this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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Louisiana resident here.
Plantations didn't stop operating post-slavery, they just had to actually hire workers.
And anyway, over here plantation tours play more on the supernatural-haunted aspect that sort of permeates our culture. We still regard slavery as a tragedy, nobody is at a plantation celebrating the oppression. It's more like an observation of an outdated mode of life.
It's like a tour of a medieval castle. Do you realize how much fucked up shit happened to literally everyone in castles during the dark ages? Does that necessarily mean that wanting to see a castle, complete with murder holes in the walls and hole-in-the-ground dungeons that are designed to never be able to get out, is wrong on a moral basis?
The holocaust was an actual, devastating tragedy. Comparing it to the operation of plantations is pretty dishonest and mostly just feels like reaching for a reason to be "morally superior to those dirty capitalist Americans," especially considering lots of plantations didn't use slaves even when it was legal to do so.
It’s closer to compare the annihilation of the native Americans to the Holocaust.
However, that doesn’t lessen the evil of conservatives owning other human being under chattel slavery.
Nobody is disputing that. The thought is that comparing the plantation itself as a conduit of slavery is dishonest, as a plantation's primary function was harvesting cotton or rice. That could be, and very much was, done by wage laborers and not exclusively slaves.
The sole purpose of concentration camps was the extermination of undesirable demographics.
It's dishonest to compare them as the original post did.