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Γιατί το
μόνο
φάρμακο
στην
σκλαβία
είναι ο
καπιτα&
DIR By: 1488
Date: January 13, 2013, 5:32 am
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Ο Sowell
καταρρίπτει
όλους όσους
πάνε να
φορτώσουν
την σκλαβιά
στην Δύση
ενώ στην
ουσία είναι
κατάλοιπο
του
κολεκτιβιστικού
πρωτόγονου
mindset κάθε
φασίστα και
κάθε
πριμιτιβιστή.
History from Sowell: Paraphrased and Quoted
1) We neglect current slavery in Mauritania, Sudan, and
parts of Nigeria and Benen but complain, debate, and demand
favors because of events over a century old and focused in the
United States.
2) Writings are meager, however, about the larger number of
Africans enslaved in Middle Eastern Islamic territories and
within Europe. Further, a million or more Europeans were
enslaved by North African pirates from 1500-1800 and whites were
sold at auctions in Egypt until August 1885, years after the
American Emancipation Proclamation. (There is bluster about
“reparations” for the modern handicaps that grew from events
more than a century ago. There is no evidence, however, that
past enslavement suppressed contemporary white achievement!)
3) “Slav” became the root for “slave” in English, Arabic,
and other languages because Slavs were widely captured by
traders from the southern and eastern Mediterranean. Asians and
Polynesians were also bought and sold by Asians and Polynesians.
India, according to Sowell, had more slaves than in the entire
Western Hemisphere and slaves were the majority in some Asian
cities.
4) The popularized history of slavery underlies the claim
that slavery grew out of racism. Not so. Sowell points out that
slavery for centuries was of like-against-like. “Europeans
enslaved other Europeans, Asians enslaved other Asians, Africans
enslaved other Africans, and indigenous peoples of the Western
Hemisphere enslaved other indigenous peoples of the Western
Hemisphere. The Western Hemisphere became the first region in
history in which slavery was also associated with racial
differences…. This enshrinement of racism as an over-arching
causal factor accords far more with current instrumental agendas
than with history.” (114)
5) “While there is a sizeable literature on the American
Civil War, for all its staggering carnage and historic legacy
within the United States, in an international perspective it s
only a small and highly atypical part of the story of the
worldwide crusade against slavery. No other nation ended slavery
in the same way as the United States did and few ended it after
so short a struggle…”
6) Slavery ended as “more and more territories around the
world consolidated into nation states with their own armies and
navies, raiding those territories to capture and enslave the
people who lived within them became more hazardous…” (115).
Further, “Slavery did not die out quietly of its own accord. It
went down fighting to the bitter end – and it lost only because
Europeans had gunpowder weapons first.” … “Ironically, the
anti-slavery ideology behind this process began to develop in
eighteenth-century Britain, at a time when the British Empire
led the world in slave trading, and when the economy of most of
its overseas colonies in the Western Hemisphere depended on
slaves …While slavery was common to all civilizations, as well
as to peoples considered uncivilized, only one civilization
developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in hits
history…not even the leading moralists in other civilizations
rejected slavery at all….Moreover, within Western civilization,
the principle impetus for the abolition of slavery came first
from very conservative religious activists – people who would
today be called ‘the religious right.’…this story is not
‘politically correct’ in today’s terms. Hence it is ignored, as
if it never happened.” (116)
“Within the British Empire, the abolition of slavery was
accompanied by payment of compensation to slave owners – not to
slaves – this cost the British government 20 million pounds…
about five percent of the nation’s annual output.” (122)
“We took possession…in accordance with our customs and we caught
all the people. Not one escaped. Some ran away from us, these we
killed and others we killed – but what of that? It was in
accordance with our customs.” (118) “In short, what was so
patently wrong about slavery….was almost incomprehensible to
many non-Westerners.”
7) “…the region of West Africa…was one of the great
slave-trading regions of the continent – before, during, and
after the white man arrived. It was Africans who enslaved their
fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to
Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of
Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for
themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere….In East
Africa, the Masai were feared slave raiders and other African
tribes – either alone or in conjunction with Arabs, enslaved
their more vulnerable neighbors…Arabs were the leading slave
raiders in East Africa, ranging over an area larger than all of
Europe.”
8) “A vast literature has detailed the vile conditions
under which slaves from Africa lived – and died – during their
voyages to the Western Hemisphere. But the much less publicized
slave trade to the Islamic countries had even higher mortality
rates …most of the slaves who were marched across the
Sahara…died on the way. While these were mostly women and girls,
the males faced a special danger – castration to produce the
eunuchs in demand as harem attendants in the Islamic world.”
(126) “…vestiges of slavery still survived in parts of Africa
into the twenty-first century.”
9) There was disagreement about slavery within the West:
“In addition to whites who defended the enslavement of Africans
on racial ground, or who opposed general emancipation on social
grounds, there were many whites – and even blacks – who defended
slavery as matter of self-interest as slave owners….there were
thousands of … blacks in the antebellum south who were
commercial slave owners, just like their white counterparts. An
estimated one-third of the ‘free persons of color’ in New
Orleans were slaveowners and thousands of these slaveowners
volunteered to fight for the Confederacy…”
There were several contributors: 1) Humanism deemphasized the
importance of an afterlife: slavery, therefore, became a more
urgent topic, 2) the widening moral debates in Britain required
no longer accepting slavery as “simply one of those facts of
life.” The political storm lasted a century and Britain’s
military strength made it possible for her to impose her
convictions on the rest of the Empire as slave ships were
intercepted, confiscated, and their cargos freed. “…the
anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western
power and hegemony were had their zenith, so that it was
essentially European imperialism that ended slavery.” Slavery,
however, continues to exist, interlaced with Islam, particularly
in East Africa.
“The story of how human beings treat other human beings when
they have unbridled power over them is seldom a pretty story, or
even a decent story, regardless of the color of the people
involved. When the roles were reversed, Africans did not treat
Europeans any better than Europeans treated Africans. Neither
can be exempted from moral condemnation applied to the other.”
(139)
Why the South?
“…racism as neither necessary nor sufficient for slavery, whose
origins antedated racism by centuries. Racism was a result, not
a cause, of slavery, and not all societies that enslaved people
of another race became pervaded with racism to the extent that
the American South did.” (128)
“What the United States had that the Islamic world did not have
was a self-sustaining and racially distinct population of major
proportions within the larger society.” (156)
1) The North, unsuited for plantations, ended slavery with
little comment. That is, their smaller number of slaves did not
raise serious questions about what to do with the people who had
been enslaved. Southerners faced higher densities and sometimes
majorities of black populations.
2) The elites tended to ask, “How are the former slaves
going to live once freed?” And the less elite had both fears of
race wars and actions that made them more likely. After all,
free blacks were already “very disproportionately represented in
prisons.” (The Klan has been described – not by Sowell – as a
defensive tactic against the “Union League,” former black Union
soldiers who stayed in the South and destroyed southern farms
and homes. The Klan is still bad company, the Union League
became a conservative club in Philadelphia.)
3) Those opposed to ending slavery had mixed feelings.
Slave holder John Randolph of Virginia, for example, hated both
abolitionists and slavery. Edmund Burke called for a
habilitation program in which former slaves were taught to be
members of a free society. The colony of Georgia tried to ban
the introduction of slavery but was overruled by London. Quakers
in Pennsylvania tried to impose a high tax on importation of
slaved but were also overruled by London.
“The fact that nineteenth-century public opinion in both Britain
and America was very different from what it had been two
centuries earlier did not mean that either country could simply
wipe the slate clean and escape the consequences of what had
already been done in earlier times.” Also as Sowell notes,
“Many problems can be made simple, but only by leaving out the
complications which those in the midst of these problems cannot
so easily escape with a turn of a phrase, or as those who look
back on them in later centuries can.” (144)
4) “Stewardship” – keeping together and passing on what you
have – may have been another factor that contributed to
slavery’s continuation.
5) Economics – “…the end of slavery found the regions in
which slaves had been concentrated poorer than other regions of
these same countries.” True for Eastern Europe, true for the
American South even before losing the War. Slaves in the
non-Western world were often not sources of wealth but a means
to display it and a drain upon it. And in the West, commercial
slave holders tended to spend lavishly, slide into debt, and
lose their plantations. “…millions suffered exploitation and
dehumanization for no higher purpose than the transient
aggrandizement of slaveowners.” (159)
Racism and racial conflict – as is true of most conflicts – can
be seen as the products of synchronous events in both blacks and
whites.
“The physical and psychic sufferings of slaves in the past are
neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the economic and
other differences between their present-day descendants and
members of the general population. The economic and other
disparities between Europeans and Africans living, respectively
in Europe and Africa are vastly greater than the disparities
between the descendants of Europeans and Africans living n the
United States.” (160)…”This cannot morally justify the seizing
of their ancestors. It simply affects the cause-and-effect
question of the reasons for black-white disparities.” (160)
Summary
1) “Moral questions about slavery have been exclusively
Western moral questions.” (162)
2) “Lincoln was viciously attacked in the Democrats press
for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. “ New England
Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison could spout rhetoric
without regard to its consequences….”Garrison’s rhetoric may
look better to a later generation but the cold fact is that
William Lloyd Garrison did not free a single slave, while
Abraham Lincoln freed millions.” (165)
3) “‘Slavery until recently was universal in two senses.
Most settled societies incorporated the institution into their
social structures, and few peoples in the world have not
constituted a major source of slaves at one time or another.’
Despite such common knowledge among scholars, the version of the
history of slavery more commonly depicted to the general public,
as well as to students in our schools and colleges, is more
along the lines of Roots or similar productions.” (165-166)
4) “The idea that slavery was based on race or racism is
yet another popular notion that will not stand up to a scrutiny
of history…” (166)
5) “From a narrow perspective, the lesson that some draw
from the history of slavery, automatically conceived of as the
enslavement of blacks by whites, is that white people were or
are uniquely evil. Against the broader background of world
history, however, a very different lesson might be that no
people of any color can be trusted with unbridled power over any
other people….It was not because people thought slavery was
right that it persisted for thousands of years. It persisted
largely because people did not think about the rightness or
wrongness of it at all.” (168-169)
“Clearly, the ability to score ideological points against
American society or Western civilization, or to induce guilt and
thereby extract benefits from the white population today, are
greatly enhanced by making enslavement appear to be a peculiarly
American, or a peculiarly white, crime.” (111)
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