By ilana mercer
First he exposed the History Channel’s miniseries “Roots” as root-and-brunch fiction. Now, the courageous epistolary warrior Kunta (Jack) Kerwick has turned his attention to correcting lies about slavery, promulgated in media and scholarly circles.
A point forcefully made by Kerwick is that although a vibrant, indigenous slave trade was conducted well into the nineteenth century in the interior of West Africa, slavery has become the White Man’s cross to bear.
Also omitted, in the course of the “honest” conversation about race directed by our political masters, is that credit for the demise of the slave trade in Africa belongs to Europeans. In his compact study, The Slave Trade (London, 2006), British historian Jeremy Black highlights the “leading role Britain played in the abolition of slavery [as]… an example of an ethical foreign policy.” Britain agonized over this repugnant institution, failed to reconcile it with the Christian faith, and consequently abolished it.
Professor Black condemns the exclusive focus on the Atlantic—or transatlantic—slave trade to the exclusion of the robust slave trade conducted by Arabs across the Sahara Desert. Or, across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to markets in the Middle East. This exclusive focus on westerners as slave owners and traders, notes Black, “fits with the [political] narrative of Western exploitation” of undeveloped countries and their people.
The greatest development economist to live was Lord P. T. Bauer. As The Economist quipped, Bauer was to foreign aid what Friedrich Hayek was to socialism: a slayer. In his Dissent on Development (London, 1971), Bauer bolstered Black’s point well before the latter made it: “The slave trade between Africa and the Middle East antedated the Atlantic slave trade by centuries, and far outlasted it. Tens of millions of Africans were carried away—north through the Sahara, and from East Africa, by Arab and Muslim slave traders, well before Europeans took up the trade from West Africa.”
Arab affinity for slavery, ethnic prejudice and purges lives on today in the treatment, for example, of blacks in Darfur and Yazidis in Kurdistan, Iraq.
Considering Europeans were not alone in the slave trade, Black, in particular, questions “the commonplace identification of slavery with racism,” given that, like serfdom, slavery was a device (albeit an inefficient one) “to ensure labor availability and control.”
At its most savage, child slavery still thrives in Haiti in the form of the “Restavec system.” Children are kept in grinding poverty and worked to the bone. In the Anglo-American and European worlds this would be considered perverse in the extreme; in Haiti owning a Restavec is a status symbol. (Haiti, incidentally, is another spot on the globe that “Hillary Clinton’s State Department” “helped ruin,” by ensconcing an illegitimate and crooked leader, with a preference for corrupt NGOs such as … The Clinton Foundation.)
The savagery of the indigenous slave trade in the interior of West Africa owed a lot to the rivalries and relationships between African powers. By Black’s telling, “Both Arabs and Europeans worked in collaboration with native polities that provided the slaves through raids and war carried out against their neighbors.”
For the Atlantic slave trade, contemporary Americans and Britons have been expiating at every turn. But more than engendering a cult of apology, the Atlantic slave trade has been instrumental in the effort to control and define the past as an “aspect of current politics,” not least in shaping the historical treatment of the Civil War, the South, and the American Founding Fathers.
Jeremy Black rejects these ritual apologies as empty ploys, which “all too often conform to fatuous arguments about ‘closure,’ resolution, and being unable to move on until we acknowledge the past.”
In reality, this bowing-and-scraping, by obsequious Anglo-Americans, to their black political overlords, entails the opposite of all these, and, instead, involves the reiteration and institutionalization of racial grievance.
The cult of apology that has gripped America and Britain is uniquely Western. What other people would agonize over events they had no part in, personally, for damages they did not inflict?
Grievance is leveled at a collective, all whites, for infractions it did not commit: Africans who were not enslaved are seen as having an ineffable claim against Europeans who did not enslave them.
At its core, the argument against racism, at least as it works to further black interests, is an argument against collectivism. You’re meant to avoid judging an entire people based on the color of their epidermis or the conduct of a statistically significant number of them.
It is, however, deemed perfectly acceptable to malign and milk Europeans for all they’re worth, based on the lack of pigment in their skin and their overall better socio-economic performance.
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Adapted from Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) by ILANA Mercer.
Let those who truly feel sorry for the continued failure of backwards savages atone for it themselves by jumping into a pot to feed them. I feel no remorse for anything that happens to them. They are not my people, I see them as what they are, racial enemies who hate me as the other. Those tired arguments of trauma due to suffering of ancestors will seem funny eventually. After this blight has left our sight to never be allowed back. Those who have studied these inferior creatures know the Truth. Even if they are silenced, the Truth is already known. You need no science degree to see the clueless stupidity, the savage nature, the childish tantrums and the invariable lack of responsibility. Nothing can help them. They are truly a failed race. Here in the 21st Century as we have sent probes into space on rockets, these cretins still subsist in The Stone Age. They decry our science as a waste of money that could be better spent to fulfill their desires and fill their bloated bellies. I have had enough. Anyone who maligned these creatures has my respect. Anyone who would defend them is worse than the worst coward. Trillions have been wasted trying to uplift these monsters. They see kindness as a weakness. Weakness is something you dare not show to mindless savages. It is no coincidence that they behaved better under segregation and began to riot and loot soon after the passage of Civil Rights. Its not reparations. They want tribute. Like a bully stealing your lunch money but on a far more sinister scale. Billions for defense, not one red cent for tribute!
If I may play Devil’s Advocate, I think there is now a risk that the pendulum is going to swing too far in the opposite direction.
In 1945, a certain Progressivist, Philo-Semitic bastardisation of classical liberalism and Leftism reached its apogee and has stayed there ever since. It can be attributed to various factors: including genuine grievances that arose out of capitalism and mass industrialism; ethnic intrusion; deeper, organic trends and preconfigurations that were quintessentially Western, including the shift in consciousness represented by individualism and its political expressive force, classical liberalism; as well as the emergence of a leisured middle-class during the post-industrial phase of late Victorian England.
We have now had 71 years of them in charge. They have infected everything, especially the academy, the social sciences (e.g. Boasian anthropology) and professional politics, and now all facets of everyday life are subsumed in this post-modern, deconstructionist, Marxoid brand of mixed-racialism and Philo-Semitism.
The backlash, unfortunately, might bring something nasty to the surface.
uropeans may have abolished chattel slavery, but haven’t yet abolished economic slavery caused by an unequal share of the value derived from natural resources.
The wealthy elite no longer need to use force themselves, the have the State and it’s tax apparatus to do the dirty work for them.
Economic and chattle slavery are both infringements of property rights that is the cause inequality and impoverished lives.
[quote]”Britain agonized over this repugnant institution, failed to reconcile it with the Christian faith, and consequently abolished it.”[unquote]
That reads like something out of a school textbook. I think we are flattering ourselves if we think the British ‘abolished’ slavery throughout the Empire out of some moral or ethical conviction. It’s nice of you to think so well of us, and I’m sure moral conviction provided the rationale for formal abolition at the political level, but in truth British turned away from slavery due to shifting economic interests.
Britain was undergoing industrial development, and a chattel labour class was therefore less relevant. Furthermore, the British elite were deeply influenced by liberal free trade ideas, which shifted the focus away from chattel-produced goods towards free labour goods. Another, more specific, factor was that America began importing its sugar from the nearby Dutch- and French-controlled colonies in the Caribbean, rather than the British-controlled colonies – that was probably the killer blow for British involvement in the slave trade.
[quote]”Grievance is leveled at a collective, all whites, for infractions it did not commit: Africans who were not enslaved are seen as having an ineffable claim against Europeans who did not enslave them.”[unquote]
This is true, but I think there is a bit more to it than that. The complaints about slavery are just a manifestation of deeper issues that were caused by the era of European colonialism. I make no comment on whether it was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ to build empires. The question is too sweeping and embraces countless complexities. We explored and subjugated weaker peoples. We brought civilisation to some places. It would be difficult to say that this was ‘wrong’. On the other hand, our imprint was not always positive.
“We” didn’t do shit.
However we may have benefited from what people born many years ago in the same geographic region I currently reside in did to people many years ago in the geographic region as the people with current grievances.
At some point a line has to be drawn and the slate wiped clean. One thing I do know is that propping up warlords and dictators using “white guilt” money is not helping anyone.