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The extraordinary measures needed to keep peace in black America
Paul Kersey at SBPDL transmits the news that Indianapolis has put five hundred extra police officers on patrol to prevent violence during this year’s Indiana Black Expo Summer Celebration.
He then quotes this, from the Indianapolis Star:
An army of peacekeepers will complement a police contingent at this year’s Indiana Black Expo Summer Celebration in an effort to avoid a repeat of violence that marred last year’s event.
Public Safety Director Frank Straub said 25 community affairs officers, who are trained to work with youths, will be among the nearly 300 uniformed officers and 300 church volunteers working the last two nights of the 41st annual event, which begins July 7.
“It will be a coordinated effort to keep order,” he said.
A pattern is emerging. Just as some life-long equivalent of Head Start embracing every aspect of life is needed to get blacks to function at a minimally normal intellectual level (but still doesn’t succeed), flooding black communities with “armies of peacekeepers” is needed to keep members of those communities from carrying out widespread gang violence (but still doesn’t succeed, at least in any permanent way, as the efforts must be unceasing).
I said in a speech in 1994 that as a result of the false belief in racial equality of abilities,
it is … the duty of whites, until the end of time, to exhaust their wealth and spiritual energy in a hopeless effort to make blacks collectively equal to themselves.
But things are worse than what I said in 1994. It is now also the duty of whites, until the end of time, to exhaust their wealth and spiritual energy in a hopeless effort to stop blacks from committing total mayhem.
Hey, let’s have three cheers for those far-seeing American colonists in the 17th and 18th centuries who thought that bringing African slaves to America was a neat idea.
- end of initial entry -
Paul Nachman writes:
I’ve had exactly the thought that’s in your final sentence. I’ve wondered, though, if it was actually a newly-formulated idea or just a natural progression from the then-extant ways of the world, something that wouldn’t really have even been remarked upon.
And regarding specifically the Western hemisphere, were slaves brought here first by the Spaniards or the English?
LA replies:
If you mean, “Was the importation of black slaves a new idea or a natural progression of existing ideas?”, it doesn’t matter. The American colonists were bringing and allowing to be brought into a new country people they regarded as their inferiors, people they themselves regarded incapable of civilization. Did they think that they would hold these people and their descendants in bondage forever? What did they think would happen? The answer is, they didn’t think about what would happen. It was convenient to have black slaves in the present, so they bought them and allowed the purchase of them and didn’t think about the future.
As for your second question, as far as I know, the slave trade from Africa to North America was done by British slave traders and had nothing to do with the Spanish.
Paul Nachman replies:
I actually said “Western hemisphere.” Were the Spaniards importing African slaves to their Western-hemisphere possessions before the British were importing them to North America?
LA replies:
Sorry. I believe that the Spanish importation of slaves to the New World (which involved many more slaves than the British slave trade, because the Spanish treated their slaves much more cruelly and many died) began in the 16th century, before the British importation of slaves to North America began in the early 17th century.
James P. writes: The naive observer might say that the easiest and cheapest method to prevent violence would be not to have a “black summer expo celebration” at all!
LA replies:
Paul Kersey makes the same point in the linked article:
Is no one embarrassed by this? Are the economic benefits of the Black Expo for the city of Indianapolis large enough to justify putting 500 extra officers on patrol? Wouldn’t it be easier just to cancel the event or would the negative public relations fall-out be too much of a Black-eye for the city?
Obviously cancelling the Black Expo Summer Celebration is not an option in Black-Run America (BRA), so a mass of volunteers, police and resource officers are required to keep the peace….
Indianapolis is a city that proves the joke from Family Guy is only funny because it is true. Resources that cost a lot of time and money must be allocated to policing the 2011 Black Expo in Indianapolis because the city is fearful of a repeat of 2010. Because of Black-Run America and the threat of economic boycott by Black people and condemnation by Disingenuous White Liberals (DWLs) in the national media, the event can not be cancelled.
We already have learned that Atlanta, Baltimore and Newark are preparing for Black violence this summer. We know why firework celebrations are being cancelled nationwide. How much money are other cities spending to keep Black events from turning into a repeat of the Black Memorial Day events of 2011?
Chicago refuses to even acknowledge that Black people are engaging in the monolithic Mahogany Mobs that terrorize the entire city.
Until the day comes when people no longer fear BRA, we can only laugh at comedians like Daniel Tosh, Dave Chappelle, and this hilariously accurate clip from Family Guy, because truth can only be masked in humor right now.
Gintas writes:
“Hey, let’s have three cheers for those far-seeing American colonists in the 17th and 18th centuries who thought that bringing African slaves to America was a neat idea.”
I hate to have to say it, but it must be said: Southerners too lazy to do their own work.
Jeff W. writes:
Up until about 1830, most Southerners thought that the introduction of slavery was a mistake. Here is a quote from the book Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia:
“Like most of the statesmen of his generation (he was born in 1753 and died in 1824) [John] Taylor believed that the introduction of slaves had been a tragic mistake, but that any effort to free the Negroes must be followed by their rapid and complete removal to distant lands.”
From the Wikipedia article about John Taylor, a U.S. Senator from Virginia:
“Taylor is one with most American thinkers from Washington to Jefferson to Lincoln in doubting that the free Negro could ever be anything but a problem for American politics.”
After some serious slave revolts and after the Abolitionists got going, Southerners in general stopped apologizing for slavery and started to defend it vigorously. But I’m sure that many of them still privately believed that the introduction of slaves had been a tragic mistake.
LA replies:
It doesn’t matter what John Taylor thought in the early 19th century about slavery and the slave trade. By then the die was cast. And it also doesn’t matter if lots of southerners at an earlier time thought that bringing in black slaves was a bad idea. What matters is what the South, as a society, actually did. And what it actually did was to bring in large numbers of African slaves.
Don Hank writes:
I understand the temptation to make facile conclusions about this issue, after years of seeing pampered minorities misbehaving in places like Watts (“burn, Baby, burn!) and New Orleans (after the Katrina flood), and this is particularly easy if you are not a Christian and do not have love in your heart for your fellow man.
However, I suggest you come to Panama and live here for a while before concluding that blacks as a race can’t function on the same level, or better, as whites. Over 90 percent of Panamanians are black. Since the Torrijos administration in the early ’70s, government has been increasingly racially integrated, and this society functions better than most white societies in Europe and America, with no traces of the banking crises seen throughout white Europe and America. Although crime is high here—mostly because of illegal immigrants from Columbia and because of the huge number of guns on the street following the Noriega regime’s collapse—a goodly proportion of businesses are owned by blacks and they do quite well. The populations of most private schools (some with higher standards than I have seen in the U.S.) are mostly black.
On the other hand, U.S. education has dumbed down Americans (white and black) almost beyond recovery.
The main difference is that Panama does not—so far, thank God—have any social assistance programs to speak of, certainly no welfare. Families still rely on each other, not on government. And Panamanians of all races have a healthy suspicion of One-World Government schemes and stealth methods of persuading people to get behind utopian schemes that undermine economic growth and strength. They also remain adamantly Christian and traditional in marriage and economics.
One of my favorite classmates in the U.S. was a black guy with whom I still correspond from time to time, and this guy is probably the most intellectual man I know, with a grasp of history and literature that puts him way above my head.
I think you are also familiar with the writings of Thomas Sowell and other black conservatives like Star Parker.
True, we as a nation will not succeed if we keep entitling minorities—or anyone—to the fruits of other people’s labor. Because that sends them, and others, the false message that they can’t succeed without free white money and liberal/progressive politics, when quite the opposite is true.
But we most assuredly will fail quite miserably if we reduce the issues to the lowest common denominator of race. (BTW, I am finding an increase in race-based politics in Europe as well, and one of the main reasons is the censorship in the press, schools and society, which squelches the vital free discussion that could melt away the ignorance and bigotry behind it).
We need to stop blaming the Jewish, the black and the Hispanic races for the fruits of our own utopian politics and economics that kill incentives to achieve and keep people down on the Democrat farm.
I have seen both systems at work. Our welfare state with its increasing reliance on Keynesian economics is a dismal failure and the dollar may soon be rejected by OPEC. This in tandem with a staggering unwieldy debt may well causing the greatest economic catastrophe Americans have ever known—eclipsing the Great Depression.
By stark contrast, the Panamanian system works and the middle class is strong.
We are expected to have up to eight percent economic growth this year, as compared to an anemic rate of perhaps 2-3 percent for the U.S.
Not bad for an economy in the hands of minorities.
Ironically, if I had no insight into the behind-the-scenes skullduggery of the ruling classes that caused the economic and financial crisis in the West, I might be tempted to conclude that the white race is inferior.
But fortunately, I do not think in racial terms, so not to worry.
LA replies: I don’t know anything about Panama society and can’t comment on that, though I doubt very much your assertion that blacks perform as well as you say they do in that country.
On the question of U.S. blacks, almost every time I discuss the black issue I say, as you do, that their cultural/moral level could be raised significantly under conditions of a total political and cultural counterrevolution in this country. However, we must also acknowledge that such a counterrevolution is not now occurring, and may not occur for a long time, or ever. In the meantime we have the black population that we actually have, and significant elements within that population are doing the things that they are actually doing. The nature of this population is what it is; the behavior of this population is what it is; and the threat that it poses to the larger society is what it is; and it is only normal and natural to see these phenomena, react to them, and form opinions about them.
Ed writes:
Regarding LA’s speculations about the colonists’ importation of blacks into American and all that ensued, it is easy to find out what the earliest English colonists were thinking when they imported black slaves from Africa. For Robert “King” Carter, the richest man in 17th Century Virginia colony, it was a simple economic equation. As Carter explained it, tobacco prices were depressed, competition demanded that it be produced in the cheapest way possible and black slaves would produce tobacco for less than paid workers. Naked capitalism at its short sighted best, something we are all too familiar with, but something that makes sense. When our ancestors look back at the reasoning of the men alive in the years 1975-2000 who deliberately imported Islam into North America, knowing what Islam had wrought in Africa, Europe, India, Indonesia, the Caucasus, the Balkans, Turkey, knowing about the Islamic enslavement of Christians in raiding parties that went on for centuries, the Islamic massacre of Christian pilgrims that led to the Crusades, the Islamic conquest of Spain, the Islamic invasions of Europe, the battles of Lepanto, Manzikert, Kosovo, Vienna. The undying hatred of Islam for the West that was being evidenced in ten thousand terrorist attacks even while the USA was engaged in mass deliberate importation of these poisonous cultures? What will we have to say to our ancestors? There was a desperate need for surly Arab cabdrivers? That we needed not more people on welfare so we went to the Third World and imported the most violent, poisonous, dysfunctional cultures we could find?
Amidst the bloodshed, civil war, chaos, economic collapse, and cultural regression that the coming decades will bring what answers will we be able to provide to explain why we deliberately destroyed the most successful prosperous country in human history? When they dig through the archives and find film clips showing America in 1950 compared to 2011, what explanation will ever make sense of what happened? If they find film clips of our vacuous popularly elected politicians, say Teddy Kennedy or Nancy Pelosi, or Reid, or Bloomberg or the Best and Brightest of our Universities saying something utterly incomprehensible like “Diversity is our Strength,” how will our era escape the judgment of Mass Hysteria and Insanity?
D. from Seattle writes:
Don Hank said: “Over 90 percent of Panamanians are black.” No, they aren’t, according to the CIA World Factbook:
“mestizo (mixed Amerindian and white) 70 percent, Amerindian and mixed (West Indian) 14 percent, white 10 percent, Amerindian 6 percent.”
By the way, anytime I want to learn some statistics about a country I go to the CIA World Factbook; it contains a remarkable wealth of information and nobody can accuse CIA of being biased.
LA replies:
Well, Mr. Hank said, “Fortunately, I do not think in racial terms.” Perhaps that is why he thinks that Panama is 90 percent black when, according to the CIA, it is zero percent black and only 14 percent mixed Amerindian and black.
Ferg writes:
I have long thought that the two worst things that were ever done by this country were importing black Africans, and giving women the vote. The damage these two things have done is probably not reversible. Our only hope of survival as a nation and as a people is that we retain the right to self-defense and the ability to implement that right, and that we isolate ourselves from the nonwhite races in this country insofar as that is possible. That there are many places in this country where it is not safe for white people to go is a crime but one we have brought upon ourselves. We have abdicated our position in this country and in the world.
Don Marco Jawsario writes:
As VFR’s resident expert on Latin America, Don Marco Jawsario takes offense at the misstatements about Latin America perpetuated by Don Hank. A fellow caballero of Don Marco’s is married to a Panamanian from that country’s upper class. She is white, of Italian ancestry. She says that blacks are on the bottom rung of Panamanian society and contribute much to the crime in her country. Of course, as a rule the same is true in all of Latin America, including Don Marco’s beloved Colombia.
Naïve individuals such as Mr. Hank always pluck the few exceptions of black success to paint a picture of general black achievement which simply does not hold on closer examination. While we all know that men are taller than women, anyone can find a six foot woman walking the streets of Manhattan within a few minutes. Such it is with liberals in their moronic attempts to “prove” equality between the races. They are forever picking the woman who is over six feet while ignoring the majority of women who are under 5’4”.
June 20
John Hagan writes:
Don Hank writes about a mythical nation run by blacks that functions better than most any European nation. He even names this nation, Panama. The problem is, there are no black people in Panama. But Don Hank sees what he wants to see.
People like Mr. Hank sprinkle the fairy-dust of egalitarianism and non-discrimination on their cereal every morning and think the rest of us out here in the real world are going to buy into it as well. While the Hank types dream about a world that never was, the real world of black pathology with its flash mobs and anti-white violence rolls over America.
Sage McLaughlin writes:
Did I just read someone make the assertion that a Spanish-speaking, 85 percent Roman Catholic, former Spanish colony is in fact 90 percent black? That one of the highest-functioning countries in the Western hemisphere is almost entirely populated, owned, and administered by blacks? Look, that story isn’t a logical impossibility. However, if it were true it would be on the lips of every liberal every day—the place would be legendary, both a shining example of what is possible and a rebuke to actually-existing conditions worldwide. If the Spanish had ceded one of its former colonies completely to the descendants of slaves, and it had subsequently turned into a high-functioning Catholic country, there isn’t a school child in the Western world who wouldn’t know every detail of the story.
My brother is married to a Panamanian woman, and if her country was almost entirely black, he’d certainly know about it. But of course he knows no such thing and never noticed any such thing while visiting there. At most, a quarter of the population of Panama is black or mulatto, and it’s possible (though not definitively established) that a somewhat larger percentage has some African ancestry. But that’s really it.
Don Hank’s suggestion that your assessment of minority behavior in America must flow from an insufficiently Christian love for your fellow man indicates to me that Mr. Hank is operating from a thoroughly ideological perspective having nothing to do with conditions in Panama or anywhere else. There is something not a little pathetic about people who cite such bizarre fabrications as evidence that they are the ones operating in the real world, while Lawrence Auster is the one seeing things through a distorted race-based prism. The reality of course is the precise opposite—everything he sees or believes is distorted by an anti-empirical theory of race. To say that one does not think in racial terms is to admit that he does not think in human terms. The life of Man does not reduce to matters of race, but matters of race are an essential, ineradicable part of Man’s nature.
To deny this reality is not to think in specially humane or Christian terms. It is to refuse to think.
LA writes:
Wikipedia’s demographic breakdown for Panama is different from the CIA World Factbook’s. Wikipedia:
As of 2000, the majority of the population, 50.1 percent, was Mestizo. Afro-Panamanians and Mulattos were together the largest minority, accounting for 22 percent. For the remaining groups the percentages were: Amerindian 6.7 percent, European 8.6 percent, Asian 5.5 percent, and other 7.1 percent.
The CIA Factbook indicated no blacks in Panama. Wikipedia indicates “Afro-Panamanians,” which presumably means blacks, but doesn’t provide a figure for them. Instead, it combines Afro-Panamians with Mulattos in a single group at 22 percent of the population. If for the sake of argument we guess that Afro-Panamanians are half of the 22 percent, that is 11 percent, far short of Mr. Hank’s 90 percent. In any case, by far the largest racial group in the country is Mestizos, at 50.1 percent. (I find that 50.1 percent, putting the Mestizos just over the line into majorityhood not just a plurality, a bit suspicious.)
However, I think Mr. Hank has been beaten up enough now.
JC in Houston writes: While the American colonists were no doubt short-sighted, today we have no excuses. We are still importing Africans. I notice more and more black Africans working in local convenience stores, Nigerian immigrants committing fraud scams, not to mention the importation of the awful Somalis. As if we need any more of Africa’s children.
Jacob G. writes:
“While the American colonists were no doubt short-sighted, today we have no excuses.”
Whatever occurred in the past, the present is under the judgment of the plagues. What we have is the Africanization and the Islamization of the entire world as symbolized in the Biblical plague of the locusts. Locusts at appointed times swarm over an area by the thousands and take over the land and vegetation. They leave it a desert. The past is past, the present is under judgment. Be prepared for the heavy yoke of the stranger in the coming years and decades. Laugh now at prophecy, cry later under the heavy burdens you and your children will come to bear …
Leonard D. writes:
You’re being overly presentist in judging our forefathers. They did import African slaves. This did turn out to be a problem. We are saddled with a race problem indefinitely. However, in spite of their being democratic, their society could handle it. Only propertied white men could vote, and they had no idea of racial equality. So they could and did take measures necessary to control blacks.
Were our forefathers “far-seeing”? Well, they and their posterity did manage to contain black criminality until the 1960s. That was three and a half centuries after the initial importation. I have a hard time faulting them for not foreseeing, among other things, the founding of the USA and the subsequent exaltation of democracy and its consequent degringolade into progressive rule. To them, democracy was just a way of amicably running local committees, not a sacrament.
LA replies:
” … degringolade into progressive rule.”
Nice phrase, nice alliteration.
Don Hank writes:
I am so sorry. I misspoke.
I had said, “I suggest you come down and live here … ”
I take it back. You and your readers are just fine where you are.
Please stay and enjoy your surroundings—and the excellent economic conditions created by white people.
LA replies:
This is your reply to substantive criticism and discussion?
Don Hank replies:
Look, your readers know more about Panama than I do and they have never been here.
They must be truly brilliant.
There is no need for any of you to come here. You already know more than a resident of this country. Congratulations!
John Hagan writes:
Don Hank’s ludicrous display of white self-loathing is comical on one level, but on another level it’s sadly indicative of the kind of citizens America is producing. These deracinated individuals dwell in a fantasy world of racial equivalence. From reading some of Hank’s writing it seems he considers himself something of a conservative. Well, it’s big rock-candy mountain, Jack Kemp-style conservatism at best.
D. from Seattle writes:
Based on Don Hank’s latest reply, it’s obvious he knows more about Panama than either the CIA or Wikipedia’s sources, which base their estimates on Panama’s census data. Maybe Don should sell them his consulting services.
But the reason I’m writing is that I have found a curious discrepancy between Wikipedia’s article on Panama and the source it quotes. Wikipedia says: “As of 2000, the majority of the population, 50.1%, was Mestizo. Afro-Panamanians and Mulattos were together the largest minority, accounting for 22%. For the remaining groups the percentages were: Amerindian 6.7%, European 8.6%, Asian 5.5%, and other 7.1%.”
The source Wikipedia quotes for this is a site called World Statesmen. Curiously enough, here is their estimate of the demographic composition: “mestizo (mixed Amerindian and white) 58.1%, black and mulatto 14%, Amerindian 6.7%, white 8.6%, Asian 5.5%, other 7.1% (2000)” Notice how 8 percentage points shifted from mestizo to black and mulatto in Wikipedia’s version of the same data? No wonder people refer to Wikipedia as pretendipedia (although I am as guilty of using it as anyone else).
About World Statesmen: the site is edited by someone named Ben Cahoon. This is what he says in the intro: “World Statesmen.org is an online encyclopedia of the leaders of nations and territories. The goal of this site is to provide researchers with detailed lists of leaders, chronologies, flags, national anthems and maps to give an in-depth portrait of polities past and present.
“This site would not be possible without the help of Bob Hilkens, author of States and Regents of the World, Alexander Kunde, Juan Jorge Schaffer, John McMeekin, Dr. John DaGraca (author of Heads of State and Government), Jaume Olle, Daniel Trigaux, Paris Renesis, Henry Soszynski author of Genealogical Gleanings, and Oleg Schultz author of Archonology, in addition to the many contributors cited in the contributors page. I would like to thank everyone very much for their help and commitment to making this site more complete and accurate … “
Bottom line, I would still trust CIA more than Wikipedia, given the source Wikipedia uses and especially given Wikipedia’s apparent doctoring of the data.
June 22
JJ writes:
I haven’t been to Panama since the good old days before Linowitz when the Canal Zone was U.S. territory and one of the cleanest and safest places on earth. Just outside what used to be the Canal Zone on the Caribbean coast is the city of Colón, which is predominately black. Blacks are concentrated along the Caribbean coast in Central America, for example in Belize (former British Honduras), Puerto Limón, Costa Rica, Colón, Panama and at banana plantations along the coast. They mostly speak English (Ebonics) and have little interaction with the Spanish-speaking majorities in Costa Rica and Panama. Social rank in Latin America is heavily based on skin color. Blacks are at the bottom and are treated much worse by the mestizos than they are treated here.
Colón was and undoubtedly still is a filthy and dangerous hole. I only entered the city to sleep at the old Hotel Washington, the only acceptable hotel near the north end of the Canal Zone. I was warned to drive straight to the Washington and not to stop elsewhere in Colón and for good reason—there were blacks loitering on the streets. There are now newer competitors to the Washington, but from the reviews it’s clear that they are all substandard and that Colón hasn’t changed. These are from reviews of the Four Points Colón:
I would never recommend that anyone come to Colon for pleasure, but if you have to be here for business, this hotel is the best option. I gave it a low rating for location because of Colon, however, it is before the main congestion and squalor of downtown Colon. The area is gated within walking distance of a hardware store and a couple of restaurants. The parking lot is secure with armed police there at all times.
——
We drove to downtown Colon and it was such a ghetto. The sea was pretty and blue but the park was scary and we did not dare to stop because it looked so unsafe to go down the car. A local Panamanian warned us that even he would not go to downtown Colon. I think their government forgot to take care of the city of Colon as it looked like it was forsaken.
——
Then, while trying a simple steak, the kitchen failed to even be able to provide a tender and juicy piece of meat. The delay in getting your food is unbearable. I have had on at least two occasions left the restaurant while presumably they were trying to kill the chicken, cow, or whatever. Often I had to ask if the meal was coming. I resolved to eat away or eat in the room, although even the simple club sandwich was messed up!
The second big problem is the hot water, in that there is none. It is no solution to instruct the guest to leave the water running for thirty minutes. If one is here for business, we don’t have 30 minutes to wait in the morning! I was told that would be solved in February, but it was not.
I also had some problems with noise coming from the alarm clock, from the fire alarm, and music from the lobby at midnight….
I am going back to the Radisson in my visits. True, it’s musty and humid, but at least the water gets hot.
James P. writes (sent June 20):
You wrote,
The American colonists were bringing and allowing to be brought into a new country people they regarded as their inferiors, people they themselves regarded incapable of civilization. Did they think that they would hold these people and their descendants in bondage forever?
Yes, they did, and they had every reason to think so. Slavery had existed in many cultures throughout human history, blacks had been brought to the New World as slaves for centuries, and the principles of holding people in bondage were well-understood. Importing blacks is not insane and untenable if you know how to stop blacks from committing total mayhem. White colonists knew how to stop blacks from committing total mayhem. Southern cities before 1860 were quiet, orderly, and safe.
You can hardly call people “short-sighted” for assuming an institution that was thousands of years old would not continue into the indefinite future. You might as well mock conservatives today for thinking heterosexual marriage as an institution can and should endure forever.
LA replies:
Oh, really? Blacks had been brought to the New World as slaves for centuries? First, the New World had only been discovered about 130 years before slaves began to be brought to Virginia. Second, the idea of buying black slaves in Africa and then transporting them across the ocean to a new land, was new. Third, the slave-buying colonists were consigning their posterity to a future of forever having a vast population of slaves of different race to maintain control over. All these things were new, unprecedented, and fateful.
I get the feeling that James doesn’t want any criticism of white people to stand, if the criticism is one with which a liberal might agree.
James P. writes:
You wrote,
Blacks had been brought to the New World as slaves for centuries? First, the New World had only been discovered about 130 years before slaves began to be brought to Virginia.
To clarify my meaning precisely, the Portuguese and Spanish brought African slaves to the New World starting in the early 1500s, and while it is true that the English colonists began bringing slaves to their North American colonies in the mid-1600s [LA replies: I think they started bringing them around 1620], the vast majority (over 75 percent) of the African slaves who were brought to North America arrived after 1750, at which time the English had considerable experience using slave labor on their Caribbean islands. Whether you want to “count” the relevant New World experience with slaves as starting in the mid-1600s or include the Spanish and Portuguese experience of the 1500s is up to you, but to me even 130 years of experience was sufficient for them to have judged that they could keep blacks under control and that the system was sustainable.
If you count from the introduction of black slavery in Virginia in 1656, then slavery was by no means a new institution when it was abolished in 1865. [LA replies: Maybe 1656 was the legal formal institution of slavery, but I believe black slaves had been brought to Virginia starting around 1620.]
You continued,
Second, the idea of buying black slaves in Africa and then transporting them across the ocean to a new land, was new.
Again, the Portuguese and Spanish brought African slaves to the New World starting in the early 1500s, so this was not a new idea. [LA replies: You are being tendentious. You earlier said that “blacks had been brought to the New World as slaves for centuries,” and that’s what I disagreed with. How about simply admitting that “centuries” was incorrect instead extending this useless debate?]
Arab and Turkish corsairs took over a million slaves from Europe and transported them to North Africa and Turkey from the 1500s to early 1800s, so the idea of taking slaves and transporting them overseas was hardly unknown to Europeans of the time. (Yet where was the philanthropic crusade to free these slaves?)
Then you wrote,
Third, the slave-buying colonists were consigning their posterity to a future of forever having a vast population of slaves of different race to maintain control over.
They had no reason to doubt that their descendants would lack the will and capability to do so. Still less could they have imagined that other American whites would lead a crusade to free the blacks. [LA replies: You believe that Christian British men should have seen it as normal and acceptable that they should rule in perpetuity over slaves of another race that had been transported over the seas to be their slaves. You remind of me of Jared Taylor and other Southern apologists who are constitutionally incapable of admitting that anything the white man ever did was wrong.]
You concluded,
I get the feeling that James doesn’t want any criticism of white people to stand, if the criticism is one with which a liberal might agree.
I question the validity of a critique of slavery based on the attitudes and assumptions of 2011. [LA replies: This is very wrong. You would have us believe that moral objections to chattel slavery were non-existent in the Christian West prior to 2011.] We should judge the past according to the attitudes and assumptions that prevailed in the past, hateful and racist though Fitzhugh and Hammond and Adams and Carlyle might seem today.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 19, 2011 06:58 PM | Send
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