This is a big, important anniversary for the United States of America, my friends. Bet you don’t know what it is, either.
OK, here we go: On this day, August 20, 1619 — 400 years ago today — the first shipload of African slaves was taken ashore in what is now Virginia, just 13 years after the Pilgrims first settled in Jamestown.
And how should we view that fact, and the many shiploads of blacks who followed over, for close to 200 years? What should we feel? Shame that “we” enslaved the “poor, put upon” Negroes? A feeling that we must “make it up” to their descendants, even more so than we already have ever since the end of the Civil War and slavery? “Joy” that the descendants of black slaves have practically driven all the White athletes out of professional sports in the last 30 or 40 years, and taken over a significant segment of the professional music industry, and the vast majority of actors’ jobs in today’s TV commercials?
Or, try this one on for size: The original colonists, the ancestors of a few of us White Americans living today, made the worst, most ill-advised mistake in American history.
I vote for the last one.
You see, slavery had existed for many, many centuries prior to 1619, and anyone who thinks that only black Africans were ever slaves, knows nothing about history. Every race of man has had members who were enslaved, somewhere in the world, at some time or another. There were even some White slaves — indentured European servants — in the early U.S. And, of course, slavery is and always has been, morally unacceptable. But it took the United Kingdom, and then the United States, to start a campaign in the early 19th Century, that wound up abolishing slavery from the earth — except for some places in Muslim or African countries, of course.
It’s not hard to figure out the main reasons that our earliest colonists bought African blacks to serve as slaves. For one thing, they came from a civilization that was many centuries behind Europe and even the new American colonies in every kind of development. Easier to enslave people like that, than people who are as advanced as YOU are. Plus, having come from Africa, with its great heat and humidity, they could stand the scorching of the cotton and tobacco fields better than Europeans could. Plus, the colonists discovered that the American Indians, when some could be captured and put to work in the fields, were not trustworthy and were much more likely to run off.
And, of course, we shouldn’t have allowed slavery. I doubt if anyone would argue with that statement today. And we almost certainly wouldn’t have had our horrendous Civil War — or the War Between The States, as it’s still known in the South — without slavery. Although slavery was not the only cause of the war, despite what liberal historians will try to tell you.
But keep in mind: If we hadn’t allowed that first shipload of black Africans to come ashore, followed by hundreds more shiploads over the next two centuries, we probably wouldn’t have HAD slavery, to any degree. And it’s likely that the American colonies, later to be the United States of America, would have been much more ethnically homogeneous than it has become.
What’s that? Oh, you say that the liberals are constantly trying to convince us that “diversity is our strength”? Well, think about this: Each year people are interviewed all over the world to determine “the world’s happiest nations”. This year, the No. 1 was Finland. No. 2, Denmark. No. 3, Norway. No. 4, Iceland. Not much diversity in any of those four; overwhelming majorities of North European Caucasians. Sweden only made it to No. 7, but that’s probably because they’ve let in far, far too many Asian Muslims, who have become a major national headache for the Swedes.
Meanwhile, the U.S., with all its “wonderful diversity,” is down at No. 19, or thereabouts. We’re not too happy. And of course, anyone who has watched the TV news channels, or read the U.S. newspapers (those still left, that is) during the last several years, knows that, already.
The liberals like to agonize, rant and rave, about how black Africans were “forced to come to America, and enslaved.” True enough. But what they try to ignore is, the fact that ever since slavery was ended, the blacks have used those facts, to keep the White majority in this country on edge, and defensive, and feeling that they “owe” the blacks handouts, and “reparations,” and a thousand other made-up “compensations”, for something that no one alive today had anything to do with.
Early in the 20th Century there was an African American “leader” named W.E.B. Dubois who made a career out of encouraging his fellow blacks to never let up on pressuring the White man for more, and more, and more … At a rally once, he told the black audience never to be satisfied with what they had by any given time. Or, as he put it, “Agitate, agitate, agitate!”
Which is echoed, in other words, by the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and many other black agitators, right down to this day. It’s like they’re saying to us, “You honkies brought us over here, and held us as slaves, so it’s up to you to make amends. And we gonna keep rioting, and demanding, and threatening, to get what we want out of you, until the cows come home.” In other words, “We come a long way, but we got a long way to go. And you rednecks gonna pay for every bit of it.”
Horrible, horrible mistake you made, early colonists. And we’re still paying for it, 400 years later. You should have left them in Africa.
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