From Wikipedia Commons: The Old Plantation (John Rose, ca. 1785–1795)
Whether naive or ignorant, leaving apathy aside, modern man associates the notion of “slavery” with either Roman households and gladiatorial games or plantation management in the South. For the older generations, moral education found dramatic support in the TV series “Roots” (1977). By now, only a few have personally experienced the division of public transportation and benches, etc. by “color” — a shameful reminiscence of slavery and racial discrimination.
We have been taught in school that slavery is evil. As written in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776), “all men are created equal”. Of course, nobody should own another man in the same way that he owns a horse or a cow. It is fundamentally incompatible with a Christian attitude towards life. Judging human dignity based on skin color is as immoral as it is stupid. So far, so good.
In the context of a post-Soviet Marxist revival, however, dramatically reinforced by the George Floyd affair, which elevated a habitual criminal to martyrdom, “white” Westerners have been pressured to do penance in recent decades. As if personally responsible for decisions made by those in power centuries ago, they are expected to tolerate “reciprocal discrimination” presented as “positive action” and make reparations for sins of the past. If they stand up for themselves and protest against revisionist absurdities, they risk being accused of “privilege blindness”, etc. (Marxist conspiracy theorists traditionally allude to oppressive “structures” into which only the ideologically initiated have full insight.)
Like bestial, cruel, and undignified treatment of our fellow men in general, slavery in one form or another has been prevalent as far back as our annals go. Even today, old-style slavery is widespread in certain parts of the world. In terms of numbers, however, there have never been more slaves in the world than in the twentieth century — long after the abolition of slavery in the U.S. during the 19th century.
Nobody in their right mind would haunt modern-day Italians with accusations of having exploited neighboring peoples, such as the French, as slaves. However, none of those, who are busy accusing the West of “inherited (collective) guilt” in connection with the eighteenth-century slave trade, take the trouble to address the current situation in Africa where slaves are traded along the same lines as 300 years ago.
In our time, when “The 1619 Project” was born, American school children know practically nothing about the victims of communism. For them, Che Guevara is the epitome of a “cool” rebel, whose iconic silhouette they love to wear on their T-shirts, as opposed to a cold-blooded killer in the ranks of “revolutionary” psychopaths. And few college students can barely account for the heinous crimes of Nazism. Indeed, indoctrinated by both news and social media, many have difficulty recognizing Jews as genocide “victims” rather than “executioners” because of the long-standing conflict with Muslims in the Middle East.
Why this obsession with, not the slavery of “Islamic warlords”, nor that of “KZ-camp Nazis” or “Gulag Bolsheviks”, but the transatlantic slave trade of eighteenth century America which ended more than 150 years ago?
Expectedly, persistent accusations against the West are not made by anybody. They originate from its sworn enemies. Strictly speaking, these anti-Western forces are the spiritual heirs of both Marxist mass murderers and large-scale slaveholders. Forget the claims about the fight for “social justice”. It is all emotional manipulation on the part of Marxists. Ideological zombies by choice, marching back and forth in our streets, their real purpose is to bring the West to its knees. They criticize not to improve, but to destroy. Notably, they have nothing against slavery as such, agreed with the need to contain and neutralize “reactionary forces”, but everything against the West.
Slavery of the past as a “moral indictment” is simply another propaganda tool in political strategy. Hijacked by Marxists, the “cause of the oppressed” is as hypocritical as any other ingredient of “totalitarian narrativism” since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Apparently neglected, because it poses an ideological taboo, the twentieth century saw the rise of the most powerful slave empires the world has ever known: Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and Communist China.
Totalitarianism has proven to be inextricably intertwined, not only with “arbitrary trials and executions”, but also with “systematized slavery” — the exploitation of men as livestock resources to be consumed at will. Altogether, playing on credulity, human perversion reaches no greater heights than in totalitarianism.
From the moment that Lenin took over the Kremlin, wholesale massacres and slavery began. The Gulag archipelago became the “freezing inferno” of modernity, the burial ground for untold millions of slaves, political prisoners deprived of their humanity.
Neither Soviet Russia nor Communist China is in danger of being accused of the sins of slavery, because they were not involved in the export of slaves from the coasts of Africa. Incidentally, Arab and Ottoman Muslims also go free, although they could be responsible for far greater slave trade (e.g. trans-Saharan, Crimean, and Barbary) and slaveholding than Europeans and Americans combined.
The notorious “Generalplan Ost”, a Nazi vision with historical roots in the nationalist “Drang nach Osten”, was a sickening manifestation of ideological delusion and evil. It envisaged Germanic colonization of Eastern Europe and Russia west of the Urals, based on a premise of racial superiority and natural right to “Lebensraum” at the expense of other peoples. Amounting to a prepared “genocide”, industrial-style plans, apart from “Wehrbauer” settlements, included enslavement, expulsion, and extermination of both Jews and Slavs.
As soon as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was broken, Nazis displayed an unbridled abuse of Russians, whom they considered “Untermenschen” without claim to dignity, deluded by racist dogmas of Aryanism. In contrast, Bolsheviks were literally prepared to enslave and massacre anybody without regard to ethnicity. The loyalty of the individual citizen to the party mattered less than the capricious intrigue that permeated the organization from top to bottom. As the great purges revealed, nobody could feel safe in the long run. — At the hands of anti-Christian, totalitarian ideologies, alternately Bolshevik and Nazi, Russians have suffered in the twentieth century like few others in the world.
The truth is that for decades — both before and after the fall of Nazism — Bolsheviks operated a slave system with “terror” as the principal weapon. Since then, Maoists have followed suit. In moral terms, Bolsheviks and Maoists have no advantage over Nazis — unless “racism” as an ideological, explicit motive is made the ultimate measure of evil.
In the footsteps of Young Turks, who exterminated Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians under cover of WWI, Stalin used WWII as a pretext for deportations of entire peoples (e.g. Crimean Tatars) — resulting in millions of deaths. There was no limit to his social engineering. A vengeful tyrant and untroubled killer, he was as revolutionary as anybody.
Maoists have advanced in a similar way in Tibet and Xinjiang where presently hundreds of thousands are held as forced-labor slaves in so-called “education camps”.
In totalitarian states, the life of the individual citizen belongs to somebody other than himself. Like Africans on antebellum plantations, he is deprived of his right to self-determination. Whatever the rhetoric of “official propaganda”, he remains the property of the state. Without restrictions, he is a slave proper. Everybody except the tyrant himself is in reality a slave.
If the slave resists and demands his freedom, he is punished. And when he tries to escape from slavery, the slave owners send their dogs and guns after him. In the end, his choice is between submission and death. That was also the essence of Kunta Kinte’s reluctant realization in “Roots”.
In summary, there are ideological reasons for political activists to target the West while turning a blind eye to crimes committed on a much larger scale by their own political allies in Soviet Russia and Communist China — not to mention Muslims of the caliphates. Basically, everything useful in the war against Western civilization will be weaponized. The anti-democratic enemy is opportunistic.
Whether you are a “decent man” never depends on your skin color, gender or age, but the thoughts and feelings that guide your actions among your fellow men. It is that simple.
“In spite of its glowing talk about the welfare of the masses, Communism’s methods and philosophy strip man of his dignity and worth, leaving him as little more than a depersonalized cog in the ever-turning wheel of the state.”