1,940 words
What are we to make of reparations for slavery to American blacks? It’s become a frequently repeated demand lately, and might be even more so later on. The strange thing is that that the further away in time we get from slavery, which ended well before living memory, the pricklier the topic becomes. Likewise, demands for reparations have increased, often by people who would be an embarrassment to their polite and industrious freedmen ancestors were they still around. Let’s take a look at both sides of the topic.
Thesis
About three hundred thousand West Africans were taken against their will from their native shores, despite their natural rights to liberty, and brought to America. There, they and their descendants toiled in the cotton fields, as well as performing other tasks, without recompense. To right this wrong, they should be paid back for their labors.
That was the argument in a nutshell. Note that I pulled a fast one by neglecting to mention that it wasn’t whites who enslaved them. They were enslaved by their own African kinfolk and later bartered to merchant ships, typically for rum, beads, or trinkets. That’s what really happened, contrary to those who mistook the premiere episode of Roots as factual, or imagined Portuguese sailors with butterfly nets running after the natives through the jungle. The slave trade in Africa had been going on centuries before the first ship showed up to buy from the commerce that already existed. I left out some other inconvenient facts, too.
To this, I’ll add a couple of misfortunes that aren’t usually part of The Narrative about this, and have nothing to do with claims to back wages for distant ancestors. For one thing, the slaves lost their native tribal cultures. They did join together and create an African-American culture, but modern attempts at going further back into their roots haven’t worked so well. The highly inventive names which became fashionable since the 1970s aren’t genuinely African. Islam became popular with some, but most of their ancestors actually believed in Voodoo or something similar. For extra irony, Arab slavery was worse than that of the antebellum South. Finally, Kwanzaa is a profoundly artificial creation, and Paul Craig Roberts observed that its Swahili terminology is East African and therefore as out of place as singing “God Save the Queen” in Farsi.
The other misfortune is that blacks have had to live as minorities in a society not of their own making, and not run according to their own sensibilities. Therefore, when they won’t (or maybe can’t) conform to common norms, they’re sometimes judged negatively by others. Since they’re only an eighth of the population, these things are inevitable whether anyone likes it or not. They did have a parallel society of their own for a while, but they didn’t care for segregation.
Residing in America hasn’t really been entirely a bust for them, but that’s not how they see it. In the present day arrangement, they always will be minorities. They’re never going to call the shots. Even when Obama was in office, the globalists were the power behind the throne. (Perhaps that came as an unpleasant surprise to The Lightworker.) Now that Hispanics and Asians are present in unprecedented numbers, increasing with no end in sight, blacks are no longer the most influential racial minority.
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Antithesis
Claims based on collective interests over historical events are fraught with difficulties. The principle itself can be argued for plausibly, up to a point, but there’s usually a lot of moral huckstering involved, and that’s especially so in this matter. The best way to think about such a claim is how it would be regarded if it were a class-action civil lawsuit.
One important fact is that although slavery was nasty and exploitative, it had been legal prior to the Civil War. The peculiar institution didn’t exist just in the antebellum South, as Hollywood historiography might have you believe. It had existed worldwide since the dawn of history, and only came into serious opposition during the Age of Enlightenment, after which white people were the first to abolish it. Thus, the first problem is that it’s impossible to make a tort claim regarding labor practices on ex post facto terms.
This is the same reason someone can’t sue on behalf of a long-departed ancestor because the factory he worked in during the 1880s didn’t pay minimum wage, had lousy safety practices flagrantly noncompliant with OSHA, scheduled twelve-hour shifts without overtime, had pollution staggeringly above present EPA limits, and used goon squads to resist unionization. Horrific conditions and starvation wages in sweatshops used to be commonplace, and still are in countries where the globalists like to relocate their factories. (Compared to that, pulling cotton balls off of shrubs all day might not have been too bad.) The problem is that you can’t file a class-action suit over things which hadn’t yet been forbidden by law. Moreover, since it happened well over a century ago, that weakens the claim further.
Other than that, there are no longer any slaves to compensate, nor masters to bill. Moreover, for whites related to fallen Union soldiers, the idea that we owe blacks a living is especially preposterous. Free blacks sometimes ran plantations with black slaves, beginning with Anthony Johnson who got hereditary slavery started — way to go, Champ! Some Indians owned slaves, including their fellow Indians, blacks, and a few white captives. Many whites arrived as indentured servants, and this counts too if one accepts the premise that forced labor well over a century ago merits present-day compensation. Therefore, the question of who pays and who gets paid is impossible to settle.
Still, the demand is that the government should cut a check to every black in the USA. Many thorny questions remain. Does this include recent arrivals too, like Somali fuzzy wuzzies and Haitian flotsam, or just the regular African-Americans? Moreover, many blacks are partially white or American Indian. Does this diminish the supposed victim status? If so, we know who will be expected to fund the giveaways, but will the government make full payment to pure Africans, half to mulattos, a quarter to quadroons, and it’s a wash for octoroons? If, instead, we go by the “one-drop rule,” then anyone can get an ambiguous DNA test and qualify. Then we’d all get a huge check — and have to hand it right back over to the IRS.
That brings us to the next matter: somebody has to pay for it all. Surely those expecting reparations are imagining a princely sum. Just as surely, some Leftist in academia will cook up a number far in excess of that. What is equally certain is that either figure, multiplied by the number of blacks in America, will vastly exceed the GDP. This certainly also will exceed the actual value of uncompensated labor, less expenses relating to upkeep, that occurred in the antebellum South.
For liberals who imagine that the government is an endless pot of gold, surely this is no problem. For grownups who understand math, it’s an insurmountable problem. One appropriate expedient would be to make payments in Confederate money; there was plenty of that, right? If that runs out, we always can use Zimbabwe dollars from 2008. They want a billion Zim-bucks each? Sure thing! More seriously, I hardly can do better than to quote from the first Fascist Decalogue of 1934:
Do not ever say “The Government will pay. . .” because it is you who pay; and the Government is that which you willed to have, and for which you put on a uniform.
Moreover, isn’t this the same government that long ago ended slavery? Why is it therefore supposed to pay compensation for the thing it eradicated at tremendous sacrifice? Considering the Civil War’s enormous losses in life and treasure, how about we bill the blacks? If claims based on collective interests over historical events are valid, then this is just the beginning of the counterclaim. For that matter, why aren’t they getting a special tax for all the neighborhoods they’ve ruined, and sometimes even entire cities? The property damage from decades of urban blight adds up to that which would be caused by a salvo of ICBMs.
Our overly generous social programs already have been an informal reparations effort. All those trillions failed to produce equality of outcome, because equalizing dissimilar populations doesn’t work. Moreover, the largesse has encouraged intergenerational dependency, worsening the problems it was supposed to solve. In that case, throwing more trillions down the black hole won’t produce better results.
One more matter is that collective guilt is not a valid concept, and neither is inherited guilt. If your father pulled a bank heist, you can’t be sent to prison for it. If your great-great-great-grandfather robbed a stagecoach, you won’t be hanged because of that. If some distant ancestor did something which was bad but legal at the time, you’re not on the hook for an exorbitant penalty. All that said, why should we even have a discussion about this? The idea of reparations for slavery is just moral huckstering, specifically an attempt to monetize guilt. It’s pointless to debate conmen. The answer is no.
Synthesis
Although the reparations claims as such are untenable for several reasons, isn’t there anything that can be done to alleviate the lugubrious plight of the blacks? These are the very people who have generated oceans of liberal pity, so surely they’re weak and helpless and we’d better do something right for these poor wretches. Long experience shows that nothing is going to make them happy here. Try as we might to do so, even after decades of handouts and preferential treatment, they’ll be the first to tell you how tough it is to be black in America. (Is that not enough to make tears well up? Isn’t it? What kind of unfeeling brute wouldn’t weep for them?) Then let’s try another way to fix this horrible mistake, shall we?
The evil of slavery was corrected long ago — over a century and a half, and counting. Yet there is another evil that remains to be corrected. Basic decency demands — I say DEMANDS — the one suitable solution! Those people long ago were torn from the bosom of their African homeland against their will, and the only thing that can be done is to right this ancient wrong by returning their descendants to where they belong. Can I have an “amen,” my brethren?
There is nothing for blacks in America but oppression and misery, something that torrents of liberal tears and mea culpa couldn’t (and won’t) remedy. Therefore, let the four-century failed experiment of multiracialism end at last. May these despairing wayfarers bereft of their native culture rediscover it amongst their Volksgenossen in their once and future Lebensraum. There, they can be the captains of their destiny, with no whites to oppress them and hold them back from being brilliant and creative. Now that we have passenger jets, ocean liners, and troop transports, not only is repatriation of this unhappy minority back to Africa possible; it’s a moral imperative that surely must be supported by everyone with a conscience.
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22 comments
“The further in time we get away from slavery… the more prickly the subject becomes.”
I have noticed this, and have noticed that only after the last witnesses died did the south become a land of (retard-level dumb)monsters who tortured and raped their slaves for pure, blood lusting evil (basically, they’re depicted as African). I’ve observed the same thing regarding Germany. If you look at a WW2 film released in 1960, the German soldiers are depicted as regular human beings, often noble and honorable. Fast forward to 2000 and each are Jeffery Dahmer
Southern soldiers are portrayed as vampires now!
A rep-check for each, with the stipulation of no further grievances or compensation for grievances. Paid in full.
If possible, well worth the money. The reality is that any such payout would be spent on lottery tickets, gold teeth, down-payments on luxury vehicles etc., leaving no trace of Negroid socio-economic improvement. And then the grievance-agitations would begin anew, with even greater ferocity.
Reparations in exchange for permanent departure to Africa would indeed be beneficial and worthwhile. But we now live in times beyond such solutions are not possible.
The ideology of reparations in this case may be encapsulated in succinct form which I read, I think, in P.W.Roberts’ blog:
People who never had slaves are to pay reparations to people who never were slaves.
Ever since the plundering of Germany after the First World War and even more so after the Second World War such ideas of Collective Guilt and Liability have been foisted a upon people as a serious and legitimate argument for taking, or rather taking at gun point, of someone else’s wealth, honor and, ultimately, future.
It has its origin in the various writings of the Biblical Old Testament and is the reach of ancient fantasies of implacable revenge and dominance over a defeated foe that is being enacted in these asocial demands for Unconditional Surrender.
One institution that will with certainty be a victim of this raving madness is Christianity. It has signed on to the campaign against white people who are to foot the bill for this fantasy ride cloaked in hyper moralism.
Who needs a faith that denies one’s right to life and happiness?
Repatriation. Wonderful. But it’s not going to happen. They won’t go and the Sub-Saharan African nations won’t take them. They’re here. They’re not going anywhere. It’s here that we have to deal with them. For blacks who want to abide by European norms, I seen no alternative to assimilating them to the greatest extent possible. For the rest, give them black-run autonomous areas and let them re-create Africa in bits of North America. Of course, once we begin to discuss the splintering of the former USA, whites in white-run polities could simply deport blacks remaining in their areas to multicultural polities.
Sigh. This again. I have no patience for defeatism and fake inevitability. Separation need not be voluntary. As for African governments: they are all corrupt. Give them the choice of silver or lead. It would of course be easier to just create a black homeland in North America, but in the long term, it would be best to relocate them to Africa or the Carribean.
As long as blacks live here, of course, they should be forced to follow European norms. Four hundred years of experience shows us that assimilation is not possible. But why should we keep any among us, even good ones? If we muster the will to create separate homelands, do you think we will fail to send a tiny handful of Thomas Sowells there?
I find that even racially aware Whites can become entranced by The Exceptional Other Of Color and immediately assume that we owe something to the Sowells or Malkins of this world because they don’t hate us. No other racial group does this.
After 70+ years of relentless and totalizing brainwashing, though, I try to be kind while being blunt about it.
As well, this myopic entrancement can blind us to the problem of the next generation. There is no guarantee whatever that the offspring of these worthies would copy their parents’ attitudes. It is not uncommon to find that the second generation, eg, as with Muslims in Europe, are the most passionately hateful of us and our whole world, in which they feel both trapped and excluded.
It is kinder to everyone involved, ourselves most of all, to keep our boundaries simple and clear.
Indeed. Intellect may be partially inherited, but character seldom is. And particularly in the case of high IQ Blacks, we face the reality of regression to the mean. Their children are most likely to be considerably less intelligent than they are.
Hold up! We can have our cake and eat it, t00. We absolutely owe something to quality nonwhites like Clarence Thomas, Michelle Malkin, etc. They stuck their necks out for justice, which in turn and in this context means justice for our people. They deserve some consideration for their decency.
What they do not deserve – what no nonwhite EVER deserves – and what no white or group of whites may ever give, is perpetual access to whites and white territories and societies. We must all stop thinking in racio-(faux-)moral categories developed by the Left. Why is it always thought that racial justice or reward is synonymous with racial integration? Why is racial justice so often theorized by prowhites in anthropologically individualist terms?
To any fairminded person, Malkin is ideologically outstanding, and in ways beneficial to us. I don’t want anything bad to happen to her, and I would offer her “Good Samaritanship” if needed. But it is not a legitimate aspect of Good Samaritanship to jeopardize future white generations (in that case it would not be true “GS”, any more than my robbing you to give money to a beggar is true “GS”). And that is what allowing even good nonwhites access to whites represents.
We are not fighting ideologies (though it is understandable that in the hurlyburly of inflaming events some might think so). We are fighting alien racial genomes in order to preserve our genome – and by doing so, the nations, cultures, shared communal memories and collective civilization that gives meaning to our lives, and that our genome alone produced and alone can sustain. It doesn’t matter that Justice Thomas and Michelle Malkin are “good guys”; they’re not OUR guys. We can find ways to honor and reward their goodness without violating the imperative of racial (genomic) separation – and we must do so to ensure the preservation of our genome.
Edit: my last sentence is unclear. I meant that we whites must racially separate to preserve ourselves (our racial genome). Separation is our highest imperative, beyond white reproduction.
But ensuring white preservation need not conflict with being just, nor with rewarding those nonwhites who advanced white survivalist interests.
White guilt is fostered by Christian ethics, a mental disease rooted in the psyche of the white man, which pushes him to self-destruction again and again. These are the consequences of worshipping a god that celebrates death and sacrifice as its main value. In believing that life is only a test to achieve eternity in that egalitarian paradise where all pain, evil, and differences would end. Every Christian tries to imitate the crucified god, wants to carry the cross and to reach with his death this afterworld. In practice a white progressive is even more Christian than a traditional Catholic, is the living representation of Christian ethics, an ethics of evil that only longs for the sacrifice of those who adopt it as faith.
A good post.
There are now also calls for reparations to be paid to Black British Citizens to compensate them for the suffering of their ancestors under the British Empire.
Though the legal objections are just as solid as against paying reparations to descendants of US slaves, the instigators(*) of this invidious campaign know full well that the target audience will be too irate and dull to grasp them.
The objective is simply to harvest the electoral market potential of the growing and perpetually aggrieved UK black demographic by offering them a chance to vote themselves free money. This is a very foolish and dangerous plan, but much of the Left is now wed to it.
Such as the elite-educated BBC and Guardian cultural oracle Afua Hirsch.
We simply must, I say we simply must reconsider the modern reflex of derogating slavery. See how well it served the Greeks? My project is to circumvent the Christian phase of western history and plant it anew in the Classical Age.
Brilliant. It’s sad how completely true all these points are because, at least in our current political climate, these ideas will never see the light of day. The modern left that dominates discourse exists to sell feel good indulgences to wealthy liberals. Reparations, like making a big sign that says “hope not hate” or “no justice no peace”, like watching Michelle Obama regurgitate meaningless platitudes, like taking your kid to a gay pride parade, it just feels so good to them. It’s like a moral spa. If they ever do follow through on this though and blacks get a lump sum, I think I’ll open a chicken joint and sell crack out of the back, because I’ll be able to retire in a week.
“It’s like a moral spa” — brilliant — I’m going to use that one!
There are irreconcilable differences and conflicts of interest between the races. There’s no point in reparations or any other accommodation. They mean to exterminate us regardless of what we do or how low we grovel. We’re in a fight for white survival and winning that struggle will force some things that seem a little extreme by contemporary standards. Nevertheless, they will be done and people will come to accept them…and more importantly, to do them.
We’re not there yet, but if the MUDS keep burning down cities and continue their forays into suburbia, the moment of truth will come sooner rather than later.
I’d certainly prefer repatriation, but its chances are nil, and besides it would cause riots ten times worse than we’ve been experiencing this delightful Spring of 2020. They’ve managed to completely bring otherwise intelligent, responsible Whites over to their side, and so, we would be fighting our own people as well. My own chicken-livered response is to just ignore the whole race as much as I can, stay at home which I have to do anyway due to age and ‘The Chinese Bat Flu” (oh, is that offensive to someone?), and just change the channel every time they appear on TV.
So, in facing reparations, I say find any way you can to ‘disappear’ your money other than just spending it on trinkets. Save like crazy, put it in an IRA if you’re working, or under your mattress otherwise. Seriously, there are whole books written on ‘offshore investing’. I refuse to allow a penny of my hard-earned bucks to end up in South Central L.A.
We do have a marvelous gathering place right here at CC, and hopefully we can continue to expand our social circles over the months and years ahead. Also, I think if you have the time and money, return to college to study ‘European History’, ‘English Literature’, ‘Continental European Literature’, and the various other subjects which are fast disappearing from our schools. Keep them alive. I also have ordered a few courses from “The Great Courses” company. And being a closet archivist and wannabe librarian, I am adding to my collection of European History books at least one or two new books a week. I consider this ‘Saving the European and American Written Word”, which I understand is being purged from our universities and large public libraries. So, there’s lots of things for us to do while under attack. Especially, we need to let the “attack” be known to our own people, who are mostly living in a post-Christian haze which includes ‘pathological altruism’ for all the poor, neglected minorities of the world, all 5 or 6 BILLION of them. Good grief!
Our Kosher pals were some of the major slave holders in the USA, and rest assured reparations will be paid by anyone but them. German-Americans will foot most the bill.
What a laugh.
The only problem with this article is that it uses logic, reasoning, and legal theory
All these concepts are foreign to the woke left and BLM
That much is true. Their heads are so full of The Narrative that it will take an epiphany to break them out of it. Therefore, my essay here was more about giving our side rhetorical ammo, as well as convincing the uncommitted.
My way is best, and we all know what my way is!
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