Time to Set the Record Straight on Slavery
Slaves plant potatoes in the fields while the American Civil War rages — c. 1862. (Alamy Stock)
Originally published on the American Thinker
September 30, 2019
Antifa is the most public, in-your-face element of the communist Left’s decades-long effort to vilify America as a bastion of racism and “white supremacy.” Normal people know that this characterization of the United States is simply not true. We have been world leaders in promoting racial harmony and reconciliation and have bent over backwards to aid in the advancement of minorities. Today, for example, blacks, Hispanics, and women have the lowest unemployment rates in U.S. history. Furthermore, certain minority groups are eligible for racial preferences and set-asides unavailable to whites and even those minorities — for example, Asians — who excel.
The poorest people in America are better off than people in most other nations. A recent study found that when you include the myriad welfare programs available to Americans, the bottom 20 percent of income-earners in the U.S. are better off materially than everyone in most of the nations of Europe. Another study found that the bottom 10 percent in the U.S. do better than the top 10 percent in Russia and that our nation’s poor do better than virtually everyone in India and better than 85 percent of those living in China.
The Left media ignore all this. They would have you believe we are constantly on the cusp of reverting to the days of Jim Crow. Slavery in America ended with the Civil War, which cost more American lives than any other war in U.S. history. With the complete dismantling of postwar discriminatory practices by 1964, and continual efforts to boost the affluence of minorities, talk of slavery and reparations should be a thing of the distant past, but a race-hustling industry has kept it alive by misinforming successive generations of students and indoctrinating minorities to hate everything American, while (mostly white) leftists constantly agitate to sow and inflame racial division.
A look into the past is instructive. According to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, 12.5 million African slaves were shipped to the New World between 1525 and 1866, and 10.7 million (about 86 percent) survived the trip. Of these, only 450,000 (about 4 percent of the total) were sent to America. The rest were shipped to South America and the Caribbean. Brazil alone received 4.9 million. Why are there no calls for reparations in Brazil? And the black slave trade to the West pales in comparison to the white and black slave trade conducted by Muslim nations of Africa and the Middle East in its barbarity and numbers.
The much larger and infinitely more barbaric Muslim slave trade began in about 711, capturing both whites and blacks in numbers much higher than those taken by the West, and Muslim slave-traders provided over 80 percent of those black slaves sold to the West. Of the slaves captured by Muslims for their own use, 80 to 90 percent died on the way to market. Of those shipped to North Africa for sale to Western slavers, about 30–50 percent died en route. Males slated for Muslim markets were castrated. Only 25 percent survived the operation. Their descendants in those nations are much smaller in number because most male African slaves were used as eunuchs and worked to death. Estimates of total black enslavement in Muslim nations range from 11 million to 32 million. Given the high mortality rate of capture and transport, the impact on black African tribes must have been genocidal.
The Muslim Ottomans, the Barbary pirates, Crimean Tatars, and Turks enslaved European, Russian, Mediterranean, and Caucasus whites between the 15th and 19th centuries. According to The Islamic Trade in European Slaves by Emmet Scott, the most conservative estimate is 15 million white slaves. Women and boys were preferred. Most of the women were sold into sex slavery, while boys were castrated and used as eunuchs. Crimean Tatars, who enslaved about 3 million, gave older men of little value to Tatar youths, who killed them for sport.
Why do we not hear a peep from any of these self-righteous social justice warriors about this travesty? Where is talk of reparations for whites or the many blacks enslaved by Muslim nations?
Slavery has been with man in one form or another since the dawn of time. It took Western nations to bring it to an end. Contrary to what the Left will tell you, this goal was enshrined in our nation’s founding documents. This was the consequence of our great Judeo-Christian heritage, which also gave rise to our unprecedented affluence and stability.
Scott writes:
The great humanitarian impulse to end slavery, from the late eighteenth century onwards, came entirely from the Christian West, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was stamped out completely in most Christian lands.
In the Middle East, it was officially ended only due to pressure from the West:
That slavery no longer exists (officially at least) in the majority of Muslim territories is due entirely to the efforts of Westerners, and in fact Muslim societies vigorously resisted all attempts by Europeans to stamp out the slave trade in Africa during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was not in until the second half of the twentieth century that slavery was finally abolished in the Gulf States and the Arabian Peninsula — after intense Western pressure. Is it not about time that some of this information got through to students in our schools and colleges?
But slavery has not been abolished. Mauritania, the last nation to publicly condone slavery, officially outlawed it finally in 2007. However, the truth is that slavery in Mauritania is alive and well, with as much as 10–20 percent of the population (340,000 to 680,000) in bondage. Algeria (106,000), Sudan (35,000 or more), Libya (48,000), and certain other nations still practice slavery.
Famous black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan excoriates America for our history of slavery, but despite repeated calls to take action against Muslim nations that continue to enslave both black and white, Farrakhan has remained totally silent, as have Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton — despite Sharpton witnessing slavery in Sudan firsthand. Former President Obama, seen in a recently discovered 2005 photo with Louis Farrakhan, hasn’t made a peep. Why not?
Where are the complaints over Middle East and African slave trading that continued legally until 2007, and still continues illegally in that part of the world? Where are the hooded Antifa goons, smashing windows and heads and firebombing autos and buildings in protest of “Islamic supremacy” and “Muslim nationalism”?
Just as the Left demands that America pony up trillions of dollars for the bogus “global warming” agenda, while it ignores the much larger pollution quotient produced by China and Russia, it now demands trillions in “reparations” for slavery from the nation that imported the fewest slaves of any and, along with other Western nations, brought about, for the first time in world history, a complete end to legal slavery throughout the world. It’s time to set the record straight and end the Left’s constant agitation and provocation that deliberately, and fraudulently, fan the flames of division in our great nation.