A History Lesson

The white European powers of the colonial era did not invent slavery. They did not even invent black slavery. Until quite recently in human history slavery existed on every continent on earth, except Antarctica. Indians enslaved other Indians in the Americas before the arrival of the white man. African tribes were enslaving their captives of war – other Africans – and selling them to the Arabs and the Chinese as far back as the Tang dynasty, which was long before the Portuguese became the first Europeans to get involved in the African slave trade. Asians had been enslaved by other Asians throughout history, and Europeans by other Europeans at various points in their history.

It was Europe’s getting involved in the African slave trade that led ultimately to that system’s demise. When the European powers began purchasing slaves from African slave traders, the age of exploration was beginning, and along with it the settling of colonies in the New World. Slavery flourished for a period that, from a historical point of view, was quite brief, before reformers, some motivated by Christianity, others by the emerging liberalism of the Modern Age, demanded its abolition. Early in the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom took up that cause. She abolished the slave trade throughout her empire in 1807, and slavery itself in 1833. In Canada, we were a bit ahead of the rest of the Empire in this. Upper Canada – now called Ontario – banned the importation of slaves, and began the gradual emancipation of the few that were here, in 1793.

These Acts did not abolish slavery in the United States for the obvious reason that the Americans had seceded from the British Empire in their Revolution in the 1770s. Nevertheless, they led to the abolitionist movement gaining strength in the United States since the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, which abolition the Empire was backing up with naval force, cut the American slave trade off from its supply.

In the 1860s the Americans went to war with each other. The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, was elected in the fall of 1860 without any electoral seats from the states south of the Mason-Dixon Line. In ten of those states he had received no votes whatsoever, and he won only two out of almost a thousand counties. The United States was divided and polarized, and this would not be the last time, but here the divide coincided with a regional division on the map. Slavery was only one of the issues that divided the North and the South, nor was it the main issue. The conflict was primarily one between a modernizing, increasingly urban, society, with a secularized Puritan culture, intend on building an economy based on industrial manufacture on the one hand and a more traditional, rural society that was more conservative in its religion and wished to retain an agricultural way of life on the other. When Lincoln was elected without any support from the latter, the Southern states opted to secede and form the Confederate States of America. They believed they were within their constitutional rights to do so and while this was a hot topic at the time, this was certainly in keeping with the Jeffersonian or anti-federalist interpretation of the American constitution.

Lincoln was personally opposed to slavery, but this was not what motivated his actions. In his first Inaugural Address, he promised to drop the issue if the Southern states would return. To keep the South in the United States he ordered an invasion of the South, leading to a war that cost more American lives that the Spanish-American War, the two World Wars, and the Korean War combined. The campaign was fought according to the pattern that is now called “total war”, laying waste to the Southern countryside. Waging such a war against people who by your own theory are still your brethren and countrymen was and is considered atrocious and required an iron-clad moral justification. Modernizing the economy simply would not cut it. It is for this reason that the Northern interpretation of these events has always placed the stress on the abolition of slavery, often to the exclusion of all other causes of the war.

It should be noted that another man at the time who condemned slavery as a “moral and political evil” was Robert E. Lee, the brilliant general to whom Lincoln had first offered the command of the Union forces. He turned it down and resigned his commission rather than draw his sword against his native state of Virginia. Lee, even though he thought secession was a foolish idea, offered his services to Virginia and was given charge over the Army of Northern Virginia. By the end of the war he had gone from being the de facto to being the official, supreme commander of the Southern forces.

The reason this ought to be noted is because events like those of the 1860s could very well have increased, rather than decreased, the animosity between the two regions of the United States, and to prevent this from happening the Americans eventually settled on a compromise. Just as Homer eulogized Hector as well as Achilles in The Iliad, so the heroes on both sides would be honoured. This helped cement their country back together, and the United States gained from it for by all accounts the most honourable leaders in the conflict were men like the aforementioned General Lee and his associate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. The agreement to honour both sides was an honest effort to heal a wound, repair a division, and unite a country, and for a century it was successful.

The exact opposite is true of what the Black Lives Matter movement is currently doing.

While Black Lives Matter and Antifa, if it is indeed right to think of the two as separate entities, claim to hate racism, it is really white people they hate. If they really hated racism, their goal would be for blacks and whites to get along, for there to be racial peace and harmony. Instead, they have been fomenting racial strife and division. Or they would be, if whites still had self-respect, or at the very least the instinct for self-preservation, enough to stand up for themselves. Since that does not appear to be the case, what we are seeing instead is a form of one-sided violence, a bullying or beating-up on whites.

The “anti-racist” left has for some time now been trying to undo the aforementioned post-bellum healing of the American nation by demanding the removal of Confederate flags, statues of Lee, Jackson, and other Southern military heroes, and that streets, buildings and cities named after these men be renamed. Three years ago, they turned up to counter-protest what would, unlike the Black Lives Matter riots that are mislabeled such by the mainstream media, otherwise have truly been a “peaceful protest” against the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, and turned it into a violent brouhaha that led to the deaths of three people, the blame for which, predictably, was placed entirely on those who objected to the removal of the statue, although it was the other side that started the violence. They are now capitalizing on the outrage over George Floyd’s death to demand and obtain the removal of these Confederate monuments.

They are not stopping with the Confederate monuments, however, as those of us who have all along opposed the attack on those monuments knew they would not. Patrick Buchanan asks in his latest column whether George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and basically everybody who built the United States, will be next. It is a rhetorical question, I am sure. He knows the answer as well as I do.

In London, the statue of Sir Winston Churchill has been defaced, and the British government has ordered it boarded up to protect it against further vandalism. This was, of course, the same Sir Winston Churchill who led the free world in the war against the German dictator whose name has become virtually synonymous with white racism. In Leeds, a statue of Queen Victoria has been similarly defaced. Queen Victoria reigned over a British Empire in which slavery had been abolished. The bill accomplishing that had been signed into law by her father William IV, four years prior to her accession. Her government took great lengths to make sure that bill was enforced.

Here in the Dominion of Canada, Black Lives Matter has been demanding the removal of the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in Montreal. Their charge against the leading Father of Confederation and our country’s first Prime Minister is that he started the Indian Residential Schools. The rebuttal to this, not that facts matter to these pathetic know-nothings, is that the Churches had started the residential schools on their own prior to Confederation, Sir John A. MacDonald began funding the schools to fulfil the Dominion’s obligation under the treaties to provide the Indians with education, that the abuses which have given these schools a bad name come from the anecdotal evidence collected by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which pertains to a period long after Sir John A. Macdonald’s premiership, and that these schools, whose language immersion policies were by no means uniform, no more practiced “cultural genocide” than French immersion schools do today.

It is absurd to judge the leaders of a hundred or more years ago, by standards which we have invented in our own day, as if we, who are living in what is probably the greatest age of moral depravity since the days of Noah and Sodom and Gomorrah, have any right to establish such standards. This is especially true, when the standards pertain to racism, and we are hypocritically demanding from the white leaders of the past, a perfect adherence to standards which the non-whites of the present day are never expected to keep.

The demands and actions of the Black Lives Matter mob are leading us down a path to greater racial violence, not to racial peace and harmony. But then, mobs always lead to violence rather than peace and harmony. Either the promoters of this nonsense know that and it is their intention, or they have never learned from the history they seek to erase.

Systemic Racism

Is there any racial group in the Dominion of Canada or the United States of America today, about whom you can safely tell insulting jokes in public?

The answer, of course, is yes.

Is it blacks in the United States?

Is it Indians in Canada?

Obviously not. Anyone who were to try it would face severe consequences. He would be publicly denounced and shamed, probably lose his job and career, and maybe even his wife and kids and friends.

If, however, he were to tell such a joke about white people he would almost certainly get away with it.

Go back to the original question and substitute "use derogatory racial slurs" for "tell insulting jokes".

The answer is no different.

Is there any racial group in North America that you can with impunity threaten with violence?

The answer is still white people, although the certainty of your getting away with it has decreased, unless, of course, you are a superstar rapper or a university professor.

If you were to apply for an advertised position only to be told "we cannot consider you, because we need to diversify our staff or labour force", what race would you be?

No, you would not be a black, Indian, or Asian. Any company that would tell a black, Indian, or Asian applicant that their race disqualifies them from consideration, which is what “we cannot consider you because we need to diversify” translates into, would immediately be faced with the threat of crippling anti-discrimination litigation under the Canadian Human Rights Act or the US Civil Rights Act. They would most likely face public humiliation as well.

If you are white, however, they can turn you away on the above-stated grounds with no fear of recrimination.

Is there any racial group in North America or Western Civilization as a whole that is constantly made to be the scapegoat of all social evils in the way Hitler made the Jews into a scapegoat almost a century ago?

Yes, of course there is.

Is it still the Jews?

No, it most certainly is not. People today are generally afraid even to criticize the Jews, much less blame them for all the evils of the world, lest they be accused of anti-Semitism. Unless, of course, they belong to the Islamic faith, in which case they seem to have been granted a special dispensation by the gods of diversity.

Do I really need to point out that once again whites are the group in question?

The fatality rate among healthy black American men is abominably high. The reason is the violent crime and the "gangsta" culture that is destroying their own neighborhoods and communities from the inside out. The blame for it, however, is placed on white racism, especially that which is purportedly prevalent among the American police.

In Canada, a large number of Indian women are either found dead or disappear without a trace and are presumed dead, every year. An inquiry into this was demanded, then commissioned, and, last year, it released its report. The report could not hide the fact that in the vast majority of cases the murderer was also an Indian, usually a family member or someone from within the victim’s own community. Nevertheless, it still, in a classic example of putting two and two together and coming up with something other than four, placed the blame on white racism and called it a "genocide."

The social sciences departments of most universities hardly do anything else but brainwash their students with the “evil white racist” conspiracy theory of history. This is because these departments are composed of nothing but pseudo-disciplines, invented by Marxists, for the very purpose of promoting Marxism’s radically destructive revolutionary agenda.

Most races in North America have advocacy organizations which promote their civil rights and liberties, and speak to the public and lobby the government on behalf of their interests. These organizations are generally considered to be respectable and even venerable. There is one race in North America, however, which is not allowed to have such advocates. Any organization that attempts to speak or lobby on this race’s behalf, will immediately find itself denounced by politicians and bureaucrats, university professors, clergymen, the news and entertainment industry, and all the “respectable” racial advocacy groups, as a hate group. All attempts to speak positively on behalf of this race, are heard by countless people, including many members of the race in question themselves, as negative attacks on other people.

Any guesses as to which race this is?

For decades, the politicians and civil servants in both Canada and the United States, have been actively working to decrease one particular race’s demographic and political strength and influence in both countries, as academic and media progressives have cheered this race’s decline and perhaps eventual demise. This attitude, directed towards any other group, would be regarded as genocidal race hatred.

That’s right, it is the same race yet again.

We have all heard the expression “systemic racism” over and over again since the death of George Floyd. What progressives mean by “systemic” or “institutional” racism is their accusation that white racism is something embedded into the very fabric of Western societies and their institutions and which cannot be eliminated simply by abolishing slavery, ending segregation, or any other historical objective that can be achieved by an act of legislation or a judicial ruling. All sane people recognize that you cannot reason with people who think this way because they are absolutely bonkers.

If we cannot reason with them, for the sake of those they have not yet brainwashed, we ought to be able to answer them. The answer is simply this: the only systemic racism in Western civilization in 2020, is the racism against white people detailed above.

Apartheid in Perspective

There are many evils that can be charged to the account of the late twentieth- century phenomenon that is commonly called political correctness. One of these is the growing inability to perceive certain historical figures, events, and institutions with anything worthy of being called perspective. In the last century alone, movements and organizations committed to the political philosophy of Marxist-Leninism murdered the bodies of over one hundred million people and the spirits of millions more whom they forced into the dreary, hopeless, slave like existence that passed for life in the police states that flew the red flag. Yet to this day it is far safer for someone in academic or media circles to praise a Communist government, to dismiss the fear of Communism as irrational paranoia, and to say that the Americans were the aggressors in the Cold War, than it is for someone in those same circles to say anything that could be construed as a defense of General Franco of Spain or General Pinochet of Chile even though there was far more freedom and prosperity for the average citizen under either of their regimes than in any Communist country and the number of people tortured and killed by their regimes was far lower than that of any Communist country. Any attempt to put both Communism and the anti-Communist regimes of Franco and Pinochet in perspective is likely to be met with widespread denunciation and accusations that one is engaging in apologetics for “human rights” abuses.

Virtually anything having to do with Africa is similarly protected from perspective by political correctness.

Take the slave trade for example. We know all about it, don’t we? The bad guys, the white Europeans, in the age of exploration came to Africa, where they began to capture and enslave black people, who they shipped overseas to Europe and the European settlements in the Americas, where they were oppressed as drudge labourers.

Suppose, however, we were to broaden our perspective on African slavery by including within our picture of it the fact that slavery existed on the African continent long before European ships arrived on her west coast, that African slavery had begun with African tribes going to war with one another and enslaving each other, that the Arabs had conducted a trade in African slaves centuries prior to Europe’s getting involved, and that one of the consequences of modern European expansionism, colonialism, and imperialism was that the imperial powers ended and outlawed the slave trade in the nineteenth century, and abolished slavery in the territory under their control? Suppose we were to broaden our perspective even further by pointing out that since the end of World War II, which had accomplished a geopolitical realignment around the two new superpowers of the USA and USSR, who forced the old imperial powers to withdraw, slavery has begun anew in parts of Africa where it had been abolished by Britain, France, and the Dutch.? Suppose we were to point out, as Professor Bruce Charlton recently did (1), that due to liberal immigration and multiculturalism slavery has been reintroduced into the birthplace of abolitionism and is largely being ignored by the leftists who promote multiculturalism in contradiction to their professed opposition to slavery in all forms?

From that broader perspective it no longer appears to be a simple Manichean morality tale of evil whites and pure, innocent, oppressed blacks does it?

There is probably no element of African history that is more lacking in perspective than that of apartheid. Apartheid is the word in the Afrikaans language that refers, as its sound would suggest to English speakers, the state of being apart or separate. In 1948, when the Nationalist Party came to power in South Africa, it adopted this term to designate its policy of racial segregation.

The government of South Africa picked a particularly poor time to institute this policy. World War II was over, the revelations of the atrocities of Nazi Germany had given racialism a bad name, the anti-colonial, anti-imperial era was beginning under the supervision of the new progressive superpowers, the Communists were at work trying to fan the flames of anti-racist sentiment into the fire of revolution, and in the United States, now the leading power of the liberal, democratic, West, the Civil Rights movement would soon be underway, which would lead to the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, the model for subsequent anti-discrimination legislation such as the 1968 Race Relations Bill in the UK and the 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act. The way the tides of opinion were moving, it was inevitable that apartheid would receive widespread condemnation. Interestingly, the one country that understood perfectly well where the Afrikaners were coming from, itself achieved its independence as a country that same year. After the Six Days War in 1967, Israel and South Africa forged a close alliance, signing the Israel-South Africa Agreement in 1975. Today, enemies of the Jewish state liken the measures she has taken to preserve her existence in the face of the constant threat of Arab and Muslim terrorism to apartheid. Her defenders reject the comparison as a calumny, perhaps because they, unlike the country they are defending, lack perspective on apartheid.

It is fitting, therefore, that of those essays with which I am familiar, the one which in my opinion best put apartheid into perspective, appeared in an extremely pro-Israeli publication. The author of the essay was British writer and historian Paul Johnson. In an article that appeared in the September 1985 issue of the American neoconservative monthly journal Commentary, (2) Johnson took the United States to task for the economic boycott of South Africa then underway. It was a “cruel absurdity”, he declared, for the richest country in the world to “deliberately set about destroying the economy of what is in some respects still a developing nation.” (3) The United States had nothing to gain from doing so and much to lose. The only explanation for this absurdity, Johnson argued, was that “assumption that the South African regime is a unique moral evil, whose wickedness is so great that the necessity for its destruction transcends all the rules governing relations between states and, indeed, the dictates of elementary common sense.”

He then proceeded to demolish that assumption by pointing out that South Africa, far from being unique, is “in many fundamental respects…a typical African country.” He gave six examples, the first four of which are 1) that like other African states it was undergoing a population explosion, 2) like other large African states its racial problems were particularly complex and not just a matter of black and white, 3) “population pressure on the land is driving people into the towns, and especially into the big cities”, and 4) like in other African states this creates problems for the government to which the response is typical:

So governments respond with what has become the curse of Africa—social engineering. People are treated not as individual human beings but as atomized units and shoveled around like concrete or gravel. Movement control is imposed. Every African has to have a grubby little pass-book or some other begrimed document which tells him where he is allowed to work or live. South Africa has had pass-laws of a kind since the 18th century. They have now spread all over the African continent, and where the pass-book comes the bulldozer is never far behind. Virtually all African governments use them to demolish unauthorized settlements. Hundreds of thousands of wretched people are made homeless without warning by governments terrified of being overwhelmed by lawless multitudes. In the black African countries bordering on the Sahara, the authorities fight desperately to repel nomadic desert dwellers driven south by drought. When the police fail, punitive columns of troops are sent in. (4)

The fifth example Johnson gave was that South Africa, like all African states, conducts its social engineering on a racial basis. He wrote:

All African states are racist. Almost without exception, and with varying degrees of animosity, they discriminate against someone: Jews, or whites, or Asians, or non-Muslim religious groups, or disfavored tribes. There is no such thing as a genuinely multiracial society in the whole of Africa…African countries vary in the extent to which their practice of discrimination is formalized or entrenched in law codes and official philosophies. Most have political theories of a sort, cooked up in the political-science or sociology departments of local universities. Tanzania has a sinister totalitarian doctrine called Ujaama. Ghana has Consciencism. There is Zambian Humanism, Négritude in Senegal, and, in Zaire, a social creed called Mobutuism, after the reigning dictator. All these government theories reflect the appetites of the ruling racial groups… Apartheid is not a concept which divides the Republic from the rest of Africa: on the contrary, it is the local expression of the African ideological personality. (5)

This, it should be noted, has changed since the change in power from the Afrikaner National Party to the African National Congress in 1994. Not only does the ANC, despite the false image of the “rainbow nation” generated by a deceitful media, practice discrimination against the white South Africans who are currently being eliminated in a Zimbabwesque manner, the ANC is not even representative of all South Africa blacks, being historically a primarily Xhosa organization, (6) although its current leader, Jacob Zuma, comes from the rival Zulu people.

The sixth way, in which Johnson said that South Africa was typical of Africa was in the way it had suffered “at the hands of its politically minded intellectuals”.

Having demonstrated that in all of these negative things Nationalist South Africa was a typical, rather than unique, African state, Johnson then identified four ways in which it stood out by differing from other African states. The first two of these were its wealth, “South Africa has by far the richest and most varied range of natural resources of any African country”, and the fact that it had used that wealth to build a modern economy, the only one of its kind in Africa. The third was that blacks were better off in white-governed South Africa than any other country in Africa. Here another extended quote from Johnson is in order:

Except for the Ivory Coast, Kenya, and Malawi, all the black African states have experienced falls in real incomes per capita since independence. But only in South Africa have the real incomes of blacks risen very substantially in the last quarter-century. In mining, black wages have tripled in real terms in the last decade and are still rising…This helps to account for the fact that there are more black-owned cars in South Africa than there are private cars in the whole of the Soviet Union. The Republic is the first and so far the only African country to produce a large black middle class. In South Africa the education available to blacks is poor compared to what the whites get, and that is one of the biggest grievances the black communities harbor; but it is good compared to what is available elsewhere on the continent…Thanks to mining, again, this modest but rising prosperity is not confined to blacks born in South Africa. About half of South Africa’s black miners come from abroad, chiefly from Mozambique, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Botswana…The security fences South Africa is now rather anxiously erecting are designed to keep intended immigrants out, not—like the Berlin Wall—to keep people in. (7)

The fourth way in which Nationalist South Africa differed from other African countries is that was “in many respects a free country.” Johnson explained that:

Every other African country has become, or is in the process of becoming, a one-party state. None of them subscribes in practice, or in most cases even in theory, to the separation of powers. Both the rule of law and democracy are subject in South Africa to important qualifications. But it is the only African country where they exist at all. The emergency and security powers enjoyed by the South African government are so wide and draconian that they almost make us forget that the judiciary is independent—very much so—and that even non-whites can get justice against the state, something they are most unlikely to secure anywhere else on the continent. The courts are cluttered with black litigants suing the police, the prison authorities, or other government agencies, or appealing against sentences. (8)

To summarize, the things which the anti-apartheid movement most objected to in Nationalist South Africa – its official racial discrimination, its heavy handed government policing, etc., were all features that the South African government shared with all other African governments, that were not uniquely South African, per se, but rather were typically African. It made no sense, therefore, to single South Africa out for condemnation. The only difference was that in South Africa the governing group was white whereas in all other African countries – now that Ian Smith’s government had fallen and Rhodesia was being turned into Zimbabwe – it was black. Since the conditions for blacks were improving in Nationalist South Africa, to the point that they had an immigration problem from the rest of the continent, whereas they were rapidly declining in the rest of Africa, it made even less sense to condemn South Africa.

Since the ANCs rise to power in 1994, conditions in South Africa have deteriorated for blacks and whites alike. What was a first world country when governed by the Afrikaners is becoming a third world country, in which the white South Africans face genocide and the black South Africans face the deterioration of the rule and protection of law, a failing economy, and a decline into the conditions present everywhere else in Africa. Those South Africans who can, black and white alike, are now fleeing the country, while under Afrikaner rule they were struggling to get in.

What is apparent out of all of this is that South Africa was a better place to live, for blacks and whites alike, from 1948 to 1994, than either any other country in Africa was at the time or than South Africa itself has been ever since.

This does not mean, of course, either that the policy of apartheid made the difference between South Africa then and South Africa now, or that apartheid is somehow justified by all of this. What made the difference between South Africa then and South Africa now is that South Africa then, the prosperous, Western, country, was largely an expression of the Afrikaner people who built the country, established its institutions, and wrote its laws. As such an expression, the country of South Africa was a country that Afrikaners, other African whites, and African blacks all wished to participate in. Apartheid, of course, prevented the other people living in South Africa, other than non-Afrikaner whites, from full participation, and that is wherein its injustice lies. The difficulty is that apart from apartheid, that South Africa would probably have been impossible to create.

All of which must be taken into consideration if we are to even approach perspective, when it comes to apartheid and the whole South African situation.

(1) http://charltonteaching.blogspot.ca/2013/10/why-do-modern-leftists-pretend-to-be.html


(2) Commentary has been published since 1945 when it was founded by the American Jewish Committee as a replacement for the Contemporary Jewish Record. Its first editor was Eliot Cohen, who was succeeded by Norman Podhoretz in 1960. It was during Podhoretz’s editorship that the journal ostensibly moved to the right, when Podhoretz, initially a Cold War liberal Democrat, grew disgusted with the pro-Soviet, pro-Palestinian, New Left in the 1970s and realigned himself and his publication with the American conservative movement. Hence the label “neoconservative”, which in an American context generally refers to a member of the “New York Intellectuals” who moved from the left to the right in the 1970s and who is usually belligerently militaristic. Commentary gradually became independent of the American Jewish Committee. Its current editor is John Podhoretz, son of Norman Podhoretz, and it remains extremely, to the point of being obnoxiously so, pro-Israel.

(3) Paul Johnson, “The Race for South Africa”, Commentary, September, 1985. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-race-for-south-africa/ (if you wish to view this, you will have to part with some shekels, I am afraid, either a subscription price or the purchase price of the article)

(4) Ibid.

(5) Ibid.

(6) See Ilana Mercer’s Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (Seattle: Stairway Press, 2011) for more information about this.

(7) Johnson, op cit.

(8) Ibid.