IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

[freshwest]

2. Thanks! but we're also told there was an unedited version:

The Declaration of Independence as Thomas Jefferson originally presented it.

The Unedited Declaration of Independence - Thomas Jefferson, 1776

Note the emboldened text:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

to MohRokTah:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=5193766

Which I interpret to mean the slave trade, the paying of natives and importing mercenaries to attack Americans although that was addressed elsewhere. Others say this paragraph was about slaves rising up against their chains. But many blacks throughout history felt the document promised emancipation. Dred Scott was encouraged by the Bill of Rights but lose to the corporate SCOTUS o his day, but later freed. So I respect both views, yet will entertain another one.

Jefferson and the rest of the Founders are rightfully called out on their own slave holding, plantation owning ways, as most of the influential men of the time were - but not all of them. Definitely not Thomas Paine, when he wrote:

African Slavery In America

A very good read that excoriates on every level the creation by international actors and even more so, the practice of slavery in the America of his day:

http://www.constitution.org/tp/afri.htm

Yet the bigotry continues:

http://progressiveerupts.blogspot.com/2013/02/african-slavery-in-america-by-thomas.html

The Founding Fathers had arrayed against their ideals from the Enlightenment the most vicious and entrenched set of corporations that were able to influence nations on both sides of the Atlantic. They were of the most politically influential international corporations. Some of these still exist, they outlive us by centuries, but are not in the public mind. We know how hard it is to fight fossil fuel, munitions and other corporations that devastate our planet and the lives of people. It remains a stalemate.

Thomas Jefferson Feared an Aristocracy of Corporations

http://www.thenation.com/blog/37038/thomas-jefferson-feared-aristocracy-corporations

USSC decisions shows how well positioned they are now, just as they were then. None of this was in a vacuum, and the elimination of slavery required a Civil War and amendments, all of which are being threatened by current calls for an Article 5 Convention to open up the Constitution to be retooled by the Koch brothers. It is what the Reichwings wants more than anything, to make null and void the words of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, one of the most inspirational pieces of literature in the world:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

https://users.wfu.edu/zulick/340/Declaration.html

Self-evident to them, but not to many of their day, nor to many in the world now, unfortunately. That view has always been controversial to some, NOT self-evident. We see this clearly from the USSC which is busily taking our human rights, granting them to corporations.

The elements that fought the philosophy of the Founders, removing the power of social place by birth, as a universal right, were not going to let go that power easily. They extorted the men whose philosophy they denied any validity to except when they could narrowly apply it to themselves. They reject the overall purpose of government to enforce our rights now, as they did then. Such exclusion cannot last and must be ended.

There was an opposing philosophy which still maintains it is all about one's blood and birth, condemning all persons who were not white males with inherited wealth to penury and servitude. The Founders were set in a nation that was not the nation which evolved from their time, but were instead living in a time of violent and unashamed privilege.

That revolting and unjust philosophy sought to negate the ideals of the Founders as much then as it did less than a century later when it erupted again, lying in wait, founding the Confederacy, in direct opposition to 'All Men Are Created Equal.'

Their leaders called that belief the fatal mistake of the Founders, against 'God's Will' in their 'Christianity,' when the Founders sought to escape that. They have not changed their words much.

One should remember that the Founders were Deists, not Dominionists. Neither Jesus or any other defined deity is in their writings. It's why they are being written out of history:

'Nature's God' explores 'heretical origins' of religion in U.S.

But the title of the book referred to is actually:

Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

Not sure why the newspaper went with an alternate title. The book reviews I posted or the OP is worth the read:

http://metamorphosis.democraticunderground.com/1218137537

It is also why propaganda is being used to turn modern Americans away from them and our government. But it's not really the men that are objectionable, nor slavery, devil worship or the alleged international conspiracy they claim to hate, while saying nothing of the corporatist conspiracy that takes away human rights. The salesjob being presented claims they have something new and better to offer. It is not new, and it is not better:

They [who] seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers...call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt, March 15, 1941

What we are being forced into with corporations being treated as people is exactly what is happening now. The corporations of today, just as those days, had more power than nation-states and can not be left to themselves by a free people, as we keep hearing espoused, because:

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.

~ Thomas Jefferson

It is the seed of Equality the Founders wanted to plant and see grow they hate, as it interferes with their profits:

As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.

~ George Washington

The simple words of the Founders led the USA to embark on ending the slave trade in time, as Jefferson himself realized it must do, and which the Confederacy rejected, along with the rest of the Enlightenment:

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Imagine ourselves with our consciousness grounded in 2014 being transported back in time to those days. Where it was a fact of life that black men, women and children were displayed naked, like livestock, with no regard to their humanity, natural modesty or other feelings. And forbidden to learn to read, to object to their families being torn asunder for commerce. And where rape, beatings, torture and death were going on either in full sight or known about.

Just picture that reality in which this nation was born, like the Boko Harum world, where kidnapping and being anti-education for girls and women, but also boys and men, is seen by them as a good thing, like it was here by some. And the kidnapped are sold off for commerce, their bodies not their own. And resistance to that is rewarded with death. And what is it that they claim they are doing this for?

To stop western ideas. Not just music, movies, atheism, homosexuality or the evils of capitalism, although that is likely how they got their first converts. But to stop the ideas the Founding Fathers stood for, Equality and the Freedom of Religion, and so many other things.

Now we have the stories out of Thailand where men have been drawn and quartered by boats to keep their slaves in the international fishing business in line and living in tortorous, deadly conditions for the profits of the owners of the fleet of fishing ships. Many other examples are available. because Equality is not a settled issue in the world now, no more that it was then, by any means.

The horrors of the slave trade in practice was worse than most can imagine, and is why the voices of people of color with all the outrage and pain they've known for years, despite the discomfort of whites or the privileged, MUST BE WELCOMED as our kindred spirits opposing reactionaries. Those are the enemies, not those we need to be educated by whenever they grant us the gift of their wisdom and pain, and how they survived and their remedies to move forward.

We must not forget what underlies such systems of brutality and genocide both then and now, the belief that all people are NOT created Equal. Many facets of this are being discussed and fought over now, but that's the belief system we must overcome, or we will all be undone.

JMHO, quickly penned.