Reparations & Slave Traders

Discussion in 'Race Relations' started by Flanders, Oct 2, 2011.

  1. Flanders

    Flanders Well-Known Member

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    Contemporary slave traders, or to be more accurate, those who feed on selective slavery from the past, are experiencing hard times here in the US because their gig is not funded by tax dollars:

    Dreams for National Slavery Museum caught in bankruptcy
    By Matthew A. Ward | Reuters – 9 hrs ago

    http://news.yahoo.com/dreams-national-slavery-museum-caught-bankruptcy-000006637.html

    Slaver traders are doing better at the United Nations. No museums and fundraising cocktail parties for them. Their message is gut-level simple: GIVE US THE MONEY:

    Recently, the U.N. General Assembly heard from the prime ministers of two twin-island Caribbean nations: Antigua and Barbuda and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. In separate speeches, the Caribbean leaders declared that reparations were needed to remedy the barbaric injustices of slavery that Western nations loosed upon the world -- and whose legacies continue to this day, according to Caribbean news outlets.

    I wonder if Prime Ministers Spencer and Gonsalves realize that the descendants of the original slaves own the island countries that are now demanding reparations. It’s doubtful they would have come so far had their ancestors remained in Africa. As I see it that is reparations enough.

    NOTE: My favorite definition of reparations is the one I grew up with:

    Compensation or remuneration required from a defeated nation as indemnity for damage or injury during a war.

    If that definition is applied to today’s reparation hustlers the losers are demanding compensation from the winners. Put it this way: Japan could have demanded reparations from the Philippines.

    This next extract from the enclosed article defines reparations to perfection:


    The reparations racket has been around for years. It has attracted a motley bunch -- from jive-talking hustlers to erudite professors of academic disciplines like African-American history and post-colonial studies. But only in recent years have whole countries joined the reparations racket. Besides having large black populations, they share common traits: leftist leaders, ailing economies, and a host of anti-Western grievances propagated by leftist elites.

    Socialists, assorted hustlers, and dirty little moralists did rather well out of slavery in America’s past, but they forget to say that it was African tribal kings who sold their own people to slave traders. That at least makes black Africans as guilty as those mean white guys who purchased the slaves.

    And the colonies were governed by England at the time slavery came to the New World. In my book that makes the British the bigger villains, yet those who hate everything America’s Founders accomplished never mention that. Probably because Great Britain is the bastion of socialism.

    It should be said on behalf of the Founding Fathers that they were burdened with a slave economy in the South. Those brilliant men had to realize that extracting independence from Great Britain would not have come to pass had they tried to destroy the slave economy by anything they said in the Declaration of Independence. “It’s the economy, stupid.” was a political reality even back then.

    The second paragraph in the Declaration of Independence is a compomrise with the slave economy in the Southern states. More to the point, most of America’s Founders hated slavery while owning slaves. In any event, politically motivated white elitists who are endlessly offended that Africans came to this continent as slaves should go easy on the whip when putting the knock on this country’s past. Hell, if they had not come as slaves they probably would not have come at all. And slaves did refuse to return to their beloved Africa after they were freed.

    The Right of return

    If thirty-five million black Americans decided to immigrate to one or two countries in Africa, they could takeover the entire continent in no time at all —— the same way it happened with European settlers and Native Americans. Substitute racism for religious intolerance and you have the same ingredients that prompted European whites to come to the New World.

    Black Americans are certainly more advanced than the overwhelming majority of native Africans. If societal evolution brought on by a mass migration to Africa repeats the New World paradigm, black Americans and their descendants could soon be living on, and dominating, a continent without white people to contend with. (Whites are already leaving some parts of Africa.)

    Once established in Africa, black American expatriates could then demand reparations from the black descendants of the people who sold them into slavery in the first place. Blacks demanding reparations from blacks can hardly be considered racist.

    Finally, although then-Senator Obama never called his Global Poverty Act of 2007 (S. 2433) reparations, his thinking smacks of reparations to the poor for being poor. If I remember correctly, the initial price tag was 98 billion dollars a year ad infinitum. Knowing Hussein a little better today than anyone knew him a few years ago, as well as knowing how these things work, I’m pretty sure most of the money would have gone to Africa.

    Here’s the article in two parts:


    October 2, 2011
    Grievance-Mongering Leaders Demand Slave Reparations at the United Nations
    By David Paulin

    In another case of anti-Western grievance-mongering at the United Nations, the leaders of two Caribbean nations are calling for slave reparations from Western nations that profited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

    Recently, the U.N. General Assembly heard from the prime ministers of two twin-island Caribbean nations: Antigua and Barbuda and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. In separate speeches, the Caribbean leaders declared that reparations were needed to remedy the barbaric injustices of slavery that Western nations loosed upon the world -- and whose legacies continue to this day, according to Caribbean news outlets.

    "Antigua and Barbuda has long argued that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and racial violence against peoples of African descent have severely impaired our advancement as nations, communities and individuals across the economical, social and political spectra," Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer told the General Assembly.

    For his part, Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent and the Grenadines said: "Racial discrimination was justified and became itself the justification for a brutal, exploitative and dehumanizing system of production that was perfected during the trans-Atlantic slave trade and ingrained over the course of colonial domination."

    "The structure of our modern world is still firmly rooted in a past of slavers and colonialist exploitation," he added. "While we celebrate the noble heroism of the famous and the faceless who resisted racist colonial hegemony, we must continue to confront the legacy of this barbarism and continuing injustice."

    The leaders' comments, during a Saturday session, were made one day after another case of grievance-mongering and grandstanding before the General Assembly: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's call for Palestinian statehood.

    The reparations racket has been around for years. It has attracted a motley bunch -- from jive-talking hustlers to erudite professors of academic disciplines like African-American history and post-colonial studies. But only in recent years have whole countries joined the reparations racket. Besides having large black populations, they share common traits: leftist leaders, ailing economies, and a host of anti-Western grievances propagated by leftist elites.

    How should descendents of African slaves be compensated according to reparations advocates? Spencer called for formal apologies from former slave-trading Western nations, after which these offenders must "back up their apologies with new commitments to the economic development of the nations that have suffered from this human tragedy." The Caribbean region, to be sure, is already a major recipient of U.S. foreign aid, a fact the speakers failed to mention.

    Neither of men, moreover, mentioned an awkward detail: their own African ancestors may have owned slaves and participated in the slave trade (though they never did as well, of course, as Westerners, who were not doing anything illegal at the time).

    Ten years ago, the anti-Western reparations movement was energized by the United Nations' racism conference in Durban, South Africa; that was the infamous UNESCO-sponsored event in 2001 that equated Zionism with racism. It also offered tacit support to the idea of slave reparations.

    Regarding Durban, Spencer was full of pride, calling it "an innovative and action-oriented agenda to combat all forms of racism and racial discrimination."

    It's a view shared by the United Nations. Just five days after Spencer and Gonsalves made their reparations pitches, the U.N. held a high-level meeting to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action.
     
  2. Flanders

    Flanders Well-Known Member

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    PART TWO:

    Spencer and Gonsalves are not the first Caribbean leaders to jump on the reparations bandwagon. Four years ago, Jamaica's political leaders were angling to shake down Britain for slave reparations.

    The left-leaning People's National Party was then in charge on the island, a hotbed of leftist politics with a population of 2.7 million. Struggling to reverse years of economic decline, leftist political leaders and elites started beating the drum for a regional campaign to convince Britain to provide compensation for its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

    "We owe reparations to ourselves and our ancestors," Rupert Lewis, a lecturer in government at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, told a gathering of schoolchildren in Kingston, the capital. The occasion was part of activities associated with Jamaica's commemoration of Britain's 200-year-old Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, adopted March 25, 1807. At the time, the case for reparations was being made to ordinary Jamaicans with lectures and the airing of the pro-reparations documentary film The Empire Pays Back. The message: the source of the island's problems is indeed the legacy of slavery and British colonialism -- not the misguided leftist policies that have guided Jamaica since it gained independence from Britain in 1962.

    "In the medium term, the goal is to mobilize all those who have been working in the [reparations] field for a long time, and to sensitize those who have dismissed the work of the movement for lack of knowledge," Jamaica's minister of tourism, entertainment, and culture, Aloun Assamba, told the Jamaica Observer.

    'Cultural Marxism'

    Curiously, the Caribbean's reparations hustlers single out only Western nations in their demands. They ignore the slavery that existed elsewhere in the world -- the Middle East, Africa, and South America -- and while they mourn Africans caught up in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, they shed no tears for the millions of Africans who disappeared into the Muslim slave trade. Nor do they condemn slavery that persists in Africa today, nor the human trafficking that's a problem in many parts of the world, including Jamaica.

    Slavery, in other words, doesn't bother these people nearly as much as all their frothing suggests. How come? Some are obviously racists. And all are leftists; for them, reparations are the means by which they can achieve the Marxist redistribution of wealth they dream about.

    In recent years, they've adopted a postmodern form of Marxism -- what might be called "cultural Marxism." In this view, the villains are no longer capitalists and bourgeoisie, as espoused in economic Marxism. Now the villain is "white male privilege" -- a privilege supposedly made possible by the head start that black African slaves gave to white Western nations. Indeed, as Cambridge University senior lecturer Richard Drayton wrote in an upbeat review of The Empire Pays Back, "Africa underpins a modern experience of (white) British privilege." The documentary was produced by Jamaica-born producer Robert Beckford, a lecturer in African Diaspora Religions and Cultures at England's University of Birmingham.

    How should Britain's monstrous historical theft and injustice be remedied? In a word: reparations -- by redistributing wealth from whites to the ancestors of black African slaves. Ultimately, reparations advocates say this is all about healing. "These [reparations] proposals are not intended to be divisive or confrontational, but rather form part of a process to heal the wounds of the past," explained Jamaica's Ambassador to the United Nations, Stafford Neil, during Durban's racism conference.

    And no matter that few if any whites are around anymore with any connection whatsoever to the slave trade hundreds of years ago -- yet whites as a group are nevertheless cast as modern-day beneficiaries of slavery.

    Ultimately, reparations advocates distort the realities of the ancient slave trade, according to Ohio State University Professor Robert Davis. "We cannot think of slavery as something that only white people did to black people," says Davis, author of Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). In his book, Davis documents that Muslim slavers off North Africa's Barbary Coast enslaved one million or more white Europeans between 1530 and 1780 -- a number greater than Africans enslaved during the same period.

    Why is the enslavement of white Europeans ignored? Because, says Davis, it fails to echo the scholarship favored today -- that history is all about European conquest and colonization.

    In this version of history, Britain and America get no credit for leading international efforts to end the profitable trans-Atlantic slave trade -- even using their warships to stop it. Both countries are portrayed in the worst light possible; whatever they did, it was too little, too late.

    Not surprisingly, reparations advocates who claim that the West's prosperity is founded upon slave labor overlook the obvious reasons for the West's prosperity: its political and economic life are organized around democracy, free markets, and the rule of law.

    Dedicated leftists won't admit this. This includes the Caribbean's leftist rulers, who ambivalently embrace free markets and look for their inspiration to Cuba -- a place where you won't find any of the 2.6 million members of the Jamaican Diaspora living.

    Besides slavery, Jamaica's leftist elites obsess endlessly over British colonialism, but there's a glaring irony with this grievance-mongering: Jamaica's dramatic decline over the years -- crime, gangs, political corruption -- occurred when black Jamaicans, not their former masters, were running their country. Jamaica's problems, in other words, have all been related to specific decision made by Jamaica's politicians and elites.

    Jamaica vs. the Bahamas

    Jamaica's blame-it-on-slavery argument becomes especially problematic when the country's dysfunction is contrasted against the prosperity enjoyed by the Bahamas. A former British colony, the Bahamas also has a legacy of slavery. Yet it has no crippling debt, no history of serious political violence, and no out-of-control crime rate. It has one of the region's highest per capita incomes: $19,000, nearly five times more than Jamaica's. There's no huge Bahamian Diaspora.

    Why is the Bahamas a success? Because its political leaders and voters look forward, not backward -- and they unashamedly look to America as an example. They have for the most part embraced business-friendly policies and a low-tax philosophy.

    Four years ago, for instance, an interesting political phenomena occurred in the Bahamas. Its ruling left-leaning political party suffered a stunning election defeat, despite having overseen an expanding economy and an unprecedented development boom. Interestingly, the main campaign issues were good management and honesty in government -- not racial issues (such as which candidate had the darker skin color). It's an example of the Bahamas' good governance and civic culture -- traits not as apparent in Jamaica and other Caribbean island-nations with similar histories of racism and colonialism.

    Notably, in the Bahamas, the bicentennial of the slave trade's abolition got circumspect media coverage -- and was consigned to the inside pages of the main newspapers. In Jamaica, on the other hand, The Observer -- a popular left-leaning daily owned by Sandal's resort owner Gordon "Butch" Stewart -- ran a chest-thumping front-page article in which Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller paid lip service to reparations, telling schoolchildren to honor their slave ancestors by respecting one another. "My request for honoring them is that for every child that is raped and is left to soak in the rapist's semen and her own blood, you are perpetuating, Mr. Rapist, the action of the slave master."

    It's hard to imagine political leaders in the Bahamas making such lurid comments to schoolchildren. Nor are Bahamian political leaders grandstanding before the U.N. General Assembly, demanding slave reparations based on a leftist post-modern view of history.

    They're too busy looking forward, not backward.

    http://www.americanthinker.com/2011...tml?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
     
  3. DutchClogCyborg

    DutchClogCyborg New Member

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    How about we give them a ticket back to Africa as compensation? I am suck and tired of people who are unwilling to work and prefer a blanco cheque of money.
     
  4. Unifier

    Unifier New Member

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    I always thought this was fair. If you're so pissed off that we dragged you here against your will and you're convinced that you can't get a fair shake here, perhaps you'd be happy with an apology and a ticket back home.

    I don't know a single bellyaching victicrat that wants to go live in Africa. They want to enjoy the better life circumstances that they have here in the U.S. while still being able to complain about how unfair it is.

    Enlightened black folks don't do this. They've been strong enough to resist the destructive culture that teaches blacks to feel angry and oppressed and to be grateful for nothing. The liberal culture that tells them they can't do anything for themselves without the help of benevolent whitey. Whitey to the rescue. We'll save you. You're not capable of doing it on your own. :puke:
     
  5. Zook

    Zook New Member

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    Yeah, shame there isn't many of them out there...
     
  6. speedingtime

    speedingtime Banned at Members Request

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    Far more then you give credit for. A shame, that is.
     
  7. Zook

    Zook New Member

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    Yeah, no...
     
  8. Anders Hoveland

    Anders Hoveland Banned

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    I am not absolutely against reparations for slavery. But I think such payment should be tied to voluntary repatriation of blacks, either back to Africa, or in the formation of a new black nation within the current United States.

    Between the blacks and the other people who do not want to be around blacks, I think there would be enough support for this proposal. It would be completely voluntary, of course. Any black person who decided to leave would be given a payment, perhaps 40000 dollars. The individual could always decide to return, but would then have to pay back the payment.

    What is wrong with this idea? It does not force blacks to do anything. It just gives them another opportunity choice. And many taxpayers would be more than happy to have fewer blacks in their neighborhoods or country. Ironically, I think the main activists that would be against such funding would be white liberals, who seem to care more about imposing their ideals of "equality" than helping the actual minorities themselves. As excellent example of this can be seen with immigration, which is destroying unions and driving down wages and working conditions.
     
  9. hvywgt250

    hvywgt250 New Member

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    Contrary to negro mythology and the claims of reparations activists, America was not built on the whip-lashed back of African slave labor. The overwhelming majority of black slaves labored in the fields. They did not pioneer the land from wilderness into farms and towns, they did not build the roads, bridges, canals, railroads, and skyscrapers of our great cities. They did not mine the coal, gold, silver, copper, and other minerals. They did not smelt the ore and stoke the furnaces and pour the molten steel to create the infrastructure of America's industrial base. They did not work in the factories and turn out the abundance of products that made this country's economy the envy of the world. They did not invent the automobile, the electric light, the camera, the radio, the airplane, the television, the microscope, the computer, the rifle, the sewing machine, or anything else you care to mention with the exception of peanut butter. They did not win this country by blood and arms, striving with and defeating the British, the Indians, the Mexicans, and anyone else who stood in our way. They picked cotton! And where you can cite exceptions, this insignificant minority was paid for their time and trouble just like their White compatriots. White men built this country, not African slaves
     
  10. micfranklin

    micfranklin Banned

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    Wanna cite your sources?
     
  11. hvywgt250

    hvywgt250 New Member

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    My job is to make a statement.....you do the research and prove me wrong...if you do then I'll admit I'm wrong..
     
  12. micfranklin

    micfranklin Banned

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    You made the claim, or assumption rather, so YOU back it up.
     
  13. hvywgt250

    hvywgt250 New Member

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    You are, of course, under no obligation to accept any particular claim as true, but if you insist that a claim isn’t reasonable or credible, you should be willing to explain how and why.
     
  14. micfranklin

    micfranklin Banned

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    Actually it goes both ways and you made the initial claim so you really should back it up, especially when most of what gets posted in the Race forum is questionable. But since you were nice about it, I'll show you some research.

    West Virginia and some others disagree with you on that.

    http://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/25

    Actually Henry Ford himself hired blacks and European immigrants for his company in the production of automobiles. Even better, the invention of the cotton gin, by Eli Whitney (a black person) was a decent contribution to the Industrial Revolution.

    And no one said they did. But I did hear that developing physostigmine, a drug used to treat glaucoma is pretty important.

    http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775691.html

    Lies. In fact a pretty big chunk of the military forces in the Civil War was made up of black people.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_African_Americans

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_African_Americans_in_the_American_Civil_War

    Barring your obvious "Black people suck" lean, I think I've just proven you wrong.
     
  15. wopper stopper

    wopper stopper New Member

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    so if blacks were paid for their labor, then no reparations
     
  16. micfranklin

    micfranklin Banned

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    And just like that, problem(s) solved.
     
  17. wopper stopper

    wopper stopper New Member

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    what problem(s) ?
     
  18. micfranklin

    micfranklin Banned

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    No reparations needed.
     
  19. wopper stopper

    wopper stopper New Member

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    I agree ,
    none are due
     
  20. The Judge

    The Judge New Member Past Donor

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    What about those who were not paid for their labor? Don't they deserve a check?
     
  21. Zook

    Zook New Member

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    Like who? Where is he?
     
  22. wopper stopper

    wopper stopper New Member

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    Zook pretty much nailed it.

    but let's remember that slaves actually did get paid in the form of food, clothes, housing and medical care.

    Deduct that from the big fat check you are envisioning for yourself.
     
  23. Libhater

    Libhater Well-Known Member

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    LOL! I'm still waiting to get the names of the recipients I'll be writing those checks for. They may have to wait a while though, cause I first have to get off of my WALL STREET financial tower to mingle through the crowd of protestors so as to first hand them the checks they so rightly deserve. You slave wannabes will just have to wait in line behind the rest of the gang before receiving those tax funded entitlements.
     
  24. Pokerface

    Pokerface New Member

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    I agree with this 100% .. Send them back to Africa if they want to go.
     
  25. Libhater

    Libhater Well-Known Member

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    That's the problem, they won't go back africa knowing well they get all the bennies they need here without ever lifting a finger.
     

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