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| Series Theme: "Culture Wars" |
Chapter 21: Specific Battlefronts: 4. Race – 2. Reality
CONTENTS
PART 21.1 The Case against the West Facing the Challenges
PART 21.2 The Reality of the UK and the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery Origins & Reparations Collective Guilt
PART 21.1 The Case against the West
Facing the Challenges: The things that have happened in history are things that the modern culture warriors take and use to demean everything that pertains to the culture of the West, but what are the specific accusations and claims that they use: • Europe, and in our case, specifically the UK, took Africans into slavery and sold them to the tea plantations in the Caribbean and the South of what became the USA. • For this reparations should be made to all those whose families were slaves. • The white West shows little or no concern for what they have done and should apologise to the slave families and elevate all coloured people affected by it.
Those are the things that are said, but what is the truth about them? For an excellent article on this subject look up Douglas Murray's article in the Times on 29 th April 2022 entitled, “Reparations for Slavery are just a cynical shakedown,” or his chapters on the subject in ‘The War Against the West'.
PART 21.2 The Reality of the UK and the Atlantic slave trade.
Slavery Origins & Reparations: The following are facts taken as quotes from Murray's Time's article:
1. “Today, slavery is taught as though the transatlantic slave trade was the only slave trade that existed. The far larger trading of Africans east to the Arabs during the same period is utterly unknown. Where are their descendants? They didn't have any. Because the Arabs who transported perhaps as many as 18 million Africans to their lands castrated all the males to ensure there were no more black Africans. I would be surprised if one in a million schoolchildren knows anything about this. For there is very little scholarship on the subject outside the French-speaking world.”
2. “Also ignored is the trade in white Europeans which happened in the same period. In that process the Barbary pirates and others stole Europeans from the coastal towns of England and European countries and sold them into slavery. More than a million Europeans were stolen in this way.”
3. “Like everything else that benefits the anti-western narrative of our day, slavery is presented as though it was a vice indulged in only by white westerners. Whereas it was of course a wickedness engaged in by every civilisation in history. And, as Voltaire said, perhaps the only thing worse than what the Europeans did in buying Africans and sending them across the oceans was what the Africans did to their fellow Africans in stealing them and selling them, not just to the Europeans, Americans and Arabs but to other Africans. The few memoirs of slaves that have come down to us, such as those of the remarkable Olaudah Equiano, bear testament to this. The people who did the people-stealing were African. (This … does it diminish the horror of the European and transatlantic slave trade but it is context which is necessary, given that the re-eruption of a debate about reparations is so completely context-free.)
4. “Those who call for apologies seem to think that no apologies have been forthcoming before. (UK) laws putting an end to the slave trade were signed by King George III. Those who pretend that the Crown has never apologised for the slave trade or are overdue for an apology …. cannot know, for instance, that Prince Albert spoke at a meeting in London dedicated to the extinction of the slave trade in 1840. During his remarks, the consort to Queen Victoria not only apologised for the slave trade but described it as having been “the blackest stain upon civilised Europe”. Why was Albert still speaking about the slave trade in 1840? Because although Britain had by then long abolished slavery, other countries in the world had not. What made Britain remarkable was not just that we were the first to stop taking part in the wicked trade ourselves, but that having stopped doing so we then went on to do everything we could to end it in the rest of the world as well.
5. “After abolishing the trade in 1807, this country (the UK) chose to send the Royal Navy around the world, establishing the West Africa Squadron based at Freetown, and grew the fleet until a sixth of the ships and seamen of the Royal Navy were employed in the fight against the slave trade. The cost to Britain of this highly unusual decision was significant. Scholars who have done the maths have produced some sobering conclusions. Abolition is estimated to have cost just under 2 per cent of national income. That was the case each year for 60 years (from 1808 to 1867). Factoring in the principal costs and the secondary costs, such as the higher prices of goods the British had to pay throughout this period, Britain's abolition and suppression of the Atlantic slave trade may actually have equalled any financial benefits accrued to the nation during the period of the trade. Britain's actions have rightly been described by historians as “the most expensive example” of international moral action “recorded in modern history”.
6. “The costs were not only financial. In the years that the West Africa Squadron patrolled the seas, they captured as many as 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 African slaves. This led to significant loss of British lives. During the decades after 1808, more than 1,500 men of the Royal Navy were killed in action fighting ships from countries such as Brazil, whose trade in slaves continued until the 1880s. Do these lives not count for anything?
7. “Does the heroism of these seamen, chasing ships across the oceans, boarding vessels and fighting for the lives of slaves stowed away in the hold, count for nothing? Apparently so. Activists are so desperate to pretend the Royal Navy did no such thing that they have even attempted to smear Britain's greatest naval hero, Admiral Lord Nelson, by claiming he was a supporter of the trade. In 2020 activists called for Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square to be removed. Searching for evidence after they had already reached their conclusion, they cited the existence of a “letter” showing Nelson's ardent support for the trade. What they did not realise (it was proved to much less fanfare shortly afterwards by Nelson scholars) was that these activists had cited a letter which was a forgery. Specifically, it was a forgery created by the anti-abolitionist movement when the slavery debate in England was still current to posthumously pretend he would have been on their side.
8. One of the first things the Biden administration did was to look at setting up a commission to investigate the possibility of paying reparations. What any such commissions will someday have to confront are the deep problems that everybody in America as in Britain would like to avoid. First is the fact that this demand is not as new as it sounds. The case for reparations has been made for 200 years and with every year that passes it becomes ever less justifiable. - Who today has actually suffered for the crimes of slavery? - Who today has actually perpetrated the crime?
So the demand for cash continues. But here is the problem. Today we are not even talking about a wealth transfer from perpetrators to victims. We are not even talking about a wealth transfer from the descendants of perpetrators to the descendants of victims. We are talking about a wealth transfer from people who may look like people who did a wrong in the past to people who may look like people to whom a wrong was done. How on earth is restitution to be made on such terms?
Collective Guilt: Shortly after the George Floyd incident in 2021 there was an outpouring of sorrow and shame across a wide spectrum of the West that included national leaders, preachers, footballers etc. etc. But I find some specific problems with this:
1. Am I to be held guilty for every past sin of the nation to which I now belong, and how long back should that go? If you answer ‘yes' then black Africans should also be held guilty for all the selling at home. Murray in ‘The War on the West', expanding on the quote above from the Times, wrote,
2. If I am being accused of such guilt, it fails to take note of the fact that my family, living in this country may have been oppressed by the class system. Moreover they may have been servants, not far off being slaves, so how would they possibly have guilt attributed to them for what the powerful classes were perhaps doing hundreds of years ago?
3. If guilt is being sought to be heaped upon me in the UK for social misdemeanours and injustices, by these culture activists why aren't they seeking to lay guilt on other parts of the world at the same time, on China for its many civil rights abuses, on Russia for its imperialistic invasions, on India for Hindu persecution of Muslim or Christian minorities, on Iran, Saudi Arabia and a variety of other countries who violently oppose the Christian church? Where are the activists voices? Nowhere to be heard, because they haver tunnel distorted vision with a single goal of undermining Western societies.
4. On the spiritual side, you may believe we are guilty for what previous generations did but Scripture is clear that GOD DOESN'T do this – see Ezek 18 esp. v.20 – that corrected a wrong understanding of earlier Scripture. This isn't to say we shouldn't recognise the problem, work to counter it wherever it affects us, and view all others as potential children of God AND therefore with great potential but in the meantime, the principle is the individual is to be held guilty for his own sins, not the sins of his father. Ezekiel was doubly clear on that (read chapter 18 in detail).
5. Trying to impose guilt today for past misdemeanours can fall into the trap of using ‘lived experiences' which are notoriously inaccurate; memory is frequently unreliable or only partial and may indeed fail to take into account the ‘victim's' part in it all, or of those close to them, as noted above.
None of this is to in any way diminish the awfulness of slavery whenever it occurred, and one wonders if the so-called culture activists either support anti-slavery agencies and charities today, or whether they just use the words for their own means and care little, in reality, for human plight.
So, when others, media or who knows else, tries to dump you with guilt, have nothing of it! We are all guilty because we are all part of sinful mankind but none of that should stop us taking actions of support or encouragement wherever we find unfairness or injustice around us. Guilt is often unreal, as I hope we've shown above, but it always weakens and silences us and stops us standing up for what is right, speaking out truth and challenging the purveyors of lies and deception and injustice.
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