Much Ado Over Nothing

by Al Benson Jr.

Well, today is June 19th, the much ballyhooed day all the country is now supposed to remember and celebrate–the fabled and wonderful “Juneteenth.” On this day, in 1865, Yankee troops entered Galveston, Texas and informed the slaves there that they were free. Only one minor problem here–the Yankee troops had no authority to make such a statement. Nor was it official.

If you look back at the history, none of the slaves, including those held in slave states that remained in the Union, and there were five such states, were officially freed until the passage of the 13th Amendment late in 1865, sometime in December of that year. Until that time all the slaves everywhere were, officially, still slaves.

So all this noise about Juneteenth is a lot of noise and hoopla signifying nothing! If they want to have a day set aside to commemorate the freeing of the slaves then it should probably be in December on the anniversary of the passage of the 13th Amendment. But for some, that would be too close to Christmas and so it would lose much of its propaganda impact, which is really what this is all about.

This is just one more day designed to show the evil of Southern slavery. Northern slavery is never mentioned or acknowledged. That five slave states–Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri, remained, for one reason or another, as part of the Union is almost never mentioned. Nor is the fact that in these states there remained over 400,000 slaves while the Union was supposed, so they tell us, to be fighting to liberate Southern slaves.

I’ve often asked the question why, if the North was supposed to be fighting to free the slaves as we’ve been told over and over, why didn’t they first free those slaves in slave states in the Union? No one wants to answer that question and so it just gets ignored. Truth is, they can’t answer it, because if they did they would have to admit, somewhere along the line, that the war was really not about freeing the slaves, it was about other issues. And they can’t admit that because it would throw their entire narrative about the war into a cocked hat!

So they continue to ignore the question hoping no one will notice, and they try to fill the void of their empty narrative with “holidays” like Juneteenth in the hope that no one will see the gaping holes in their story. And they may get by with this for awhile, but eventually, the veneer will wear off and they will have to come up with yet another pseudo-holiday that will, like Juneteenth, be lots of noise signifying nothing!