By Paul Craig Roberts
This means that history itself is offensive as are the Founding Fathers as some of them, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves. Al Sharpton says the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., is “an insult to my family.” He demands that the funding for the national monument cease. Next Antifa, or some other collection of violent morons, will vandalized the Jefferson Memorial and then agitate for its removal.
We will also have to burn the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution as they are “racist documents.” And take Washington’s picture off of the one dollar bill and Jefferson’s off of the two dollar bill, which has already disappeared from circulation. The lack of any historical awareness is testimony to the complete failure of American Education at every level. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are not responsible for slavery.
Slavery was an institution that existed in the English colonies a century before Washington and Jefferson were born. For them it was an inherited institution. It was all they could do to free the colonies from the British. The reason there was slavery in the new world is that there was no work force with which to develop the resources. With no labor to hire, labor was purchased as chattel.
The first slaves brought to the North American British colonies were white. As Don Jordan and Michael Walsh document in White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (New York University Press, 2007), the first slaves were white children. Beginning in 1618, the authorities in London began sweeping up urchins from the slums and shipping them to the colonies.
“They were sold to planters to work in the fields and half of them were dead within a year. Shipments of children continued from England and then from Ireland for decades.” Undesirables convicts, prostitutes, beggars, Quakers, Catholics were pressed into slavery and sold in the colonies. The Irish were a large source of slaves. Under Oliver Cromwell’s ethnic-cleansing policy in Ireland, unknown numbers of Catholic men, women and children were forcibly transported to the colonies and sold as slaves.
Kidnappers snatched people from English streets and sold them to planters’ agents. “London’s most active kidnap gang discussed their targets at a daily meeting in St Paul’s Cathedral.” And there were “indentured servants,” many of whom remained indentured for their lifetimes. Jordan and Walsh report that today in the US there are tens of millions of white Americans who are descended from white slaves. If the tens of millions are more than 47 million, there are more white descendents of slaves in the US than black descendents.
White slaves suffered all the horrors, if not more, that the subsequent black slaves suffered, but their story is not part of the educational curriculum. Blacks and their white advocates would never stand for it, because white slavery detracts from the racist image that black studies has created, an image that conveys special victim status to blacks just as the Jews have acquired by the holocaust. But the facts are, report Jordan and Walsh that black slavery emerged out of white slavery and was based upon it. They quote the African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr:
“When someone removes the cataracts of whiteness from our eyes, and when we look with unclouded vision on the bloody shadows of the American past, we will recognize for the first time that the Afro-American, who was so often second in freedom, was also second in slavery.”
When black slavery superseded white slavery, the source of the slaves was the black king of Dahomey. The English colonists were merely the black king’s customers. But just as it is impermissible to question the holocaust, it is impermissible to question the uniqueness of black Americans’ experience of slavery. History is falsified, because falsification serves the material interests of those who falsify history.
White Americans, still a majority, are refused permission by the preferred minority to retain “offensive” statues, murals and monuments of the founders of their country. A small percentage of the population claiming special status by virtue of their “unique suffering” expect the majority to accept an historical cleansing in which their history is swept away as “offensive.” Once the evil of Identity Politics succeeds in its demonization of white people, white people along with their history will be swept away by their enemies that they stupidly empowered.