Oh, don't stop there, Tom Cotton. If you're going to call slavery a "necessary evil" that gave rise to American liberties, why not call the Holocaust a necessary evil that gave rise to post-1945 human rights? And so on. 1/

Yes, you can say: the past is filled with terrible crimes and suffering, and we cannot erase that, and despite all that, history does not reduce only to those terrible crimes. An adult has to face what they've done to others and try for redemption. 2/

No adult who is trying to be a better person dare say "Well, I had no choice but to do evil to someone; I would do it again, it was necessary." That is not what someone seeking redemption or forgiveness says. It is not what a good person says. 3/

It is indeed hard to think counterfactually of how modernity could have come to be without the enormous evils involved (and ongoing) in its creation and maintenance. But a failure to try to think that is an an endorsement of those evils. 4/

Only someone unharmed by those evils--only someone who is trying to pardon themselves for their commission without blame, responsibility or sorrow--could say, "It had to happen that way". At hundreds of thousands of moments of contingency, it did not have to happen. 5/

The Atlantic slave trade and the plantation complex were not inevitable. The violent destruction of Native American societies was not inevitable. The treachery, murder, greed and hypocrisy of European expansion was not inevitable. Any more than racism and oppression are now.