THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

MODERN SLAVERY | 2001-04-21

The slave ship fiasco in Africa brought the modern slavery situation into focus.

The International Labor Organization estimates that there are 250 million children between the ages of five and fourteen in slave labor around the world -- predominantly in Asia and Africa.

Two points about this need to be made.

First, This slavery involves few if any whites.

Second, these slave traders bought their slaves from Africans and Asians, usually the children's parents.

Liberals want to talk about slavery in 1860, not about who is guilty today. No way that liberals will OK the discussion of the color of today's slave traders. But I thought that respectable conservatives might dare talk about it anyway.

'Fraid not. Even I constantly underestimate the pure intellectual cowardice it takes to be respectable.

So let's look at the rest of what these ideological Bobsey Twins are not going to bring up.

The liberal line today (and therefore the respectable conservative line) is that Southerners were responsible for the slave trade because they BOUGHT slaves two centuries ago.

It's a funny thing, but few if any whites were going to buy today's slaves, and nobody wants to discuss that.

Slavery was often brutal, but even the Confederacy HANGED people who engaged in the slave trade. Half the blacks were expected to die in misery on a slave ship.

It is New England fortunes, not Southern fortunes, that were founded on that famous Triangle Trade.

One John Brown, for whom Brown University in Rhode Island is named, amassed a slave trade fortune. Most of the other such fortunes were in Massachusetts.

But modern history has to lie even about those bestial slave traders in order to be Politically Correct. So the History Channel tells us that "whites kidnapped blacks in Africa."

The networks produced the movie "Roots" in which whites -- with a couple of black helpers -- were shown capturing Kunte Kinte. In that movie, it was only a few black "allies of the white man" who were mentioned as helping kidnap blacks for the Triangle Trade .

After he was Born Again, an actual eighteenth century slave trader confessed the horrors he had perpetrated in that trade. But even he said that the one thing they were not guilty of was chasing down and enslaving blacks.

No white slave trader ever did what the History Channel constantly says they did and what the networks said they did. It was not that they were too good to kidnap Africans. It is just that, in real history, they would never have found any reason to do it.

Yesterday, as today, slaves are too cheap in Africa to be worth chasing down oneself. Exactly like today's slavers, all the old slave traders bought their ENTIRE cargo from black Africans.

It was and is cheap and easy to buy slaves from black Africans.

What the Confederacy NEVER ALLOWED is what Africans have ALWAYS engaged in.

That would have ruined the "only whites are evil" theme of "Roots", wouldn't it?

FOOTNOTE: The only people conservatives allow to speak for them about race issues today are "neoconservatives," who were hard-core leftists in the 1960s.

I discussed these "neos" on March 24, 2001 in THE "NEOS" HELPED CAUSE TODAY'S SUPPRESSION OF FREE SPEECH.

Neos like David Horowitz have found some of the points I make here useful in representing the "conservative" side on reparations for slavery.

My problem, once again, is that I have a memory. Today's "neos" were shrieking us down when we made that kind of point in the 1960s. The shouting down of free speech never had more loyal allies, on and off campus, than today's neos when they were liberals.