The Best of Jim Goad
White Slavery Denial

4,924 words

The currently approved conceptual framework for American race relations dictates that whites—all of them, simply by dint of being white—are oppressors. Any deviation from this rigid script, no matter how deeply rooted in fact, must be immediately squashed like a blood-engorged tick.

We are taught that black academic and financial underperformance—as well as black over-performance in crime—are the direct result of slavery’s horrid legacy. There are to be no other possible explanations. To note the hugely embarrassing fact that American blacks live far longer and under vastly superior economic conditions in America than they do in any majority-black nation on Earth may be factual, but it is RACIST because it undermines the ironclad Guilt Narrative that must never be questioned.

Here are some facts that The Script demands you ignore:

• Even at the peak of American slavery, only a tiny percentage of American whites—about 1.5%—owned slaves.
• Leading up to the Civil War, a vastly higher quotient of whites had worked as indentured servants and convict laborers than had ever owned slaves. Most historians, regardless of their political orientation, agree that anywhere from half to two-thirds of whites who came to the American colonies arrived in bondage. The fact that the vast majority of whites existed in a state closer to slavery than to slave ownership is something resolutely ignored in the modern retelling of history.
• Documents from the era show that so-called white “indentured servants” were often referred to as “slaves” rather than “servants.”
• These “servants” did not always enter into voluntary contracts. There is overwhelming evidence that many of them were kidnapped by organized criminal rings and sent to work on American plantations. It is possible that as many, if not more, whites than blacks were brought involuntarily to the colonies.
• The middle-passage death rates for these “servants” were comparable to that of blacks on slave ships from Africa to the New World.
• Indentured servants were whipped and beaten, sometimes to death. When they escaped, ads were placed for their capture.
• They lived under conditions so brutal that an estimated half of them died before their seven-year term of indenture expired.

I covered many of these facts in my book The Redneck Manifesto. The chapter regarding white slavery is here. A simplified “kids” version is here. And Gavin McInnes and I covered much of the same ground in this video.

I’ve often discussed how guilt is one of the primary political weapons—in the long run, possibly more powerful than bullets. Since the currently accepted narrative is based far more on an attempt to quarantine historical guilt among whites than it is a sober assessment of the facts, the typical response to any discussion about white slavery is emotional rather than logical.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, “rebuttals” consist of nothing more than ad-hominem attacks, straw men, and appeals to motive. I often get accused of trying to “justify” slavery or of trying to argue that two wrongs make a right. When I counter that I’m arguing that two wrongs make two wrongs—and that I wonder why the sole focus is on one wrong rather than all of them—I am accused of being a racist liar.

Most frustratingly, I’m falsely accused of saying that white slaves had it worse than black slaves. No, actually, in The Redneck Manifesto, I was merely quoting people who alleged that:

Howard Zinn states that “white indentured servants were often treated as badly as black slaves.” Eugene Genovese claims that “In the South and in the Caribbean, the treatment meted out to white indentured servants had rivaled and often exceeded in brutality that meted out to black slaves…”

OK, well, obviously those were neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denying, minority-lynching, right-wing KKK lunatics saying that, right? No—both Zinn and Genovese were Marxists.

The book also quotes early observers saying much the same thing:

A colonial observer of Virginia convict laborers said, “I never see such pasels of pore Raches in my Life…they are used no Bater than so many negro Slaves.” A 1777 screed protesting the indenture racket claimed that a white servant’s body was “as absolutely subjected as the body or person of a Negro, man or woman, who is sold as a legal Slave.” In the 1820s, Karl Anton Postl commented that non-slaveowning whites “are not treated better than the slaves themselves….A 1641 law provided for all disobedient servants to have their skin branded, regardless of its color. A 1652 law in Providence and Warwicke (later Rhode Island) mentions “blacke mankind or white” servants. A 1683 Pennsylvania law contains the phrase “no Servant White or Black.

But rather than even attempting to dispute any of this, critics merely call me a white supremacist and think they’ve won. That’s truly how stupid they are. Or dishonest. Or stupidly dishonest and dishonestly stupid.

Last week I was alerted by about a half-dozen friends to a story circulating about the “Myth of the ‘Irish slaves’” and how it was based on “a purposeful lie” spread by “Neo-Nazis, White Nationalists, Neo-Confederates, and even Holocaust deniers.” If that sounds like the frothy, methinks-the-lady-doth-protest-too-much vituperations of a Southern Poverty Law Center press release, that’s exactly what it is. The article features an interview with a certain Liam Hogan—who is nothing more than an Irish librarian—in a frantic attempt to “debunk” this “myth.”

Hogan’s “refutation” consists of little more than character smears. When he wades shallowly into the factual realm, it’s only to prove that some dumb meme somewhere misidentified a picture of bedraggled white children as white Irish slaves. But by that reasoning, since rumors of human soap and human lampshades were proved to be false, that whole story falls apart…right? Otherwise, there is absolutely no refutation of the reams of documented evidence that not only did white slaves exist, they were often called slaves back then. Again, from The Redneck Manifesto:

During a 1659 Parliamentary debate on the white-servant trade to the colonies, legislators used the word “slaves” rather than “servants.” A Virginia law of 1705 mentions the “care of all Christian slaves,” Christian being a contemporary euphemism for European.

In my long and checkered life I’ve often found that people who make huge public displays of virtue-signaling and moralistic grandstanding are often engaging in projection. In an article called “‘Irish slaves’: the convenient myth”Hogan writes:

The conflation of indentured servitude with chattel slavery in the ‘Irish slaves’ narrative whitewashes history in the service of Irish nationalist and white supremacist causes.

OK, two can play at that game. How’s this sound?

The media and academic blackout regarding white indentured servitude and convict labor—which were often referred to simply as “slavery” by contemporaries—whitewashes history in the service of a pro-black, pro-Jewish, anti-white cause.

Hogan also drags the Ferguson riots into it:

Its resurgence in the wake of Ferguson reflects many Americans’ denial of the entrenched racism still prevalent in their society.

So I’ll drag Ferguson out of it:

The fact that white slavery deniers are using Ferguson to somehow dispel white slavery as a “myth” shows how desperate and intellectually bankrupt they’ve become in their attempt to quarantine historical guilt solely among non-Jewish whites.

But to white slavery deniers such as Liam Hogan and the SPLC, to even dare drawing analogies between black slavery and white indentured servitude is to peddle “false equivalencies”—possibly because to do so renders the idea of universal white guilt as undeniably false. So it’s not a case of me denying guilt—it’s a case of others falsely imputing it.

Since so much of leftist “argumentation” these days consists of guilt by association, the SPLC and Hogan ignore the Marxist and centrist historians who agree that white slavery was rampant and brutal. Instead, they go straight for the jugular of anyone they can dismiss as a white supremacist Nazi Holocaust-denier.

Enter one Michael A. Hoffman II, easily one of the most interesting alternative historians on Earth, even though Wikipedia’s dutiful social-justice termites have pegged him mainly as a “Holocaust denier and conspiracy theorist.” Along with over a hundred other sources, I cited Hoffman’s book They Were White and They Were Slaves several times in The Redneck Manifesto. Wikipedia mentions the book, but in true fashion it doesn’t bother to note its staggering reams of documentation from primary sources—instead, it heads straight into a critic’s description of Hoffman as a “racist.”

Michael A. Hoffman II

Although the “Irish slaves myth” story was spread far and wide on several sites last week, no one bothered to contact the alleged primary mythmaker.

The following Q&A was conducted with Michael A. Hoffman II via email.

Jim Goad: Throughout his purported “debunking,” Hogan floats the idea that white indentured servitude and black slavery were so different as to be incomparable. Why is he wrong?

Michael A. Hoffman II: White enslavement has a long history in Britain and Scandinavia. Mr. Hogan, like so many writers on this subject who conform to the Establishment line, overlooks several points and has a naive faith in the white ruling class of Britain.

The conforming authors don’t take into account that the study of white enslavement has been impeded over the centuries by two facts missing from their own studies and critiques. First, white enslavement carried with it a hereditary taint. As I demonstrate in my book, this extends back to the Vikings who looked on Scandinavian “thralls” and those born into “thralldom” as carrying a hereditary defect in part because their enslavement was hereditary. Something akin to this was operating in Anglo-Saxon England under the category of villeinage. The daughter of a villein could not be married without buying her way out of villeinage. The test of a young English woman’s status in early medieval England—whether she was slave or free—was decided by whether or not the local lord had control over her body, as all masters have over their slaves. Under English law, a villein woman was one who could not be married until she first offered the custom of the country as it was known, the “ransom of blood for merchet” (i.e., until she first submitted to sexual intercourse with the lord, prior to her marriage).

Both in early Britain and Scandinavia and much later in the sugar plantations of the West Indies and the tobacco plantations of America (before cotton became king), British-American whites whose parents or relatives had been enslaved, or who themselves had escaped it, or bought their way out (as did some black people), were exceedingly reticent to identify as former white slaves or as their progeny. “Servant” was a far more attractive category, and we see identifications with this status and less so with outright enslavement due to the stigma.

Hogan has a pictorial display allegedly confuting my thesis in which he displays a photograph of what appear to be mixed-race people in the West Indies who are Barbados residents circa 1908, and he is incredulous that no Irish white “redlegs” are in the photo or named as such. We know from primary source materials that white slaves worked alongside blacks in the West Indies and that the word “redleg” was applied to them by their darker coworkers because of the tendency of the white slaves to sunburn. Whether or not their descendants stayed on the island to pose for a camera nearly 300 years later is a flimsy device for casting doubt on a historical epoch. Limiting oneself to the search for Irish surnames is an even more egregious error because it excludes the search for traces of the English Protestants who were transported as slaves to those islands in the 17th and early 18th century.

Hogan and company also support the notion that white bondage was mostly carried out within a framework of law. Here they are swallowing the propaganda of the white ruling class who were permitting the mass kidnapping of white children off the streets of port cities such as London and Glasgow for shipment to America under no indentures whatsoever, or under forged indentures, or as criminalized paupers and “rogues.” Upon arrival these youth were often put to work clearing forests and draining swamps. They were regularly assaulted, ill-fed, and worked to death. Britain had a surfeit of poor white youth who represented a potential for a French-Revolutionary type of insurrection in the cities. The aristocracy was only too glad to be rid of them, and I draw my evidence for this from state papers and contemporary letters and eyewitness accounts.

Hogan accepts the official tale of the slavers themselves, as they obscured their monstrous crime against their own people. So for him, there is no mass “kid-nabbing” (as it was first termed). He is blind to the fact that to facilitate white bondage under penal enslavement, the British ruling class contrived laws such as the Waltham Black Act, which made simple misdemeanors (stealing lace, breaking down an aristocrat’s fish pond, poaching deer) into felonies punishable by “transportation for life into the colonies.” In the 17th century the tens of thousands of prisoners these laws netted were not sent to slavery in British America and the West Indies on indentures. They were sold at the ports on arrival. As prisoners they had no rights. Diaries, letters, and eyewitness accounts give testimony to their horrible mistreatment and slave labor. Mr. Hogan won’t call these wretches “slaves,” even though they were clearly handled like chattel (cattle).

It seems that a powerful lobby has decided that black folk have a proprietary relationship with the word slave. “You blacks are the slave race,” they are told by their liberal white alleged “allies.” If this designation is false, however, then it constitutes an act of psychological crippling. The history of the white race is in many respects synonymous with the long history of enslavement, and if blacks have a copyright on the word “slave,” someone should tell that to the Slavic people, who for generations were targets of Viking slave raids and from whom the word “slave” is derived.

The weakness of Mr. Hogan’s assertions can be found in his gullible acceptance of the party line of the white ruling class with regard to their whitewash of their role in white enslavement. The white ruling class is excoriated with contempt by the left when they minimize crimes of the British aristocracy and capitalists against people of color, but Mr. Hogan will believe them implicitly when they aver that white bondage was operated within a legal framework, and it only involved “servants.”

The kidnapping of poor whites has precedence in Britain. It does not have a legal basis per se, but it has color of law and we find it in the systematic mass kidnapping of British people for maritime slavery aboard ship for the Royal Navy. I can anticipate the objection: The bondage was for a determinate period of time. Officially, yes. An Englishmen was kidnapped of the streets and country lanes of Britain with the connivance of the judiciary and conscripted for a period of years, but in actuality these determinate number of years was not worth the ink that had been used to write the paper, when it so happened that the victim of abduction was returning home from a five- or seven-year compulsory voyage. He saw the blessed shore of England at long last, prayed that his wife had not run off and that his children and parents still lived, and then a few miles from shore, another man-of-war sailed up to his vessel, boarded it at sea with a press gang, and kidnapped him again for another multi-year abduction. This could happen two or three times. The kidnapped sailor could be gone from Britain ten, fifteen, or twenty years and killed or severely injured during that time. I doubt Mr. Hogan would confer upon this naval slave that title because if the slave survived his ordeal he eventually went home. He had been a slave for a time, and to quibble over it is to do a grave disservice to the memory of tens of thousands of Royal Navy slaves. Impressment was one of the rotten roots, along with villeinage, that created a precedent for an institutional framework for white slavery concealed under cover of “indenture” or some other deceptive and cosmetic rubric.

Jim Goad: In this passage, Hogan essentially accuses you and others of lying: “The inclination to describe these different forms of servitude using the umbrella term ‘slavery’ is a wilful [sic] misuse of language.” Didn’t contemporary legal documents often refer to alleged “indentured servants” as “slaves”?

You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.

Michael A. Hoffman II: The truth was in the writings of the white slaves themselves who referred to themselves as such, and eyewitnesses to their plight who wrote accounts of what they saw. This is in my bookThey Were White and They Were Slaves.

As for willful misuse of language, I suppose I should apologize for defying the Establishment-imposed monopoly on how the word “slave” is to be employed, but I cannot, because like all monopolies this one is a form of restraint, enforced by thought cops indifferent to truths that violate the whole foundation of their monopoly on history and white self-image.

Jim Goad: Hogan claims your book deceptively uses “selective quotations taken from nearly 200 different secondary sources,” that your motive is “to deny reparations for slavery in America,” and that your “denial has a pro-slavery ideological lineage.”

Michael A. Hoffman II: One usually can discern that something is defective about an argument when it is ad hominem, and we discover this ill omen in Mr. Hogan’s resort to Pavlovian incentives for stigmatizing a writer with pejoratives calculated to cue an intended audience of partisans that here is someone to despise and dismiss. If he’s writing mainly for the benefit of Mark Potok and members of the new religion of Multiculturalism and Diversity, then he’s in luck. If he seeks a wider audience, however, then I don’t see how such tactics help to make his case.

The idea of paying reparations to any aggrieved racial or ethnic group is something with no appeal to me. It devolves into one-upmanship in the game of guilt imposition. Even in the matter of the Irish Catholic slaves, the focus is too narrow, and the subtext is one that excludes English Protestant slaves, since the Irish narrative is too often beholden to a vision of near-perpetual victimization by the English, which excludes the reality that a vicious white ruling class in London has seldom had any compunctions against betraying and enslaving their own white English yeomanry.

Do the English pay reparations to the Irish for what Oliver Cromwell did in transporting Irish slaves to the West Indies? Do the Catholics pay reparations for the pro-Catholic Stuart King Charles II for having shipped criminalized and enslaved English Protestants to the West Indies? A world full of victims demanding payment is a definition of a madhouse, not a civilization. The reparations process is very often politicized, with war victors or the plutocracy with the most bloat apportioning the guilt and assigning the victim status.

As a revisionist historian, I wrote They Were White and They Were Slaves for the astonishing reason (to some observers) that it was a chronicle that had not been adequately addressed and thus was pure gold from the standpoint of historical rediscovery. My “sin” is to have detailed the history without regard to the idol of political correctness. My book is good news for black people: You are not inferior; you were not the only race or the main race in chattel bondage.

Jim Goad: In an earlier email you wrote to me: “the work of my opponents (at least Hogan that is; the distaff side of the trio today admitted to me that she has not read my book), is so blundering (at least what I have read so far) as to actually add ammunition to my thesis.” How so?

Michael A. Hoffman II: At this URL, Hogan, Matthew Reilly, and Laura McAtackney make the case for one of the assertions in my book. They write:

“If a white servant assaulted another servant or a slave, it was treated as a misdemeanor and they were fined. If they assaulted their master they were whipped. Their indenture was legal property therefore a servant’s remaining time could be left in wills, traded for commodities and sold. Since one’s labor is inseparable from one’s person, this meant indentured servants in Barbados were treated as a sort of commodity. The distinction between voluntary and involuntary indentured servitude is also important, but all too often serves as justification for the existence of “white slavery”. It is true that some Europeans, particularly prisoners of war or political prisoners, were sent to places like Barbados against their will and without a predetermined period of servitude. However, upon arrival, those without contracts were, by law, required to serve the master who purchased their labor for a limited number of years, depending on their age. It is also true that many servants didn’t live to see the end of their period of servitude due to brutal treatment and unsparing work regimens, but while under the conditions of servitude, they were subject to the same laws that governed European servants, not enslaved Africans.” (End quote; emphasis supplied).

Apart from the risible fiction that all white bondage was “indentured” and for a “predetermined period” and therefore all of it was scrupulously governed by some kind of “European servant” legislation and jurisprudence, Hogan, Reilly, and McAtackney concede that “many” whites in bondage suffered “brutal treatment and unsparing work regimens” which proved lethal.

Even they admit that many whites were sent into bondage in Barbados and then worked to death. This is not slavery and it cannot be designated chattel slavery? By what sufficiently dainty term do we describe it? The death of many “servants” was by accident? Were their masters prosecuted and executed for this? What sort of human being who is beaten and worked to death is undeserving of the name “slave”?

Notice as well the knee-jerk assumption the three critics of white slave history exhibit: They expect us to believe that in every case where a white person in bondage is whipped, it was because “they assaulted their master.” How do they know this? Imagine the outcry if someone made such a characterization about the whipping of blacks in bondage—that the flogging was always their fault?

How is the experience of whites in servitude, who were at the mercy of masters of all types, reducible to the notion that no master ever unjustly lashed an un-free white person? This myth presupposes that whites were never whipped due to having tried to run away, or because they were too sick to work, or they refused the master’s sexual advances. By some miracle, the human predicament by which nonwhites in bondage unjustly found themselves on the receiving end of a lash is not shared by whites in bondage. Here we observe the subhuman status of whites in servitude as we demarcate the dimensions of the distortion: They died as slaves yet must not be called slaves; unlike black human beings who experienced servitude and were unconscionably whipped, whites who were whipped almost always deserved it.

Jim Goad: Isn’t it true that several historians who can in no way be smeared as “holocaust deniers” or “white supremacists” essentially agree that white slavery existed in the colonies? In my research forThe Redneck Manifesto, I found historians across the political spectrum essentially agreeing with the historical facts you raise in your research.

Michael A. Hoffman II: The cumulative evidence of A. Roger Ekirch in Bound for America (1990) is conclusive, though he employs euphemisms for white enslavement. He certainly does not fit the hysteric’s categories of “denier” or “supremacist.” Oscar and Mary Handlin openly refer to whites in servitude in the seventeenth century as “slaves. ” See “Origins of the Southern Labor System” in William and Mary Quarterly, April, 1950. Personally, I rely mainly on testimony of the white slaves themselves, their own writings and pleadings and those persons high and low who encountered them and wrote of them.

Jim Goad: With all these allegations of people trying to deny white guilt, is it possible that others are trying to deny black responsibility? Couldn’t one argue that some people are lazily trying to use slavery as a blanket and bulletproof excuse for black academic and economic failure?

Michael A. Hoffman II: Some black people are angered that there is an entire industry in the U.S. centered on the so-called “Holocaust” of Judaic persons in eastern Europe decades ago, with museums in America and innumerable college classes, books, and movies, and a de facto “Holocaust” tax on Americans in the form of billions of dollars in US aid sent to the Israelis, while the descendants of the black people who worked the plantations and helped to bring to market the cotton—the greatest material prize of antebellum America—never did receive their “40 acres and a mule.” One wonders whether the recent energy devoted to black slave reparations and African-American museums and university curricula would be as intensely promulgated and ubiquitous if there was no “Holocaust” industry to remind American black people that they are not getting their share of the white guilt pie.

Certainly if reparations are to be paid for slavery in America, they must also be paid to the descendants of the white slaves who also performed the requisite labor that enriched the planter class and before there was much of a planter class on the eastern frontier, the white slaves of the 17th century performed the most back-breaking labor of colonial settlement: land-clearing.

Jim Goad: So much of Hogan’s alleged “debunking” simply employs the fallacies of argumentum ad hominem and appeal to motive. But since he called your motives into question, what might be someone’s motive in denying the well-documented history of white slavery?

Michael A. Hoffman II: In my book I give examples of white British aristocrats speeding in their carriages to abolitionist meetings where the plight of blacks in America was decried, heedless of white children by the side of the road who had finished toiling 16 hours, half-naked in a mine; or having their arms and legs mutilated in the factory machinery of the early Industrial Revolution whose owners, such as Josiah Wedgewood, and the famous poet and mine owner Lord Byron, considered poor British whites entirely expendable.

Charles Dickens, who had been a child laborer in a chemical factory, termed this callous hypocrisy “telescopic philanthropy.” The white elite of Britain had the apparition of black enslavement constantly before their eyes, even though it was thousands of miles away, while they were oblivious to the English boys who were sold to chimney sweeps and who sometimes burned and suffocated to death in the chimneys of the magnificent mansions of the abolitionists. Almost no one was paying attention to their agony. It’s supposed to be naughty of me to refer to child labor in the factories, mines, and chimneys of Britain as white slavery. I do not know what else to term girls and boys stripped virtually naked toiling side-by-side in a mine for 16 hours stunted and blackened, or a factory, where they often were seriously injured or killed, because if they didn’t undertake this labor they would starve to death. They went to their labor before dawn and ceased their labors after dark.

Most of your readers are familiar with white self-hatred and this perverse loathing, coupled with the legacy of the betrayal of the masses of white paupers and laborers in Britain by their rulers, has created the current situation of ruinous psychological and spiritual alienation that would seem to desire demographic extinction of their own seed.

Jim Goad: The SPLC claims that you are engaging in “an ahistorical reimagining of real events weaponized by racists and conspiracy theorists.” Speaking of “ahistorical reimaginings,” has the Southern Poverty Law Center ever addressed the Jewish role in the transatlantic slave trade?

Michael A. Hoffman II: Mr. Dees’s poverty palace is a satrap in the Israeli orbit. His hate mill seldom grinds the racist libels and murderous deeds of the settler-rabbis. Goyim-hating Chabad rabbis travel throughout the US to disseminate their racist doctrines, and the SPLC purrs like a kitten in the face of it. Dees and Potok are not going to reveal to their duped supporters—and their numerous cronies at executive levels of the US media—the pivotal role Judiac-Americans played in the merchandising of black flesh prior to the 20th century. Black academics such as the late Prof. Tony Martin of Wellesley College are marginalized and their career opportunities severely curtailed if they dare to inform their students of the vast Judaic role in black enslavement in the Americas, as detailed in the magisterial history books, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volumes I, II, and III.

Jim Goad: Hogan claims that the purpose of reviving this alleged “myth” is that it “aims to shut down all debate about the legacy of black slavery in the United States.” Yet for someone who is apparently in favor of free and open debate, you claim he’s blocked you on Twitter. Would you be willing to debate Hogan…?

Michael A. Hoffman II: I would very much hope that Mr. Hogan would be true to his fighting Celtic heritage and consent to go a round with this writer.

(Written in 2016, published in the 2018 book Whiteness: The Original Sin. The Hogan/Hoffman debate never happened, but Jim Goad interviewed Hoffman on his podcast in 2017.)