The reparations for slavery nonsense again

Leaders of more than a dozen Caribbean countries are launching a united effort to seek compensation for the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The above is from a recent report in the Guardian newspaper. Since it was published, it has been announced that the University campus at Kingston, Jamaica has announced it will offer a course looking at this non-issue.

The reparations shakedown is an old chestnut that rears its dumb head from time to time, in fact for some people it never goes away. It is part and parcel of that great delusion of white privilege and racist oppression that envisages the world populated only by two types of people: white oppressors and non-white victims, the latter of whom are to be known universally by that sick euphemism “people of color”, a popular phrase in the United States where this nonsense appears to have originated.

This dichotomy is not only a delusion but an illusion, because for the people at the bottom of American society – the black underclass – all they see are, to put it crudely, white assholes defecating on them from a great height. This is because with a few exceptions – most noticeably the President and Attorney General Eric Holder – most of the people holding power in the United States are white.

Where blacks see white assholes, oppressed whites see only assholes. A graphic example of this was reported here recently. A woman who was admittedly caught shoplifting was beaten savagely for no excusable reason by a police officer. To his credit, the reporter condemned this as the thuggery it was, but what would the usual suspects have said if this woman had been black? Think Rodney King. Here is another example of a woman being manhandled by a thug in uniform. Again, no mention of race, and why should there be?

Finally, in London, another thug in uniform slaps a small if feisty woman in the face, and for good measure whacks her across the back of the leg for no reason whatsoever. In this case the thug was black, but no one made a race issue of it because it was clearly as with the other two examples a case of abuse of power. And he was acquitted not on account of either his race or hers but because his uniform brings him a privilege that neither money nor the colour of a man’s skin can buy. Is that not the truth?

The feminist fantasy of the patriarchy is a similar delusion/illusion to that of white privilege. While it is true that in some societies – like India – the status of women is not what it should be, and crimes of sexual violence and worse have been and in places are still not being treated with the gravity they warrant, the same cannot be said of the West.

The ambulance-chasing law firm Leigh Day has agreed to take up the ludicrous cause of the claim for reparations basing its non-case on the recent Mau Mau claims. The Mau Mau uprisings in Kenya were some of the most contrived revolutionary activity ever undertaken anywhere at any time, and they did native black Kenyans not one whit of good. Can the same be said for slavery?

No man in his right mind would claim slavery to be anything but an abomination; along with usury and prostitution it is the world’s oldest and most disreputable institution and then some. What is conveniently forgotten though is its practice in Africa. As the explorer Samuel Baker wrote in 1866: “the institution of slavery...is indigenous to the soil of Africa, and...has NOT BEEN TAUGHT TO THE AFRICAN BY THE WHITE MAN, as is currently reported, but...has ever been the peculiar characteristic of African tribes...It was in vain that I attempted to reason with them against the principles of slavery: they thought it wrong when they were themselves the sufferers, but were always ready to indulge in it when the preponderance of power lay upon their side”.

Let us though assume that the slavery to which they were subjected by the white masters was far worse, how precisely does this affect American blacks or Caribbean blacks or black Africans today?

The stark truth is that it has benefited them, the same way the suffering of the white man’s ancestors has benefited him and them. If this sounds an extraordinary claim to make, that is only because most people have been brainwashed by the specious rhetoric of the socialist elite which has insinuated itself into even the American Government. Namely the idea that equality of opportunity must equate with equality of outcome else white privilege, institutional racism or sexism are holding millions of people down.

Again, white privilege does not exist, what does exist though is the equity the human species has built on the suffering, the blood, sweat and tears of our ancestors. The world in which we live today is the result of a relatively few creative brains; from the anonymous inventor of the wheel to the WorldWideWeb and maybe tomorrow to the batteryless flashlight.

The overwhelming majority of those creative brains have been white men; there have been white women too, and others have contributed significantly; for example the Arabs gave us the concept of zero in mathematics, without which we would have made little if any progress. They also gave us many other things, particularly in literature and the arts. China gave us not simply Bruce Lee but many martial arts, acupuncture, the oldest military manual in the world and much else besides.

While some races have contributed enormously, others have contributed little or nothing to civilisation, certainly before contact with the Arab and the white man. This inconvenient fact is glossed over today, ignored or denied by fanciful pseudo-histories that have no basis in fact, like the ludicrous Kwanzaa.

The demand of reparations for slavery or white privilege is simply a shakedown attempt that is being carried out by self-styled black leaders and their bleeding heart white liberal friends and socialist fellow travellers. The ludicrous idea that the West somehow sucked the wealth out of Africa and destroyed some great indigenous civilisation is not supported by a single reliable fact.

In the 1914 book, NEGRO CULTURE IN WEST AFRICA..., George W. Ellis documents the Vai people of Liberia. In the INTRODUCTION, Frederick Starr writes “It was among the Vai that the only practical and actually-used script for the writing of an African Negro language has been produced”. This written language was invented by Momoru Doalu Búkere who was born in the previous century. He was taught to read by a missionary.

Not only was there no written African language, there was no technology worthy of the name. Early adventurers into the Dark Continent did not find houses, they found huts made of mud or at best straw. There was no mechanical power, not even the wheel. The proof of this inconvenient fact can be found in 20^th Century films like the 1925 short In The Land Of Giants And Pygmies.

This has absolutely nothing to do with racism, it is simply inconvenient historical truth. The Africans who were captured – or often sold into slavery – first to the Arabs then to the whites, suffered greatly, but the Africans of today did not, neither did nor do the black Americans of today. And the black victims of the slave trade were far from the only ones who suffered. The Industrial Revolution was started in Britain, again by a tiny number of inventors, but who paid the price? The 1847 Factory Act reduced the working day for under 18s and women to 10 hours. The previous acts were even less appetising. Ordinary people worked from dawn until dusk in dangerous factories for a pittance. At times this included women and children.

So-called indentured servants were shipped off to the New World where they were little more than slaves. Although slavery was abolished in England by an 1833 Act of Parliament, young boys were shoved up chimneys for another forty and more years.

Thomas Clark “master-sweep of Nottingham” told the 1863 Children’s Employment Commission “It [apprenticeship] is as bad as the Negro slavery, only it is not so known”. The last climbing boy fatality was in 1875.