“You, dear reader, are no more responsible for slavery than German millennials are for the Holocaust. Understand how it works? To suggest, as some overpaid politicians now do, that Western people today are somehow tainted by the enslavement of Africans by some of their ancestors, is an idea so extraordinarily backward that even the Old Testament – not exactly a hippie manifesto at the best of times – prohibits it.”
Regrettably, slavery has always been with us. Basically all cultures throughout human history have been involved in slavery. Yet Westerners today tend to think it ONLY happened in Western countries and was perpetrated by whites on non-whites.
Slavery is wrong, but telling lies about it is wrong as well. Like most topics being discussed in the West today, we are being sold a bill of goods along with plenty of self-loathing and political correctness. Indeed, the whole point of things like Critical Race Theory is to convince us that racism is purely the result and domain of white people, and only whites are the ones that need to grovel in remorse and make continuous apologies for all this.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, whites were involved in enslaving non-whites, but every other colour combination is also a reality – even today. Thus non-whites have enslaved whites and other non-whites. Plenty of fact-based discussions on these matters exist.
The Black American economist and intellectual Thomas Sowell for example has written often on this. See a recent article that I wrote on him and the issue of slavery here: link
Many others can be appealed to in this regard. A few days ago I discussed a recent book by Konstantin Kisin – a writer who left Russia and now lives in Britain. The book is this: An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West (Constable, 2022). My piece is found here: link
I want to utilise this book once more, since he devotes an entire chapter to this topic. Chapter 3 is titled, “Stop Feeling Guilty About Race, Whiteness and Slavery.” It is well worth quoting from. And I should emphasise at the outset that he does NOT make any apologies for slavery – he condemns it. But he seeks to bring some moral and mental clarity to the issue and refute the reverse racism and identity politics we see being pushed throughout the West.
He begins by stating that his paternal great-grandfather was a slave. He then says this:
He wasn’t black or involved in the transatlantic slave trade. He was a white, communist immigrant from Poland. This combination of facts either offends people, gets misconstrued as a provocation or acts as a conversation stopper. Sometimes all three – I don’t get invited to a lot of dinner parties these days! Many react by shaking their head, some respond by scoffing, while countless others simply walk away, unable to discuss the matter further. As if their brains had been tasered.
Not because they’re bad people, but because they’re victims of bad thinking – especially when it comes to the scope and scale of slavery, which has become one of the biggest hot-button issues of our time. To some extent, I understand this impassioned rush to judgement. After all, the subject is a highly emotive and contentious one. There’s no doubt that human trafficking is one of the most shameful episodes of the world’s past – and present. According to the United Nations, there are 40 million people estimated to be trapped in modern slavery across the globe, whether that’s men who are forced to work in factories, women traded as sex objects or minors trapped in child labour.
Geographically, the breadth of the problem is vast and spreads across the planet. A 2018 report suggests that India is home to the largest number of slaves globally, with 8 million people of all ages, followed by China (3.86 million), Pakistan (3.19 million), North Korea (2.64 million), Nigeria (1.39 million), Iran (1.29 million), Indonesia (1.22 million), Democratic Republic of the Congo (1 million), Russia (794,000) and the Philippines (784,000). In case you hadn’t noticed, none of these places is big on white privilege. (pp. 49-50)
He speaks more to his own family’s past history with slavery. And he reminds us that Soviet slavery – the gulags – was just as bad as the Nazi concentration camps, but far more extensive. While the Nazis had over 1,000 concentration camps, the Communists had over 30,000 in Siberia and the Russian Far East.
Kisin goes on to offer a few hard truths about the reality of slavery throughout human history:
The politically incorrect truth is that in every corner of the world, from the earliest human societies up until the present day, slavery has been a universal, abominable phenomenon. It has been conducted by people of every race against every other race, as well as their own.