In a recent Viewpoint discussion between Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers, the ladies agree that our young, including even our relatively well-educated young, know nothing of the past, their ignorance being the direct result of generations of academics willing to flog Marcuse’s demonstrably biased assertion that Western Civilization is the most abominable cancer in all of history. It is simply not true.
1807 saw the British House of Commons led by William Wilberforce with strong support from Quakers and Evangelical Protestants, pass the Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade Act by a vote of 283 to 16, resulting in the Royal Navy patrolling the African coast for the next 50 years and freeing over 150,000 potential slaves. Given that the slave trade depended upon Africans selling others of the same into bondage, Great Britain signed treaties with over 50 African rulers requiring them to attempt to stifle the obscene practice. For these early 19th Century “social justice warriors” slavery was clearly a violation of what they defined as the natural law. The narrative of the contemporary Left both minimizes the extent to which people of color engaged in such practices while more or less ignoring the achievements of post-Enlightenment Western Man, thereby rationalizing its denunciation of the latter as the primary villain of human history.
While the Americans fought an incredibly vicious civil war to end slavery in the 1860s, their more than admirable insistence on pursuing their ideals hardly led to the end of racism in the U.S. But as Black conservative Thomas Sowell points out, it is Human as opposed to merely White perfidy that lies at the heart of the historical dynamic. Did you know that in the antebellum South thousands of free Blacks themselves owned slaves until compelled to release them by their White rulers?
While references to White Privilege and Systemic White Racism and the “irrational” sensitivity of those of us who take exception to the indiscriminate abuse of such terms are staples of contemporary political discourse, rarely will one encounter any reference to the fact that slavery continues to be an issue throughout much of the non-Western world, the United Nations estimating that at this very moment approximately 2 million people are living in captivity as little more than animals, those responsible for this reality being predominantly people of color only too eager to bestialize those whose race or politics or religion offends their own bestial sensibilitities.
Mauritania, which only abolished slavery in 1981, has done little of substance to enforce that ban. It is estimated that from 340 to 600 thousand of its Black citizens continue to live in slave-like conditions beneath their Muslim overlords who placate them by declaring that Allah in fact approves of their servitude. Lovely!
Is the guilt we White Westerners are being asked to assume in any way justified by history or the product of a truly ridiculous species of dementia? Is the vision of the contemporary Left rooted in empirical fact or a compulsively sentimental aversion to reality? Hopefully as we go on the answers to these questions will become eminently clear!