The slave ship fiasco in Africa brought
the modern slavery situation into focus.
The International Labor Organization estimates
that there are 250 million children between the ages of
five and fourteen in slave labor around the world -- predominantly
in Asia and Africa.
Two points about this need to be made.
First, This slavery involves few if any
whites.
Second, these slave traders bought their
slaves from Africans and Asians, usually the children's
parents.
Liberals want to talk about slavery in 1860,
not about who is guilty today. No way that liberals will
OK the discussion of the color of today's slave traders.
But I thought that respectable conservatives might dare
talk about it anyway.
'Fraid not. Even I constantly underestimate
the pure intellectual cowardice it takes to be respectable.
So let's look at the rest of what these
ideological Bobsey Twins are not going to bring up.
The liberal line today (and therefore the
respectable conservative line) is that Southerners were
responsible for the slave trade because they BOUGHT slaves
two centuries ago.
It's a funny thing, but few if any whites
were going to buy today's slaves, and nobody wants to
discuss that.
Slavery was often brutal, but even the Confederacy
HANGED people who engaged in the slave trade. Half the
blacks were expected to die in misery on a slave ship.
It is New England fortunes, not Southern
fortunes, that were founded on that famous Triangle Trade.
One John Brown, for whom Brown University
in Rhode Island is named, amassed a slave trade fortune.
Most of the other such fortunes were in Massachusetts.
But modern history has to lie even about
those bestial slave traders in order to be Politically
Correct. So the History Channel tells us that "whites
kidnapped blacks in Africa."
The networks produced the movie "Roots" in which
whites -- with a couple of black helpers -- were shown
capturing Kunte Kinte. In that movie, it was only a few
black "allies of the white man" who were mentioned
as helping kidnap blacks for the Triangle Trade .
After he was Born Again, an actual eighteenth
century slave trader confessed the horrors he had perpetrated
in that trade. But even he said that the one thing they
were not guilty of was chasing down and enslaving blacks.
No white slave trader ever did what the
History Channel constantly says they did and what the
networks said they did. It was not that they were too
good to kidnap Africans. It is just that, in real history,
they would never have found any reason to do it.
Yesterday, as today, slaves are too cheap
in Africa to be worth chasing down oneself. Exactly like
today's slavers, all the old slave traders bought their
ENTIRE cargo from black Africans.
It was and is cheap and easy to buy slaves
from black Africans.
What the Confederacy NEVER ALLOWED is what
Africans have ALWAYS engaged in.
That would have ruined the "only whites
are evil" theme of "Roots", wouldn't it?
FOOTNOTE: The only people conservatives
allow to speak for them about race issues today are "neoconservatives,"
who were hard-core leftists in the 1960s.
I discussed these "neos" on March
24, 2001 in THE "NEOS" HELPED CAUSE TODAY'S SUPPRESSION OF
FREE SPEECH.
Neos like David Horowitz have found some
of the points I make here useful in representing the "conservative"
side on reparations for slavery.
My problem, once again, is that I have a
memory. Today's "neos" were shrieking us down
when we made that kind of point in the 1960s. The shouting
down of free speech never had more loyal allies, on and
off campus, than today's neos when they were liberals.
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