Published at Herland Report, Written by Paul Craig Roberts
Slavery is presented to American school children as something
that white people did to black people. Therefore, white people are
racists and must pay in some way for the slavery of black people that
ended in the US 156 years ago.
For example, about the black African kingdom of Dahomey Benin, Encyclopedia Britiannica
says, “Dahomey was organized for war, not only to expand its boundaries
but also to take captives as slaves. Slaves were either sold to the
Europeans [or Muslims] in exchange for weapons or kept to work the royal
plantations that supplied food for the army and court.”
Slavery had been a fact of life for millenniums. Long before white
peoples had black slaves, they had white slaves, and were themselves
slaves owned by Arabs. Read about this below.
But if a person wants to engage others in emotion for the
purpose of gaining preferment and its rewards, money and power, or
simply to enjoy the self-righteousness of moral denunciation of one’s
fellows, these questions are in the way.
The fact that these questions are never asked and are not a part of
black studies programs in universities or the New York Times’ fake
history project–the 1619 Project–is conclusive evidence that today slavery is an emotive word used to demonize white people and to bring preferment to black people, writes Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, a leading American political economist and regular contributor to The Herland Report.
There are so many unasked questions. For example, how did the blacks
brought to North America become slaves? Who enslaved them? The
answer, which explodes the narrative, is that blacks were enslaved by
other blacks.
The main source of slaves for the slave trade was the black Kingdom
of Dahomey. Dahomey engaged in slave wars with other black kingdoms or
tribes and became the dominant power.
As Encyclopedia Britiannica says,
“Dahomey was organized for war, not only to expand its boundaries but
also to take captives as slaves. Slaves were either sold to the
Europeans [or Muslims] in exchange for weapons or kept to work the royal
plantations that supplied food for the army and court.”
The socialist Karl Polanyi wrote the classic work: Dahomey and the Slave Trade published in 1966. The book does not fit our woke time and the black studies agenda, and it is no longer available in print.
Today Dahomey is known as Benin. On the beach at Ouidah there is a
contemporary monument, the Gate of no Return, commemorating the lives of
the Africans captured by the black Kingdom of Dahomey and sold to Arabs
and Europeans as slaves or traded for firearms.
In other words, the origin of black slaves was black slave traders.
Why did European sea captains bring black slaves to North America? The
answer is that there was fertile land capable of producing profitable
crops and no labor force. Those who held land grants or charters from
the English king needed labor to make the land useable. There was no
other work force.
Slaves were brought to the US not because of racism but for
economic motives. Black Africans sold other black Africans to merchants
for firearms that established Dahomey’s dominance.
The merchants sold the slaves as a labor force to those who held land
that originated in land grants or charters from the English monarch and
had no one to work it. Slavery was established as the agricultural
labor force long before the United States existed.
This brings us back to the opening question of this essay. Was
slavery a wrong or an inherited institution? Whether or not something
is wrong depends on the morality of the time. At the time the black
Kingdom of Dahomey and the other blacks with whom Dahomey engaged in
slave wars did not consider slavery wrong.
Neither did the Arabs who for centuries had raided European coastal
towns for white slaves. Neither did the Europeans who brought the
purchased slaves to North America. Neither did the colonists who
purchased a labor force. Neither did the original slaves, captives who
themselves had fought in slave wars.
Slavery had been a fact of life for millenniums. Long before white
peoples had black slaves, they had white slaves, and were themselves
slaves owned by Arabs. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries North
Americans were enslaved when US merchant ships were captured by North
African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
For some years the US Congress paid large sums to ransome Americans
enslaved in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. President Thomas Jefferson
tired of it and sent US Naval forces that captured Tripoli and broke up
the practice of enslaving captured American merchant ship crews—thus in
the US Marines anthem—“to the shores of Tripoli.”
Slavery was everywhere. It was an inherited institution. In
the African slave wars, a man could begin the battle a free person and
if defeated find himself a slave. A person born to slave parents knew no
other life.
Truth about Slavery: In North America
where slaves comprised the agricultural labor force, everyone was born
into a society in which slavery was an established institution. It was
the result of a choice made in a distant time when there was no
alternative labor force.
The American and French revolutions, as they are called, resulted in
an idealism of the free autonomous person, and those affected by this
ideal turned on slavery as wrong, as it seems to be under this ideal of Western Civilization. However, it was not wrong in black Dahomey.
How one disposes of an entire labor institution and replaces it was
never described by those who wanted an end to slavery in the 19th
century. Landowners owned the land and the labor.
To require them to free their slaves would be to deprive them of a
large part of their capital. If they freed their work force, they would
have to hire them back with wages, but after such a capital loss where
would the wages come from? Would taxpayers fund a government program to
compensate owners for freeing their slaves?
These are major questions during a time period when many other major
questions took precedence. To reconfigure a country’s established
institutions is an extraordinary undertaking. The Communists attempted
it in the 20th century, and did not meet with success.
Mechanization has replaced the bulk of the agricultural work force,
but it wasn’t an available alternative at the time. If it had been,
what would have provided the livelihood for the freed slaves? In the end
it was sharecropping, which kept the former slaves tied to the land as
they had been as slaves and as medieval serfs had been tied to the land.
Instead of wages, sharecroppers shared in the ownership of the crop
and the proceeds from the sale.
In the US the heavy immigration would have eventually produced a free
labor force except for the fact that until the frontier was closed at
the end of the 19th century, immigrants could move west and claim land
they occupied. Most prefered working their own place to working as
labor for another person.
Jobs offshoring has eliminated most of the American manufacturing
labor force, and those who had manufacturing jobs find themselves today
with diminished living standards. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and
robots are eliminating much of the rest of human employment.
The question of human employment in a world of automation and AI
remains an evaded question, just as abolitionists evaded the question of
the fate of freed slaves. President Lincoln wanted to send them back
to Africa or to a Central or South American destination.
If slavery was such an evil, why did Congress resurrect slavery with
the 16th Amendment in 1909 and the states ratify it in 1913? To
understand what I mean, ask yourself what is the definition of a slave?
A slave is a person who does not own his own labor or the
products of his labor. If you are subject to an income tax, you do not
own your own labor.
Part of a slave’s work goes to his own
maintenance. Otherwise, if he is not fed, clothed, housed, and his
health attended to, his owner loses his labor. The rest of his labor
could be appropriated by his owner to cover the cost of the slave’s
purchase and to turn a profit. For a 19th century slave in the US the
tax rate was approximately 50%.
For a medieval serf, the tax rate was lower as he had less technology
and therefore was less productive. A medieval serf could not reproduce
if his tax rate exceeded 30%, or such was the view years ago when I
studied the medieval economy. Unlike a slave, a serf was not bought and
sold. He was attached to the land. Like a slave, he was taxed in
terms of his labor. The lord of the manor had use rights in the serfs’
labor, and the serfs had use rights in the land.
Truth about Slavery: Formerly serfs were free
farmers. After the collapse of Roman power, they had no protection
against Viking, Saracen, and Magyar raiders. To survive they provided
labor to a chieftain who constructed a walled tower and maintained
fighting men. In the event of raids, serfs had a redoubt to which to
flee for protection.
In effect, serfs paid a defense tax. They exchanged a percentage of
their labor for protection. Serfdom became an established institution
and continued long after the raids had stopped. In England serfdom was
ended by the Enclosures which stripped serfs of their use rights in land
and created a free labor market.
Consider the US income tax. When President Reagan was
elected the tax rate on investment income was 70%. The top tax rate on
wages and salaries was 50%. In other words, the privileged (mainly
white) rich were taxed at the same rate as 19th century black slaves.
How is an American on whose labor the government has a claim a free
man? Clearly, he is not a free man. We can say that there is a
difference between a present day American and a slave, because the
government only owns a percentage of his labor and not the person
himself–unless the person does not pay his taxes, in which case he can
be imprisoned and his labor hired out to private companies who pay the
prison for the use of the prisoner’s labor.
The extraordinary failure to ask the relevant questions discussed in
this essay has caused a racial division in the US infused with
hatred. This hatred is cultivated every day by an irresponsible media,
by the Democrat Party, by the universities, by the NY Times 1619
Project, and by the critical race theory taught in public schools.
Now that all this hate has been created, how do we get rid of
it? With misinformation passing as scholarly fact, how do we recover
truth and escape the lies that are destroying us?
__________________________________________________________________________________
Doug here: There is still a large slave trade in children as free labor, women and girls as sex slaves for profit, forced prostitution, child trafficking. There is child trafficking going on the US border and PROTECTED by the US Government (see below for links). Here's an world-wide estimate of percentage of people in forced labor or slavery from the Washington Post:
Africa , South Asia and even Southeast Asia are still hotbeds of slave trade.
See a few articles below.
The US Government: The Largest Human Trafficker In The World, at Gulfcoastcommentary
I DON'T SEE ANY US BLACK SLAVERY IN AMERICA!! INSTEAD, US BLACKS HAVE EVERY ADVANTAGE --BUT THEY KEEP SHOUTING "DISCRIMINATION" AND "PREDJUDICE" HELL, GO BACK TO AFRICA, DIPSHITS. THERE YOU CAN ACTUALLY EXPERIENCE SLAVERY CONDITIONS!!
TEACH THAT IN SCHOOLS, DUMBFUCKS!
