> 0:09:11.920 even though very often they're either fleeing their debtors or 0:09:12.000 --> 0:09:14.600 their all of their debts about to be called in. 0:09:14.800 --> 0:09:18.120 These are people who still technically have lines of credit 0:09:18.160 --> 0:09:22.240 open and they and you know also there are also 0:09:22.280 --> 0:09:26.120 people who sometimes have allies in more sort of solvent 0:09:26.600 --> 0:09:30.320 people in the same class, so they're able to sort 0:09:30.320 --> 0:09:33.920 of funnel liquid capital into these sort of ventures. And 0:09:34.160 --> 0:09:36.559 this is a process that we are going to see 0:09:36.679 --> 0:09:53.080 again after these ads. And we're back moving forward in 0:09:53.160 --> 0:09:56.559 time a few hundred years and north a few thousand miles, 0:09:57.200 --> 0:09:59.960 we come into another scene of debt subjugation and violen 0:10:00.679 --> 0:10:05.280 the plantations of the American South. Now, this is not 0:10:05.440 --> 0:10:09.439 the primitive, unhallowed fifteen hundreds, where slaves would be marked 0:10:09.480 --> 0:10:11.960 like tally sticks as they were passed back and forth 0:10:12.040 --> 0:10:16.120 between sword and pike wielding Spanish barbarians as they slaughtered 0:10:16.120 --> 0:10:18.360 their way through one of the greatest cities the world 0:10:18.360 --> 0:10:22.800 had ever known. This is the benighted eighteen hundreds. This 0:10:22.920 --> 0:10:25.520 is the age of steam power and railroads, the age 0:10:25.520 --> 0:10:30.280 of electricity, the advent of the global telecommunications network. What 0:10:30.320 --> 0:10:34.280 would come of this new era of progress. One of 0:10:34.360 --> 0:10:37.680 the greatest of all world historical crimes, the conversion of 0:10:37.800 --> 0:10:43.960 human beings into increasingly complex financial instruments plantation owners contrary 0:10:44.000 --> 0:10:47.480 to their depiction in media, which they've gotten almost those 0:10:47.480 --> 0:10:50.040 those people have gotten almost as good PR as cops, 0:10:50.440 --> 0:10:56.280 which is fairly incredible considering they haven't really existed as 0:10:56.320 --> 0:10:58.440 the sort of slave owning classes they used to be 0:10:58.640 --> 0:11:03.720 in you know, a hundred hundred years. I don't know, 0:11:05.000 --> 0:11:09.080 discuss among yourselves when you think share cropping has sort 0:11:09.080 --> 0:11:11.679 of decreased to an amount where these people like are 0:11:11.720 --> 0:11:15.840 no no longer around as a class. But you know, okay, 0:11:15.880 --> 0:11:18.080 just despite the sort of pr but these like Southern 0:11:18.120 --> 0:11:24.680 gentlemen get these people are constantly in debt, and they're 0:11:24.679 --> 0:11:26.959 you know, constantly attempting to solve the problem of them 0:11:27.000 --> 0:11:28.960 being in debt with the only thing they know how 0:11:29.000 --> 0:11:32.360 to do, which is slavery. And when I say they're 0:11:32.360 --> 0:11:34.959 trying to solve this problem through slavery, um, we're we're 0:11:34.960 --> 0:11:36.920 going to get to the more complicated ways to try 0:11:36.960 --> 0:11:38.880 to solve this with slavery. One of the big ways 0:11:38.880 --> 0:11:41.000 I try try to solve this with slavery is just 0:11:41.040 --> 0:11:50.080 whipping people harder. It's brutal and horrible, and yeah, you 0:11:50.120 --> 0:11:52.959 know this, this this is a system that is, who's 0:11:53.000 --> 0:11:55.840 the the efficiency of which is just built on profound 0:11:55.920 --> 0:12:01.040 human violence. So let's let's let's just established that right 0:12:01.080 --> 0:12:03.000 off the bat. This is the worst kind of slavery 0:12:03.000 --> 0:12:09.280 anyone's really ever done. Yeah, now you know, another factor 0:12:09.320 --> 0:12:12.000 for these people essentially turning into debt or slavers is 0:12:12.040 --> 0:12:15.400 the fact that these people are constantly putting themselves in 0:12:15.440 --> 0:12:20.920 self inflicted debt in order to do speculation. And this 0:12:21.040 --> 0:12:24.320 is the part where they start doing ship that is 0:12:25.160 --> 0:12:28.319 difficult for me to even try to explain will adequately 0:12:28.440 --> 0:12:32.920 capturing the horror of the process. The Southern planters began 0:12:33.000 --> 0:12:36.920 to create an entire separate financial network based entirely off 0:12:36.960 --> 0:12:40.439 of the quote unquote value of their slaves and their land. 0:12:41.679 --> 0:12:47.960 From the historian Edward B. Baptiste, Yet enslavers had already 0:12:47.960 --> 0:12:51.280 by the end of the eighteen twenties created a highly 0:12:51.360 --> 0:12:56.960 innovative alternative to existing financial structure. The Consolidated Association of 0:12:57.040 --> 0:13:01.880 Louisiana Planters, despite his name it c APL was still 0:13:01.920 --> 0:13:05.720 a bank, created more leverage for enslavers at less cost 0:13:06.280 --> 0:13:11.120 and on longer terms. It did so by securitizing slaves, 0:13:11.640 --> 0:13:16.720 hedging even more effectively against the individual investors loss, so 0:13:16.760 --> 0:13:20.200 long as the financial system itself did not fail. Here 0:13:20.320 --> 0:13:25.319 is how it worked. Potential borrowers, mortgage slaves and cultivated 0:13:25.400 --> 0:13:29.480 land to the c APL, which entitled them to borrow 0:13:29.600 --> 0:13:33.120 up to half of the assessed value of their property 0:13:33.120 --> 0:13:37.240 from the CIAPL and bank notes. To convince others to 0:13:37.320 --> 0:13:41.000 accept the banknotes thus distributed at face value, the ci 0:13:41.080 --> 0:13:45.679 ap L convinced the Louisiana legislature to back two point 0:13:45.760 --> 0:13:50.000 five million dollars in bank bonds do win ten to 0:13:50.080 --> 0:13:54.280 fifteen years bearing five percent interest with the faith and 0:13:54.320 --> 0:13:58.200 credit of the people of the state. The Great British 0:13:58.280 --> 0:14:01.559 Merchant bank bearing brother has agreed to advance the c 0:14:01.760 --> 0:14:05.760 APL the equivalent of two point five million dollars in 0:14:05.880 --> 0:14:10.040 Sterling bills. By the way, that is a unfathomable amount 0:14:10.040 --> 0:14:13.040 of money. Now that's not five million dollars that is 0:14:13.480 --> 0:14:15.040 that is it? That is an amount of money that 0:14:15.080 --> 0:14:18.360 will make your ears bleed the equivalent of two point 0:14:18.400 --> 0:14:21.760 five million in sterling bills and market the bonds on 0:14:21.880 --> 0:14:27.920 European securities markets. The bonds effectively converted in slavery's biggest investment, 0:14:28.680 --> 0:14:34.000 human beings or quote unquote hands from Maryland and Virginia 0:14:34.040 --> 0:14:38.800 and North Carolina and Kentucky into multiple streams of income, 0:14:39.280 --> 0:14:44.240 all under their control. Since all borrowers were officially stakeholders 0:14:44.240 --> 0:14:48.040 in the bank, the sale of the bonds created a 0:14:48.120 --> 0:14:51.200 high quality credit pool to be lent back to the 0:14:51.240 --> 0:14:55.720 planters at a significantly lower rate, sorry at a rate 0:14:55.760 --> 0:14:58.960 significantly lower than the rate of return they could expect 0:14:58.960 --> 0:15:02.920 that money to produce. The pool could be used for 0:15:02.960 --> 0:15:07.520 all sorts of income generating purposes, buying more slaves to 0:15:07.680 --> 0:15:11.560 produce more cotton and sugar and hence more income, or 0:15:11.640 --> 0:15:16.480 lending to other enslavers. Ver borrowers could pure amid their 0:15:16.560 --> 0:15:20.400 leverage even higher by borrowing on the same collateral from 0:15:20.520 --> 0:15:26.560 multiple lenders, while also getting unsecured short term commercial loans 0:15:26.600 --> 0:15:30.360 from the c apl by purchasing new slaves with the 0:15:30.400 --> 0:15:34.800 money they borrowed and borrowing on them too. They had 0:15:34.840 --> 0:15:40.120 mortgaged their slaves, sometimes multiple times, and sometimes they even 0:15:40.160 --> 0:15:44.800 mortgage fictitious slaves. But in contrast to what Walsh had promised, 0:15:44.880 --> 0:15:50.360 Nulty in this type of mortgage gave the enslaver tremendous 0:15:50.440 --> 0:15:55.120 margins control and flexibility. It was hard to imagine that 0:15:55.160 --> 0:15:59.520 such borrows would be foreclosed even if they fell behind 0:15:59.560 --> 0:16:04.200 on their aiments. After all, the borrowers owned the bank. 0:16:05.520 --> 0:16:08.840 Using the C A p L model, slave owners were 0:16:08.840 --> 0:16:12.320 now able to monetize their slaves by securitizing them and 0:16:12.360 --> 0:16:19.720 then leveraging them multiple times on the international financial markets. Now, okay, 0:16:19.840 --> 0:16:24.160 having having just spent a decent amount of time running 0:16:24.200 --> 0:16:26.760 through the sort of finance of this, I need to reiterate. 0:16:27.080 --> 0:16:31.080 These are human beings who are being enslaved and tortured constantly, 0:16:32.600 --> 0:16:36.040 the ownership of whom is being mortgaged to a bank 0:16:36.600 --> 0:16:39.760 and then sold and traded as assets on the financial market. 0:16:40.560 --> 0:16:44.720 What what they have done here is like two thousand 0:16:44.960 --> 0:16:50.800 eight style financial collapse, like set of collateralized loan obligations, 0:16:50.880 --> 0:16:55.480 except the loans are backed by fucking human beings they 0:16:55.600 --> 0:16:59.200 forced into slavery. It is a level of evil that 0:16:59.320 --> 0:17:04.720 is almost incomprehensible because the very financial language that is 0:17:04.760 --> 0:17:09.480 necessary to explain what they're doing, by necessity, conceals the 0:17:09.640 --> 0:17:13.440 horror of what's actually being done and was actually being 0:17:13.480 --> 0:17:17.600 done here is hundreds of thousands of people are being 0:17:17.640 --> 0:17:21.159 sold into slavery and forced to clear land and work 0:17:21.640 --> 0:17:25.959 on land that has just been stolen literally like you know, 0:17:26.080 --> 0:17:29.680 sometimes in some cases like the day before, by indigenous 0:17:29.680 --> 0:17:31.679 people who have just been sent on the trail of tears. 0:17:32.480 --> 0:17:35.120 And this is this is being done to fuel these 0:17:35.119 --> 0:17:40.320 new financial instruments. Now, in a somewhat ironic twist, the 0:17:40.400 --> 0:17:43.199 product of this entire thing, the product of all of 0:17:43.280 --> 0:17:46.679 this land clearing, the product of Andrew Jackson's war on 0:17:46.760 --> 0:17:50.000 the Second Bank of the US, the product of all 0:17:50.040 --> 0:17:54.520 of this sort of speculation is the plantations wind up 0:17:54.520 --> 0:17:58.680 producing too much cotton, too much slave cotton, and this 0:17:58.840 --> 0:18:04.879 quickly becomes an absolute fiasco. Debt suddenly outpaced the entire 0:18:05.040 --> 0:18:08.840 value of the slave crop, and you know, the entire 0:18:08.920 --> 0:18:11.919 financial system begins to implode. So it starts, It starts 0:18:11.960 --> 0:18:14.800 in sort of the UK and the European markets that 0:18:14.840 --> 0:18:17.440 had taken a bunch of these these sort of slave bonds. 0:18:18.359 --> 0:18:22.040 But eventually the financial collapse spreads, and you know, as 0:18:22.080 --> 0:18:24.600 we heard in the article, right the way these banks 0:18:24.600 --> 0:18:26.640 are set off, the way these again like these these 0:18:26.680 --> 0:18:30.800 banks that are just all of the bank is just slaves. 0:18:31.720 --> 0:18:33.480 And I guess, I guess I should also take an 0:18:33.480 --> 0:18:37.160 aside here to mention that like the normal banks are 0:18:37.200 --> 0:18:40.960 also doing stuff like this. It's just that the South 0:18:41.080 --> 0:18:44.520 not being content to just have normal banks taking you know, 0:18:44.600 --> 0:18:47.919 doing mortgages, like they're taking out mortgages on houses with 0:18:48.000 --> 0:18:51.760 slaves as collateral. Uh, they've they've credit decided to create 0:18:51.800 --> 0:18:54.479 like they're in their own entire financial network that's just 0:18:54.720 --> 0:18:59.120 slaves and nothing else. Well land too, but yeah, slaves 0:18:59.119 --> 0:19:03.760 and land, and this entire thing sort of just collapses 0:19:03.760 --> 0:19:07.879 in on itself and this leads to it to an 0:19:07.960 --> 0:19:14.360 even larger mass of deader slavery plantation owners. And this 0:19:14.480 --> 0:19:17.480 is where we turn from plantation slavery to some good 0:19:17.480 --> 0:19:22.600 old fashioned conquistadoring what what have the sort of myths 0:19:22.640 --> 0:19:25.280 of slavery with the way that you know, slavery has 0:19:25.280 --> 0:19:29.680 been sort of understood in the West, particularly in sort 0:19:29.680 --> 0:19:32.920 of Europe, well, particularly in the U S and the UK, 0:19:33.400 --> 0:19:40.960 which have these sort of like complexes about you know, 0:19:41.080 --> 0:19:46.480 like this sort of inevitability of ebolitionism and the sort 0:19:46.520 --> 0:19:51.280 of benevolent empire against abolition or whatever. You know, there's 0:19:51.320 --> 0:19:53.400 there's this sort of like that you get these economic 0:19:53.480 --> 0:19:55.920 organis to that that the people people will argue that 0:19:56.320 --> 0:19:59.800 you know, slavery was like going to collapse anyways, Like 0:20:00.680 --> 0:20:03.080 people just let it go, it would have fell on apart, 0:20:03.400 --> 0:20:07.440 and that that is just sort of nonsense. And one 0:20:07.480 --> 0:20:09.600 of the things that this, one of the things that 0:20:09.640 --> 0:20:16.040 this conceals is that slave power was constantly expansionary. It's 0:20:16.119 --> 0:20:19.480 never sort of like slavery was never a system that 0:20:19.560 --> 0:20:22.960 was sort of just contained in one place, right. It 0:20:23.040 --> 0:20:25.520 was always pushing. It was always attempting to you know, 0:20:25.640 --> 0:20:29.160 seize new land. It was always attempting to seize new slaves. 0:20:29.280 --> 0:20:31.760 Was it was a system that could only really survive 0:20:32.320 --> 0:20:35.040 if it was constantly able to seize new territory and 0:20:35.080 --> 0:20:38.879 seize new slaves in order to work it. And so 0:20:39.840 --> 0:20:42.440 there's a lot of sort of products of this, right. 0:20:43.560 --> 0:20:45.480 One of the sort of earlier ones, you get these 0:20:45.520 --> 0:20:48.520 settlers pushing west, attempting to turn sort of new states 0:20:48.520 --> 0:20:51.680 and the slave states, and these are you know, these 0:20:51.720 --> 0:20:54.320 are often, like the settlers here, often the sort of 0:20:54.320 --> 0:20:57.560 men like euphemistically described as adventurers, with like you know, 0:20:57.560 --> 0:21:01.040 these are people who portize right like they are people 0:21:01.119 --> 0:21:03.879 desperately attempting to stay one step ahead of their creditors 0:21:03.920 --> 0:21:07.480 by invoking the time honored American tradition of slaughtering indigenous 0:21:07.480 --> 0:21:10.119 people for their land, which you know, could then be 0:21:10.119 --> 0:21:12.280 turned over to speculators, you could be turned over to 0:21:12.320 --> 0:21:16.959 the sort of wealthier backers. And these men and in 0:21:16.960 --> 0:21:19.920 this period these are almost always men. I thought that's 0:21:19.920 --> 0:21:24.720 going to change pretty soon. But these men are so 0:21:24.800 --> 0:21:27.000 violent and so disruptive that at various points in the 0:21:27.119 --> 0:21:30.399 late seventeen hundreds and early eight hundreds, the US like 0:21:30.520 --> 0:21:33.560 attempts to stop them from settling any further less they 0:21:33.560 --> 0:21:37.120 sort of disturb American foreign policy efforts. Um. And these 0:21:37.119 --> 0:21:41.159 efforts fail, and the product of this is that manifest destinies, 0:21:41.240 --> 0:21:44.760 you know, trail of corpses pushes even further and further west. 0:21:55.000 --> 0:21:57.720 Now by the by the eighteen fifties, there there's a 0:21:57.760 --> 0:21:59.960 new sort of conquistador who's setting out to you know, 0:22:00.200 --> 0:22:02.400 conquer in the name of the Cross and paying off 0:22:02.400 --> 0:22:06.680 their creditors. And they're called filibusters. Now this is actually 0:22:06.760 --> 0:22:09.960 where these people are where the term filibuster as a 0:22:10.040 --> 0:22:13.439 sort of like like thing that you do in the 0:22:13.560 --> 0:22:15.440 sentence and not let people do stuff like that. This 0:22:15.440 --> 0:22:18.359 this is where that comes from. It's these people. Um, 0:22:18.440 --> 0:22:23.720 these are okay, so you know, the official descriptions of 0:22:23.760 --> 0:22:28.359 them will say things like private armies. I there are 0:22:28.440 --> 0:22:32.520 more these kind of like ragged bands of like slavery 0:22:32.600 --> 0:22:36.760 mongering gennis ideas who are backed by, you know, largely 0:22:36.800 --> 0:22:40.000 by southern plantation owners, sometimes by Southern states, occasionally by 0:22:40.040 --> 0:22:43.199 just northern banks, because the place they're trying to go 0:22:43.359 --> 0:22:45.600 somewhere the banks, the northern Banks want to sort of 0:22:45.600 --> 0:22:48.720 seize control of. And you know, these people set out 0:22:48.760 --> 0:22:52.000 to conquer new slave states by you know, straight up 0:22:52.000 --> 0:22:56.040 season control of places like Cuba or Mexico. They do 0:22:56.080 --> 0:22:59.320 a bunch of this stuff in Texas doesn't really work, 0:22:59.400 --> 0:23:03.720 but you know they I mean, part of the complicated 0:23:03.760 --> 0:23:07.199 thing and talking about the filibusters is that like, in 0:23:07.280 --> 0:23:11.720 some sense, the most successful like attempt to do something 0:23:11.800 --> 0:23:15.080 like this was actually Texas, but those people weren't really 0:23:15.240 --> 0:23:18.800 phil about. Like the people who actually successfully sees control 0:23:18.840 --> 0:23:22.679 of Texas, like Sam Adam and his sort of crew 0:23:22.720 --> 0:23:26.960 of merry miscreant slave owners. Those guys aren't technically filibusters, 0:23:27.040 --> 0:23:29.879 but you know, they they do sort of succeed in 0:23:30.040 --> 0:23:35.280 bringing in Texas as a slave state. But yeah, you know, 0:23:35.240 --> 0:23:37.560 I mean these people are they keep they keep launching 0:23:37.560 --> 0:23:40.840 invasions of fucking Cuba. They keep launching use invasions everywhere 0:23:40.920 --> 0:23:44.439 that There's a really great movie called Walker that's a 0:23:44.440 --> 0:23:47.639 sort of fictionalized account of probably the most famous filibuster, 0:23:47.760 --> 0:23:51.040 a guy named William Walker. And well, okay, so it 0:23:51.080 --> 0:23:54.680 starts with his attempt to like conquered Mexico, which doesn't 0:23:54.680 --> 0:23:57.600 go well, but then it sets out for his ataept 0:23:57.600 --> 0:24:00.560 to conquered in Charagua, which like kind of works, actually 0:24:00.560 --> 0:24:05.320 takes Nicaragua for a little bit. You know. But this 0:24:05.320 --> 0:24:07.199 this this movie version of it's also like it's an 0:24:07.240 --> 0:24:10.159 anti war film about the US backing the contrast, and 0:24:11.160 --> 0:24:14.000 it rules. I'm talking about it because nobody's ever watched 0:24:14.000 --> 0:24:17.639 this thing. And the studio when when they they actually 0:24:17.720 --> 0:24:20.879 figured out what Walker was and that it was, you know, 0:24:20.920 --> 0:24:24.919 like an an anti war film about the contrast, they 0:24:25.200 --> 0:24:29.640 literally killed the entire movie and the director, Alex Cox, 0:24:29.680 --> 0:24:31.560 here's the guy you should repo man like, he literally 0:24:31.640 --> 0:24:35.560 never worked in Hollywood again after this. So yeah, go 0:24:35.640 --> 0:24:38.240 watch Walker. Understand it's a little it's a bit fictionalized. 0:24:38.400 --> 0:24:41.520 It's mostly an anti war film about the contrast, but 0:24:41.600 --> 0:24:43.360 you know, part of what you try to track down 0:24:43.359 --> 0:24:45.680 and personally, that is very important about this is that 0:24:46.400 --> 0:24:49.600 you know, the there's this, there's these sort of lineages 0:24:49.600 --> 0:24:53.480 of American colonialism, and part of these lineary edges is 0:24:53.520 --> 0:24:57.480 that you know, like the that literally does not matter 0:24:57.640 --> 0:24:59.680 like what century you're in, the US is trying to 0:24:59.720 --> 0:25:03.360 see his introl of Nicaragua. Now, okay, so but back 0:25:03.359 --> 0:25:06.879 back to the soil. The filibusters mainline. Unlike the Conquistadors, 0:25:06.920 --> 0:25:10.080 who were kind of like I don't know, they had 0:25:10.119 --> 0:25:15.080 a combination of being really really lucky and also like 0:25:15.760 --> 0:25:19.000 genu winely having some pretty good leadership even though you know, 0:25:19.400 --> 0:25:24.640 good leadership, but for evil I those guys were really successful. 0:25:25.040 --> 0:25:30.800 The Philip Buzzers they mostly failed because again this is 0:25:30.920 --> 0:25:33.520 these these are mostly sort of just like bands of 0:25:33.680 --> 0:25:37.639 like marauders. They almost they barely have supply lines, like 0:25:38.640 --> 0:25:42.479 I don't know, sometimes they have real weapons, but they're 0:25:42.520 --> 0:25:46.040 not especially competent. But what what what they did do 0:25:46.640 --> 0:25:50.560 is they kill a lot of people. And this this 0:25:50.720 --> 0:25:54.960 is one of those things that's sort of like I 0:25:55.000 --> 0:25:57.840 don't know, it gets sort of romanticized or it gets 0:25:57.840 --> 0:26:00.720 sort of like brushed over. Is that like, yeah, I know, 0:26:00.960 --> 0:26:06.320 these these people like they're they're like these groups are 0:26:06.359 --> 0:26:10.680 basically like rolling lynch mobs, and so you know, there 0:26:10.800 --> 0:26:13.200 they'll they'll be doing something that run into a town. 0:26:13.280 --> 0:26:16.240 They'll just they'll just kill everyone. They will enslave people, 0:26:16.280 --> 0:26:19.600 they were rape people, they do ship that is just 0:26:20.280 --> 0:26:24.520 they're absolutely imborrant. And that's that's the sort of legacy 0:26:24.560 --> 0:26:27.399 of this stuff. And you know, they probably would have 0:26:27.480 --> 0:26:30.679 kept doing it and you know, except they were stopped. Right. 0:26:30.800 --> 0:26:34.080 One of one of the sort of like legacies of 0:26:34.160 --> 0:26:37.639