Counter-Currents
Michael Hoffman’s They Were White & They Were Slaves
Spencer J. Quinn
3,665 words
Spanish translation here
Michael Hoffman
They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America
Dresden, New York: Wiswell Ruffin House
Every few years or so a book comes around that rips your foundations from under you and makes you re-question pretty much everything. For me, Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago are two such books. Michael A. Hoffman’s They Were White and They Were Slaves is another.
I first learned of this book from Jim Goad, who was being interviewed by Greg Johnson for Counter-Currents. If I remember correctly, Goad was discussing his slightly aloof attitude towards White Nationalism and cited this book as a key ingredient of his unique and individualistic identity. “I don’t do group hugs,” he stated flatly. Instantly, I felt the need to read it.
I could follow this up with a trite statement such as “I wasn’t disappointed” or “It turned out better than expected,” but my reaction to this elucidating volume was one of a scolded child who knows he was in the wrong and is grateful that the scolding hadn’t been worse. They Were White and They Were Slaves chronicles the brutal and tragic (and, dare I say it, embarrassing) history of white people enslaving other whites, mostly in the British Isles and in Colonial America. Every page of the book hurts. For a comparison, I nearly swallowed the chapter in Benjamin Ginsburg’s How the Jews Defeated Hitler which covered Jewish warmongering before World War II. I dedicated over a third of my review to that chapter alone. I consumed Robert Davis’ Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters with the same abandon. Why? Because these books gave me someone to blame. Someone other than whites, that is. Michael Hoffman does not allow the same kind of out, so any white advocate or identitarian is just going to have to lump it while reading They Were White and They Were Slaves.
* * *
The several narratives attached to They Were White and They Were Slaves require discrete analyses. First, there is the exoteric history of the phenomenon. Of course, whites had enslaved their own people throughout history, as all peoples have done. Hoffman touches upon this, mentioning briefly the role of the Vikings in the global slave trade during the Middle Ages as well as the contemporaneous white-on-white slavery in Russia, which was something apart from serfdom. But Hoffman focuses mostly on the sharp rise in the demand for cheap labor and its transport that the discovery of the New World initiated. For over two centuries, Colonial America and the Caribbean became cesspools for white slavery. For example, by 1627, white slaves made up over four-fifths of the 25,000 slaves in Barbados. During this time, the term “barbados” was being used as a verb in England to describe the abducting of poor whites on the streets and shipping them off to the Caribbean as slaves.
Hoffman provides a sweeping and quite revolting depiction of the abject squalor large numbers of whites had to endure in England from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. As a result of widespread land dispossession, which took place towards the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, large numbers of English yeomen were evicted from their family farms and then flocked to the cities, which caused the twin crises of overpopulation and poverty. Hoffman quotes Herman Melville at length who as late as 1839 witnessed mass starvation on the streets of Liverpool. In one passage, the black slave of John Randolph of Roanoke visited Ireland with his master and, upon seeing the widespread poverty and wretchedness, was moved to contemplate his superior station in life.
And work was not necessarily a way out for these people unless it provided an early death — especially for children. Hoffman estimates that the mortality rate for children in the workhouse was ninety percent.
In 19th century England tens of thousands of White children were employed as slave laborers in British coal mines. Little White boys, seven years old, were harnessed like donkeys to coal carts and ordered to drag them through mine shafts. In 1843, White children aged four were working in the coal pits. In old English cemeteries can be seen epitaphs on grave stones like one which reads, “William Smith, aged eight years, Miner, died Jan. 3, 1841.”
It was within these roiling circumstances that enterprising men known as “spirits” would form “press gangs” and to kidnap poor whites for a lifetime of servitude in the New World — all for a fee. Children would quite literally be snatched off the streets, sometimes in the presence of their parents or siblings, never to be seen again. Of course, this practice was met with the tacit approval of many in the aristocracy — as depicted in Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Kidnapped. Fat cat merchants would then transport these unfortunate souls to the Americas in the holds of ordinary cargo ships — a journey every bit as dangerous and lethal as the much more greatly renowned Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade of Africans. Hoffman estimates that hundreds of thousands of poor whites from England, Ireland, and Scotland, many of whom were children, met such a grisly fate. The etymology of the term “kidnap” — as in nabbing kids — attests to this horrid phenomenon.
The English authorities were also quite clever in how they framed this behavior. Most often, these were criminals who were spared the gallows and mercifully given a second chance in the New World as indentured servants. To justify this lie, authorities substantially lowered the bar as to what constitutes a criminal. If you poached a deer, or skipped church on Sunday, or stole a loaf a bread to feed your starving children, then you stood a realistic chance of getting barbadosed. Political prisoners did as well.
Hoffman spares little detail on the horrors that white slaves had to face in America during the colonial period: the shackles, the torture, the floggings, the rape, the murder, the suicides, the unceasing body-warping labor. Fugitive slave laws were harsh and nigh-ubiquitously enforced. Escaping or aiding escape was punished brutally. Hoffman also points out how fraudulent indentured servitude really was. In some cases, yes, a person received a plot of land and his freedom after serving his term. But in most cases, however, white slaveowners would ignore or annul any agreement they had with their slaves (to be almost always seconded by the corrupt court system), or they would oppress their charges mercilessly towards the end of their tenures to encourage escape. This would ultimately give these cynical slaveowners the excuse to tack on a new set of terms on their beleaguered slaves once they were caught and returned.
Indeed, one-half of White “indentured servants” did not live to attain their freedom. Should anyone think this grim datum refers mainly to Whites enslaved in old age, it actually refers to Whites who were first “indentured” between the ages of 16 and 20.
* * *
They Were White and They Were Slaves, as one would expect, also challenges the prevailing myths (some would say “hoaxes”) of black victimization and white racism. If whites were enslaving their own kind just as badly if not worse than they were blacks, then that kind of explodes the idea of racism being our nation’s original sin, doesn’t it? Further, nearly all power-seeking racial minorities in the United States today use their aggrieved status as “victims” as a means to arrogate power for themselves. Whether this victimhood is real or whether whites actually treat these minorities better than they treat themselves in their own parts of the world remains immaterial. What is material is how these minorities use history as a weapon as they construct and maintain their victimhood narratives.
Of course, white people are not allowed to do this. White victimhood would not only derail minority victimhood narratives, but it would put whites in the front of the line for whatever reparations or privileges these minorities feel are rightfully theirs. Perhaps this is why the Leftist Howard Zinn scrupulously refers to whites in bondage in the Colonial period as “servants” rather than slaves in his People’s History of the United States, despite using some of the same sources Hoffman used.
Hoffman states it best:
The whole apparatus of the institution of human slavery in English-speaking America, which has been searingly memorialized in the voluminous literature on negro slavery, was first put into place in the enslavement of Whites who were kidnapped in their native land, died on board ship, suffered child slavery and separation of parents from children forever; endured fugitive slave laws, the banning of White slave meetings and severe and extreme corporal punishment, sometimes unto death.
The motivation for the cover-up of the extent of White slavery by Establishment-funded and approved house scholars is obvious. To admit the true history of White slavery and record it faithfully in modern history is to furnish empirical evidence that White skin does not necessarily embody power or status; that the “poor White,” “redneck” of today who is asked to subsidize with his taxes and make sacrifices in his living wage and job prospects, so that Blacks may be “compensated for slavery,” in reality owes nobody for anything.
Hoffman also takes pains to show how in many places white slaves were treated worse than black slaves. There were several reasons for this, the first being purely economic. Since they were in large part stolen and then transported on cargo ships which were headed to the New World anyway, white slaves were much more easily acquired and dispensed with than black ones. Black slaves had to be bought and paid for on the east coast of Africa. Slaver ships built for the sole purpose of transporting slaves had to be paid for as well. As a result, black slaves tended to be more valuable than white ones, and their owners were more loath to abuse them or expose them to potentially lethal work.
Here is an anecdote which epitomizes the difference in station between black and white slaves:
In the course of an 1855 journey up the Alabama River on the steamboat Fashion, Frederic Law Olmstead, the landscape architect who designed New York City’s Central Park, observed bales of cotton being thrown from a considerable height into a cargo ship’s hold. The men tossing the bales somewhat recklessly into the hold were negroes, the men in the hold were Irish. Olmstead inquired about this to a mate on the ship. “Oh,” said the mate, “the niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything.”
The second reason deals with the rebellious nature of whites when they were being treated like animals. Fugitive slave laws were so rigorously enforced and escaped white slaves were so brutally punished because the threat of slaves running away or mounting rebellions was very real, more so than it was for the black slaves, according to Hoffman. Of course, Hoffman covers Bacon’s Rebellion and other failed white slave revolts. He also quotes contemporaneous sources that describe unrest among white slaves as “chronic” and putting whole regions on “the brink of civil war.” Such discord prompted most Southern planters and other slaveowners to gradually replace their white slaves with black ones.
You can buy Spencer Quinn’s novel White Like You here.
* * *
Likely you can figure out the opposite side of the Devil’s denomination here. By undermining the insidious myth of black victimization with white victimization, Hoffman simultaneously strengthens the concomitant myth of whites being the ultimate villains. They Were White and They Were Slaves essentially has no other. Whites did the capturing, the shipping, the buying, and the abusing. Some got rich over it as well. Blue-blooded Britons such as Andrew Reid, James and Andrew Armour, Scot Duncan, and others served as the moneybag merchants behind the slave trade. Cold-blooded ones such as the Captains Edward Brockett and Barnet Bond developed fearsome reputations with the lash. Yes, Jewish economist David Ricardo is painted as particularly heartless in his assessment that it would be better to let unemployed whites starve than “create an unlimited demand for human beings.” But in this regard, Ricardo is hardly different from other thinkers of the time such as Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Malthus. The latter, at one point, urged the poor to practice “moral restraint.” Translation: stop having children. A century later, English novelist George Gissing depicted the urban poor sympathetically in his classic The Nether World. Yet he describes — as narrator — the untimely deaths of young children born into desperate families as a “kindness of fate.”
Indeed, the “surplus” white populations of England were a real problem not just for themselves but for the aristocracy as well. The aristocracy saw poor whites as a revolutionary threat, and so were excruciatingly slow to halt the barbarous practice of slavery which either spirited these budding Robespierres off to the colonies or squeezed all possible work out of them with a tourniquet. Bills requiring that the minimum age of chimney sweeps be ten years were defeated in Parliament four times between 1804 and 1819. This was dangerous and potentially deadly work that boys as young as five were expected to perform. According to the likely uncircumcised Lord Sydney Smith, reform of the chimney sweep trade “could not be carried into execution without great injury to property.”
(And to play Devil’s advocate here — even to the point of the Devil himself saying, “Yeah, all right. No. Stop. Really. Just stop. You’re making me look bad.” — what if the aristocracy had a point? What if the real reason why the French Revolution had no parallel on British soil was not due to Edmund Burke’s consummate statesmanship — as Russell Kirk suggests in The Conservative Mind — but because the authorities just kept finding creative ways to manage the burgeoning populations of their poor?)
Oof. I’m going to Hell for that one. But apparently I’ll be waiting in a very long line. White advocates and identitarians must be clear-sighted about the sins in our own past. Sure, we get browbeaten constantly over bad things we’ve done to non-whites. But in many times and places, whites did beastly things to each other too. The only consolation appears when we realize that whites may have been the more moral race when compared to all the others. Hoffman does discuss how whites and only whites continually made attempts at reform, attempts which eventually began to heal the bleeding gash in our side that was white slavery. The same cannot be said of Mesoamerican, Muslim, African, and Asian societies which would never have abandoned slavery had the whites not done it first.
Slim pickings, but there it is.
* * *
Another drumbeat that pounds throughout this book is that of white virtue-signaling — especially when it comes to non-whites. You think it is a recent phenomenon? You think it couldn’t get any more annoying today? Think again.
Over and over, we have well-to-do whites absolutely fretting over the fate of the poor Negro slaves while all around them impoverished and enslaved whites suffer. The abolitionist Quakers who had no compunction about owning white slaves come across as especially sanctimonious. In Bleak House, Charles Dickens gives us Mrs. Jellyby, a character who obsesses over the welfare of distant Africans while making conditions intolerable for the white children working in her household. Remember those chimney sweep bills which were defeated in Parliament? Three of those defeats came after the abolition of the Negro slave trade in 1808. This demonstrates quite clearly where the priorities of the British elites lay back then — which is not far from where they lie today.
Perhaps the most delicious moment in They Were White and They Were Slaves occurs towards the end when Hoffman tears into Harriet Beecher Stowe. He calls her “one of the great hypocrites of the 19th century, a pious fraud whose legacy of malignant hatred for her own kind has infected many another White man and woman to this day.”
I’d quote more, but prefer to save some of the best stuff for those who will actually read the book.
* * *
The final narrative entwined between the pages of They Were White and They Were Slaves took me to that beatific meta place where one envisions, like, everything with blinding, godlike clarity. It’s sort of like peyote, I guess. I’ve never tried it. Anyway, forgive me if any of you readers have already reached this wonderful place and have been wondering all these years when that slowpoke Spencer J. Quinn would finally turn up. Well, here I am.
Thanks to this amazing little book I now understand why white people vote Democrat!
What if — what freaking if — the stubborn loyalty that many poor and working-class whites have towards a party which is more worm than apple when it comes to corruption, which has a dismal record on the economy, which has all but renounced Christianity and patriotism, and which frankly demonizes their racial interests is, in fact, an artifact of the white slave trade from centuries ago? What if these poor whites see class as a deeper dividing line than race, religion, economics, or the flag? And, finally, what if this class division is really the deep and still-painful psychic scar left by white slavery?
This means that the Democratic Party can serve up a smorgasbord of sculpted steaming turds for the American people, but as long as they do more than just pay lip service to the class interests of poor whites, they will get their vote. Until Donald Trump, what did the Republicans have to offer as an alternative? The Laffer Curve?
Being raised in the upper-middle class, I’d seen the signs of this class struggle all my life and never took it seriously: Movies like Norma Rae and Roger and Me; novels such as The Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle; the classic-period songs of Bruce Springsteen, to name a few. David Duke, one of the most well-known white advocates in the world, ran for office in the early 1990s as a Democrat, not as a Republican. There’s a fascinating scene from the movie The Pope of Greenwich Village. The working-class Irish mother of a New York City police officer (in a breathtaking performance by Geraldine Page) meets with a pair of representatives from the NYPD after her son dies under dubious circumstances. Later she refers to them as “two college-educated little pricks.” The sheer contempt in Page’s delivery will never leave me. I saw this movie in college, and I wondered back then why this person would hate someone simply because they went to college.
Now I know. Or, or at least, I think I know. Pardon me while I spitball:
For many American whites, the greatest villains of history are not non-whites but other whites. It’s hard to get exact numbers here, but Hoffman estimates that the number of white Britons who were abducted, bamboozled, or sentenced to slavery in the New World reaches well into the hundreds of thousands. Compare this to the mostly black-on-black crime in our cities and the less than 600 whites that blacks kill every year. Compare this to the 3,000 or so whites killed by Islamic terror on American soil starting with 9-11. Sorry to say this, but most poor American whites won’t know about the horrid conditions of whites in South Africa, or the history of the Islamic white slave trade. And the Jews are so good at entertaining us and covering their tracks that any shenanigans they pull will likely go past them as well.
So in light of this, it makes sense that many poor whites would distrust capitalism, free markets, tax cuts for the rich, and other classic economic platforms of the Republican Party. Yes, a smaller piece of a bigger pie will give them more in an absolute sense. But it was never about that. It was about preventing the rich from getting too rich — because you never know what they’re going to do with all that power.
* * *
If They Were White and They Were slaves teaches us anything, it’s humility. This is something all of us should have in some degree or another. The Dissident Right can perceive a non-white holocaust already approaching within the horizon — the first one since perhaps the siege of Vienna in 1683. A lot has happened since 1683. We’ve had a holocaust of our own making which has been criminally underreported on in recent years. This is perhaps one major reason why whites have been so slow to react.
Of course, this has to change.
And the one person who seemed ahead of the curve on this was none other than Donald Trump. Trump was (and still is) the only Republican on the national level since Ronald Reagan to successfully reach across this white-white divide. F. H. Buckley in his 2018 book The Republican Worker’s Party describes this phenomenon. Trump abandoned some of the free-market, neocon globalism of the GOP he inherited from Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush and approached millions of disaffected whites with some good old-fashioned populism. And it worked. This is the key to success for the white race in the multiracial Thunderdome the West is becoming. We need to read books like They Were White and They Were Slaves, we need to understand the profound differences that linger among us as a result of our difficult past, and we need to heal the wounds that still keep us apart as a people.
Because if we don’t, the wounds we are going to receive once we become despised minorities in our nations are going to be far worse.
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29 comments
‘More worm than apple’ is a fabulously apt and visual metaphor.
‘We need to heal the wounds that still keep us apart as a people.’
As ever, my question is “HOW?”
I am a dyed-in-the-wool separatist. The system we labour under cannot be refrmed or replaced. Nor will we ever convince enough people to see things our way.
The only option is for us to leave them to their devices. Separate and unequal.
This is how it was all over Europe, and probably everywhere else. My ancestors were from France, as I derive from a French part of the country. One ancestor was convicted of some minor crime at 17, branded, and sent to the colonies. His wife was killed in an Indian massacre, but then he started a plantation in La Louisiane and proceeded to exploit Africans. Some of my ancestors were branded and put on galleys for being Lutheran. It was a hard knock world in the pre modern period. German hessians were sold as mercenaries very late.
I read that many of the English and Irish captured by Cromwell were sold as slaves in the carribean. In Jamestown, one indentured servant was convicted of “speaking ill of his master,” had both arms broken, was kicked by heavy boots out of the colony, where he would certainly die a slow death in the hostile wild, as there was no place to go. Another was pilloried and had nose and ears cut off. Purely cosmetic. Even stories of the early twentieth century in America can be harrowing by our standards. Young men were often arrested on minor charges and put on chain gangs.
Each race has its defects:
Asians have high IQ but lack creativity.
Whites are creative but we all hate each other.
Blacks have good solidarity but low IQ.
In the wash, I suppose Asians and Jews are the most admirable because at least their fury is directed outward.
The violence you describe reminds me of how Whites were also the victims of indian tribes in the US not that long ago. “Empire of the Summer Moon” by S.C.Gwynne was an eye-opener for me, I had no idea of their savagery !
God yes. Read or watch Black Robe about the Iroquois. Read Captured by the Indians. They were all like that. And horrible to each other. Any captured by another tribe could expect death after days of slow ritualistic torture.
Hi Stephen,
Turns out I did a review of Empire of the Summer Moon as well. Enjoy!
https://counter-currents.com/2020/05/s-c-gwynnes-empire-of-the-summer-moon/
Thank you for that Spencer. It was actually your review which sparked my interest !
I agree with most of your comment except for the idea that whites uniquely hate ourselves.
Brits and Frenchmen might have fought a lot of wars but that’s because they are distinct groups just like the Japanese and Chinese are. For the longest time, tribes and nations had no way of seeing race wars on the horizon. Today, especially in the post-colonial white states, race equals tribe. We are largely some form of ethnic mutt while maintaining near perfect racial purity.
However, as much of the world Americanizes, the distinctions between European nations will matter less and our commonalities much more.
Thank you for the review, I will purchase a copy. On my mothers side were two brothers who were send to the Australian colony in the late 19th century for the crime of poaching, essentially hunting on private property to feed themselves and their families. They both received 7 years, although neither returned to England. Whenever I think about the racial shakedown of Whites by POC, my brain automatically goes to a speech by Jonathan Bowden to make me feel better – “Liberalism is moral syphilis. And I’m stepping over It.”
“… And he said, ‘Wouldn’t it better if we presented ourselves as the victims?’ And the problem with that is that it is what everyone else does. And it can be done. Because there are many white victims in this society now, in the way that it is going. But if you concentrate on pain and defeat you will breed resentment. And I believe that resentment and pity are the things to be avoided. FIRE, ENERGY, GLORY and THINKING! Thinking is the important thing. Being white isn’t enough. Being English isn’t enough. Being British isn’t enough. Know what you are! To read about your own culture is a revolutionary act! “
‘Wouldn’t it better if we presented ourselves as the victims?’
Good impulse, wrong terminology.
Working class people since Thatcher and Reagan (to name only two of the most visible) have been betrayed, not victimized.
(I know, it started lots earlier than the Ditchworm Duo, but the 80s are as far back as I care to look at the moment.)
On the subject of betrayal, all you need is to spiff up on spurious history a bit:
…if we should have to leave our bleached bones on these desert sands in vain, then beware the fury of the Legions.
In the States, the CIA after its founding infiltrated the labor unions FIRST. Not the media, not the colleges. They knew who had to be throttled first. Legions in labor should be furious. The Germans who are poorer because of their Turkish (etc) “guest workers” and every other European working man. Few exceptions, but not many.
Another angry victim will get us noplace, you are right. But a betrayed worker might be both furious and read up on his history. Maybe getting to Hoffman too. Fury has to be stoked. With all his faults, Trump did it for awhile. But it has to be done by somebody who means it, not another puppet.
There’s plenty of fury. And plenty of bleached bones.
Great article Spencer! We as Whites need to know this information and face it. I’ve long said that Whites need to realize that Blacks and Jews could do nothing against our people if we did not first allow them. So often, we have become our own worst enemies. Too many times we have fallen into the error of thinking like self-entitled minority groups who can only blame others for their self-inflicted problems and poor choices.
I’m not saying that the growing threat of White displacement isn’t real, nor am I denying that Jews, Blacks and other groups don’t want us all dead (or just enough of us to pay for the government goodies), but only that we must be careful to engage in wearing rose-colored glasses when it comes to our own kind.
Also, Spencer mentions briefly the hypocrisy and virtue-signaling of certain women in the article. I think this has been a major problem among us. Giving women the right to vote has certainly fed into it and wreaked havoc on our once great nation. This is because women are natural do-gooders. They are nurturers. They want to “help” and “make things better” which isn’t a bad quality per se. However, it needs to be kept in check. Unfortunately, today’s White women are unrestrained, and they are permitted every conceivable platform to spew their ‘woke’ nonsense. Tyranny only increases when women are in charge.
Also, women tend to think with their hearts and not their heads. They are not generally the sort of critical thinkers that many men tend to be although I admit there are exceptions. Our White men can be pretty dim-witted too, but it seems to me that women excel in this particular quality. Far too many of them are gullible and overly-trusting.
Is it any wonder why so many churches are filled with females? This might help to explain why women are almost always at the forefront of any radical marxist group? Corporations likewise rely on the gullible nature of women who uniquely tailor their commercials to appeal to their non-critical and emotional natures.
If Whites ever obtain their ethnostate, we would be wise to remember these realities and to not commit the same errors.
Women are almost always at the forefront of any radical marxist group.
Really – Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, Felix Weil, Carl Grünberg, Samuel Flowerman, Franz Boas, Saul Alinsky, Joel Spingarn, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, Stephen Wise, Henry Moskow, and too many more to enumerate here are women? Who knew.
The truth is that the above are Jews, and the same goes for any radical female Marxists such as Gloria Steinem (who helped stage CIA-backed bra-burning protests in the 1960s) as well as Betty Friedan (née Goldstein), Andrea Dworkin etc. All Jews.
—
As for this article it presents an interesting overview. I’ve read the booklet and can highly recommend it – it’s eye-opening. Yet while it’s true that poor Whites were treated abysmally by their own kind, I would add that Jews were highly over-represented among slave-traders and among slave-owners. For example the 1830 census shows that over 70% of Jewish households in the South owned slaves.
In addition the major plantations in the British West Indies which instituted slavery as early as 1627 were Jewish-dominated – so much so that slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday.
The following passages are from Dr. Raphael’s book ‘Jews and Judaism in the United States’: A Documentary History (New York: Behrman House, Inc., Pub, 1983), pp. 14, 23-25:
“Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade. Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated.
“This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the ‘triangular trade’ that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa.”
In Barbados by the 1640s there were an estimated 25,000 slaves, of whom 21,700 were White, the majority of whom never lived to attain freedom. These colonial plantations had a particular reputation for cruelty and were Jewish-dominated.
Goad doesn’t do group hugs. I guess that’s why I don’t want to hug Goad.
Goad doesn’t think White Nationalism works? Then what kind of system works?
I’m inclined to think the solution to class exploitation requires racial homogeneity as a necessary, but not sufficient condition.
That was Uncle Adolf’s view.
to [cough] “Hamburger Today”:
“Goad doesn’t think White Nationalism works?”
Where did I say it doesn’t work? No matter how meticulously I explain that I’m not socially wired, you herd-brained drones always get it wrong. It’s like you can’t help yourselves. It has nothing to do with being “aloof” or “judgmental” or “disavowing” anything. While you were tapping away anonymously on a keyboard, I was fighting anti-racist skinheads in the streets of Portland. But your walnut-sized mind can’t grasp this.
You know what me and Uncle Adolf had in common? Unlike you, we have the balls to use our real names.
The scene in ‘Roots’ of the slave raid where Virginia planters sail a ship to Africa, and then advance into the interior to capture and abduct innocent victims is complete and utter bulldink. Nothing like this ever occurred.
However, the Arabs and Ottomans during the same period were conducting such slave raids in the Balkans, Mediterranean, and the Atlantic Coast.
I remember the premier episode of Roots. Theophile Conneau’s memoirs discuss what REALLY happened. Tribal chiefs sold the slaves directly to the ship captains, typically in exchange for rum, beads, and trinkets. If they hadn’t been sold, many of those folks might’ve ended up as dinner.
I remember that one when it first came out. It’s certainly a grim read. The thing is that before the Industrial Age, all races were practicing slavery – their own people, or any others they could get away with enslaving. We were the first to end it, and that should count for at least something. If it wasn’t for the “evils” of colonialism imposing our horrible, repressive values – the “White Man’s Burden” and all the rest of that oh so awful imperialism – on everyone else, slavery would still be ubiquitous throughout the non-White world.
The trick that minoritists and cultural Marxists pull these days is to single out Whites for past slavery (as if guilt could be inherited) while pretending that nobody else was doing these same things. It’s only because of widespread ignorance of history (other than the politically correct kind) that they get away with this.
Were other Whites enslaving their own at the same time or was this a purely English practice?
I think it was a British thing. E. Michael Jones in Barren Metal makes the case that, for example, during the Irish potato famine the central government was so wedded to the doctrine of laissez-faire that it refused to show kindness to Ireland lest the people became corrupted. The same post renaissance attitude reflected on the treatment of minor criminals and deportation.
Jones gives more details in his almost 1500 page book. Well worth the read.
My interview with Hoffman responding to The New York Times’ attempts to dismiss Irish slavery as a “myth.” Excuse the garbled HTML with dashes rendered as quote marks and single quotes rendered as double quotes; things such as this were one of the many reasons I left Taki’s—the lights weren’t on and nobody was home. Also keep an eye out for the super-tiny “Next page” link at the bottom of that page. You’d probably miss it without a warning:
https://www.takimag.com/article/white_slavery_denial_jim_goad/
Thanks for linking this, Jim. And welcome to Counter-Currents.
“What if these poor whites see class as a deeper dividing line than race, religion, economics, or the flag? And, finally, what if this class division is really the deep and still-painful psychic scar left by white slavery?”
Conservative Republicans seem to be amazed when poor whites don’t line up to vote for globalist economic policies – and “dissident right” types wonder why most whites show little interest in, perhaps even an active hostility to, their yearning for a new “aristocracy” while blaming all problems on “egalitarianism.”
If the dissident right just wants their slave class to be white, not black, exactly why would whites go along with them?
“For many American whites, the greatest villains of history are not non-whites but other whites.”
I mean, yes, of course. Blacks didn’t enslave us.
“So in light of this, it makes sense that many poor whites would distrust capitalism, free markets, tax cuts for the rich, and other classic economic platforms of the Republican Party. … It was about preventing the rich from getting too rich — because you never know what they’re going to do with all that power.”
Obviously. It’s also why we love our guns.
All this yap about a return to aristocracy is beyond belief. Where are we supposed to find all those noble-minded, pro-white aristocrats to lead us back into the joyful days of “tradition”? Will they just appear out of nowhere? If they do materialize somehow, you can bet they, like their precursors, will be wanting to live in opulence, own huge tracts of land, and look down on their underlings as helpless, silly and in need of their guidance.
Oh, wait – we’re more than halfway there, except no one in the “dissident right” gets it. Gates, Turner, Irvings, Malone, Bezos etc. Look at how they live (millions of acres, most of them), their financial worth and their power, direct or indirect, over the rest of us. Tell me why they should not be considered aristocrats. Is a different variety of good-for-white-people wealthy nobles going to fall from heaven, or what.
If you want even more information on white slavery, might I recommend James LaFond’s Plantation America series of books.
Next step forward from Hoffman’s book, relies on mostly primary sources from PA and MD to paint an even more vivid picture of the plight of white slaves.
Interesting stat: c. 500k blacks imported from Africa from 1679 onwards had c. 4 million descendants in 1865. c. 4 million “indentured servants” imported from 1609 had 2 million descendants in 1865.
White nations ended slavery worldwide in the 19th century…and the rest of the world has yet to forgive White people for that!
The thing to consider is that slavery has been part of most civilizations since time immemorial. It was widely practiced by Sub-Saharan Africans (look at the medieval kingdoms of the Sahel). Same with the Islamic slave trade from Eurasia to Africa, American Indians and quite a few others. In the early 19th century the new United States fought a couple wars against the Barbary Pirates who were, well, enslaving American citizens. Let us not forget Marxists of the Leninist variety brought back slave labor big time in the 20th century in the gulag and its Maoist equivalents.
And we see slavery returning today in areas where the Western world is losing its grip, whether we are talking the various transnational Islamist movements or Rotherham. (Perhaps White people should demand reparations from the perpetrators of Rotherham?)
Non-Whites sense the weakness and smell blood: White countries opening their borders to mass third world migrations, White liberals groveling out “apologies” for supposed “sins”
of the past and allowing themselves to be shaken down by race hustlers, White governments surrendering their cities to be pillaged by non-White hordes.
For White people to claim “victim” status would be a further sign of weakness and encourage even more mayhem. Who knows, perhaps third worlders will declare that anti-slavery was a form of Western imperialism and bring the peculiar institution back, big time.
It’s really time for White people to wake up and see all these non-White incursions for what they are: a declaration of war against the Western world. And fight back, accordingly.
White people conquered the (slave) kingdoms of the Americas, Africa and the Islamic world once upon a time. Let’s remind our enemies that Whites are the greatest warriors on the planet.
It’s interesting that Whites don’t feel even the slightest bit of guilt about the enslavement of other Whites. There are still remnants of this legacy in communities in Barbados for instance, and probably in some of the other extremely poor White communities that exist. But Whites will weep mightily and get hysterical and masochistic over black or other colored enslavement.
When labor is in high demand, any people will do, including one’s own.
Clearly it is, and has always been, the West’s demand for labor that is the source of our past and current race problems. Our civilization-building ambition has been our demographic undoing.
The Right has never understood or appreciated the importance of economics in the motives of men and nations. Too many on the Right have dismissed the influence of economic factors as Marxian.
Labor scarcity yields third-world flooding. Labor surplus yields unemployment, poverty. Where is the solution?
The solution is a global economic system that balances the labor demands of economies with the available demographic supply of labor. And a system which supplies a living wage to all who labor. Without the latter, global misery, turmoil and migration flooding will continue.
The solution is NOT “stimulate the economy” or “create more jobs”. Everyone thinks that. The real solution involves global control of population density. A deep subject.
The West will not survive until it either learns how to satisfy its labor demands with its own people, OR learns how to harness the labor of others without racial migration.
” The real solution involves global control of population density ”
I agree. Remember when this was often discussed from the 1970’s up until the early 1990’s (when I graduated college) in polite environmentalist circles ? One never hears anything about this anymore, especially from those on the left. Hypocrites all.
Curious. There is a note of lamentation that power-invested white elites would have enslaved ‘their brothers’. Yet if one imagined things in terms of a Nietzschean power-principles there is nothing out of the ordinary. If one can lament the enslavement of white people — our own people — then is not one indulging as it were in the sentimentalism (Christian-influenced) that Nietzsche attempted to critique?
I thought a bit about Jonathan Bowden’s imperative to ‘never apologize’ for white colonialism (etc.) yet here, examining one of the *outcomes* of such aggressive ideology, it seems that doubt rises to the surface. And is one then impelled to think in terms of more *just* arrangements? Isn’t the argument against ‘globalism’ essentially a statement against elite power that does what it wants with its *tools* and its *victims*?
“Thanks to this amazing little book I now understand why white people vote Democrat!”
But they would have voted democrat way back in the Sixties, wouldn’t they, when a Democrat was someone concerned for ‘the working man’ and his family. American populism of 100 years ago could be nothing else but left-progressive in this sense and opposed to the machinations of the Fat Cat Capitalists. Our attempt to define a coherent ‘white nationalism’ can only propose a more egalitarian (what other word to choose here?) social organization within European-derived society. That is to say something social and nationalistic but self-aware and self-preserving.
I did not read this review very thoroughly, I read it slightly quickly drinking my coffee, but it made me think that the reactionary aspect of white nationalism is necessarily evolving and gaining a more ‘mature’ (if you’ll permit this word) stance.
I recently read the title The Sword of Christ (a book published out of the Kevin MacDonald camp and, I gather, Neo-traditional-Catholic) that developed the idea that slavery is not a (Christian) sin. The ‘sin’ lies in maltreatment and abuse. In this sense then the reduction of people to classes which are ‘exploited’ or in any case employed (int he sense of a tool) is part-and-parcel of the human situation.
> Neo-traditional-Catholic) that developed the idea that slavery is not a (Christian) sin. The ‘sin’ lies in maltreatment and abuse.
That’s the same argument that Muslims used when the questioned about the practice of slavery.
Kevin should tread carefully here.
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