“African chiefs urged to apologise for slave trade”

The Guardian published an article on Nov. 18, 2009 with the above title. It raises the subject of Africans themselves who furthered the slave trade. Here is a sample quotation:

“The shameful history of some traditional leaders remains an awkward subject on which many politicians prefer to maintain silence. One exception was in 1998 when Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda, told an audience including Bill Clinton: ‘African chiefs were the ones waging war on each other and capturing their own people and selling them. If anyone should apologise it should be the African chiefs. We still have those traitors here even today.'”

In History of Slavery, we read “Slavery was known in the very first civilizations such as Sumer in Mesopotamia which dates back as far as 3500 BC, as well as in almost every other civilization.”

If you had a relative who fought for the Confederacy 8 generations ago, does that make you guilty of something? I don’t think so. You cannot be held responsible for what someone else has done, and especially so long ago. If you had a relative who was a slave 8 generations ago, does that entitle you to take something today from someone? I don’t think so. How can you make a just claim unless you can show a harm that today’s person is doing to you? This will prove impossible because causation is vastly diluted by the passage of time and the interposition of so many persons and events.

Most people today are guilty of many things, but slavery isn’t one of them. Social justice warriors (SJWs) cannot thrust such guilt upon anyone except existing slave traders, and there are some still said to be operating. Accusing innocent people today of benefiting from slavery of yesteryear can only cause resentment, sow discord and create counter-reactions. Singling out and blaming white people as a class will be seen as the rank injustice that it is. Nor can accusations of Western civilization fare any better. A disembodied concept like “Western civilization” can’t bear guilt. SJWs cannot sanitize the history of slavery by removing signs of the past from the present.

Forced wealth redistribution via political power has grown over time. It’s unlawful, unconstitutional, immoral and it has never done Americans any good. If this is what SJWs want more of, forget it. It’s only more of the same destructive social-political idiocy. The sensible idea and the just idea is to create wealth, not force people to give it up to others for any baseless reasons.

Reparations, a form of wealth redistribution, are a non-starter for many strong reasons. They will never happen because they’d tear the country apart, which would reduce wealth drastically for a time. They are complete foolishness.

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9:20 am on August 28, 2017