Filtering History Many years ago, I was surprised to receive a letter from an old friend, saying that she had been told that I refused to see campus visitors from Africa. At the time, I was so bogged down with work that I had agreed to see only one visitor to the Stanford campus-- and it so happens that he was from Africa. He just happened to come along when I had a little breathing room from the work I was doing in my office. I pointed out to my friend that whoever said what she heard might just as well have said that I refused to go sky-diving with blacks-- which was true, because I refused to go sky-diving with anybody, whether black, white, Asian or whatever. The kind of thinking that produced a passing misconception about me has, unfortunately, produced much bigger, much longer lasting, much more systematic and more poisonous distortions about the United States of America. Slavery is a classic example. The history of slavery across the centuries and in many countries around the world is a painful history to read-- not only in terms of how slaves have been treated, but because of what that says about the whole human species-- because slaves and enslavers alike have been of every race, religion and nationality. If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings-- no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history. But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and in the movies. The message that is pounded home again and again is that white people enslaved black people. It is true, just as it is true that I don't go sky-diving with blacks. But it is also false in its implications for the same reason. Just as Europeans enslaved Africans, North Africans enslaved Europeans-- more Europeans than there were Africans enslaved in the United States and in the 13 colonies from which it was formed. The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves picking cotton. But there are no movies or television dramas about it comparable to "Roots," and our schools and colleges don't pound it into the heads of students. The inhumanity of human beings toward other human beings is not a new story, much less a local story. There is no need to hide it, because there are lessons we can learn from it. But there is also no need to distort it, so that sins of the whole human species around the world are presented as special defects of "our society" or the sins of a particular race. If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilization, it is that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery, including in some cases armed resistance. Only the fact that the West had more firepower than others put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. Yet today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery-- on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment. It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who go back to mine history, in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization, have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire or similar atrocities in other times and places. Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed. An ancient adage says: "Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof." But apparently that is not sufficient for many among our educators, the intelligentsia or the media. They are busy poisoning the present by the way they present the past.
OddsOn, what is your opinion on the article you just posted? What do you think is important about it?
Totally agree with the article. The second Abe Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, all forms of slavery ended, and its effects ceased forever. I am so glad we live in a word today where the darkies no longer suffer, to even the slightest degree, from the oppression of being taken from their homes to a foreign continent, routinely separated from their families, forced to work for the enrichment of their white masters, denied any education, raped by aforementioned white masters, etc.
Perhaps this is because the descendants of those slaves did not continue to live in North Africa as second class citizens (or worse) into modern times. Just a thought.
Thank you, OddsOn! I assume you wrote that yourself. Now I will sleep better knowing that the idea of persecution, exploitation, and marginalization of black people is all just a mythic creation due to clever TV movies like "Roots." Just like Rush Limbaugh has been telling me for years, it's TRUE: white men like him and me (and you! and giddyup!) have had it harder than anybody!
OddsOn, instead of posting stupid editorials with half ass information why don't you spend some time and study some of the differences between the slavery in America and what happened in the rest of the world up to that point. You'll educate yourself and stop looking like an angry white guy all at once.
I just love how you people casually hearl around your rhetoric.... So please explain to me your understanding of the whole slavery topic?
Please answer thadeus and tell us what you think about this article you posted. Or do you not feel the need to contribute to the discussion at all?
Is there a contreversy on the way the history of slavery is taught in america? do you think that along side the history of slavery in this country and this hemisphere, that all types of slavery should be taught to give more perspective in an american history class?
"The inhumanity of human beings toward other human beings is not a new story." I agree. All you have to do is look at the history of the republican party and their illegal wars across the americas and the middle east.
OddsOn, what is your opinion on the article you just posted? What do you think is important about it?
hearl = hurl + calling earl on the porcelain phone? By the way, not to try to salvage something interesting out of this cut-n-paste thread, but there is a very real and modern form of slavery going on even in the US. Check out the "not for sale" campaign -- not a bad site for info. http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/
