Joe Madison
There are STILL some ahistoric, dolts among us who continue to make inane claims like “The foundation of all of America’s wealth was slavery.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOPPQq4KLh0)
What can you expect from people who STILL don’t believe that the African slaves, were taken entirely from INTERIOR, sub-Saharan Africa by more sophisticated and advanced Coastal Africans and sold BY those Coastal Africans to BOTH Arabs, including the Arabs of North Africa (Egyptians, etc.) in the Zanzibar Slave Trade and to Europeans in the European Slave Trade.
The West (Europe and America) weren’t merely the very first nations to outlaw chattel slavery, they remain among the very few nations who’ve, even today, outlawed that primitive practice. The West appears to have been at least 400 or 500 years ahead of the rest of the world morally, as well as industrially and technically.
YES, even today, chattel slavery STILL exists throughout most of the Arab-Muslim world, along with vast tracts of Asia and, ironically enough, throughout sub-Saharan Africa, as well.
In the U.S. specifically, virtually NONE of that nation’s wealth was “created by chattel slavery.”
General William Tecumseh Sherman was no doubt right when he said, “We burned the South for four months, but it took less than a day to destroy everything the negro slaves had a hand in making.” That could be said because black slaves weren’t taught to build structures, nor work in the few industrialized cities in the Confederacy, nor do much of anything short of the agricultural and domestic work they were assigned to.
General Sherman wasn’t denigrating the black race, nor the generations of slaves that had long toiled in the South, he was merely stating a fact, that chattel slavery is and was an anachronism of an earlier agricultural age.
In America’s Civil War, the Agrarian society (the Confederacy) lost and the mechanized, industrial society (the Union) triumphed.
In truth, the world owes ALL of its industrialization to Northern Europeans, as no other group had much of a hand in that industrialization, which began in England and spread quickly through Germany (an even more technically proficient and better educated nation) and the rest of Europe. Yes, to be sure, Jewish (among other) bankers had a hand in the financing of that “Industrial Revolution,” but any honest look at the inventors and the men who moved that industrialization forward, shows very clearly that they were virtually ALL northern Europeans. From James Watt – Steam Engineering (1736-1819) often referred to as “the father of the steam age” because of his years of hard work in improving the Newcomen design created a true ‘steam engine’ that brought on the “Age of Mechanization,” to Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham factory owner and engineer whose works and capital facilitated the manufacture of James Watt’s steam engines, to Henry Maudslay, who, in seeing that the new age of machines would require metal to be worked with precision, pioneered the making of the machines – lathes, drills, planning machines, etc. which were used to make the other machines of the revolution, to Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Gottlieb Daimler, Karl Benz, the Duryea brothers, the Wright brothers and the other giants of the modern machine age.
It was also those SAME Northern Europeans who eradicated chattel slavery, while it is still agrarian societies, like those found in sub-Saharan Africa that STILL, to this day, wallow in the deprivations of subsistence agricultural economies, rife with chattel slavery.
It is industrialization that made chattel slavery obsolete. It allowed for the production of far greater amounts of goods at much lower prices. Mechanization and technological advancements have allowed more work to get done with fewer workers.
This has benefited EVERYONE and the proof of that is no movement has been amassed against this replacement of workers by machines since the failed Luddite Movement of the mid-1700s. That movement was such a failure and was so openly opposed even by the workers of that day that it petered out with barely a whimper.
As to the contributions of African slavery to America, it was negligible. The Southern economy was in the midst of a massive reorganization and mechanization prior to the Civil War, which is why the importation of slaves was banned in America on January 1st, 1808. The agriculture of the South fed a lot of people, BUT it offered no lasting wealth creation.
Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin, on the other hand, produced a lasting legacy of wealth creation, as did George Washington Carver’s awesome and eclectic array of discoveries in the later 19th and early 20 Centuries.
The vast bulk of America’s wealth was created in the industrialized North and was NOT at all dependent upon uneducated, unskilled, agricultural workers from the Deep South even after the Civil War.
In an ironic twist of fate, when many of the North’s industrial centers became predominantly black in the late 1960s and beyond, as America shifted to new Information Age technologies, those workers were unable to continue to maintain the industrial output of places like Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, Newark, NJ and other such hubs. Some of that was almost certainly due to the shift in our nation’s productive focus, FROM “Rust Belt” industrial output TO Information Technology, but SOME of it was also due to the diminished quality of that urban workforce.
Interestingly enough, such industrialization has yet to be successfully grafted onto Sub-Saharan Africa, nor, for that matter, throughout much of the Arab Middle East. On the other hand, it has been able to take hold throughout much of Asia, South America and the rest of the world. There is no reason why it can’t eventually flourish the world over, once the theocratic despots of those regions are eliminated.
Bottom line, today we live in increasingly multi-cultural communities and that creates both challenges and advantages going forward, BUT one thing that has to be eradicated are the inane ideas that (1) the labors of earlier chattel slaves, be they the Irish (who comprised the majority of the slaves in the New World until around 1700, due to Oliver Cromwell’s “Irish Slave Trade”), black, or other “produced the foundation of today’s wealth” AND (2) that some people living today “owe,” while others “are owed” because of past injustices.
The first of those ideas should be self-evidently false on its face. The agricultural work of the Southern Confederacy did little to nothing to help generate the foundation of America’s great wealth.
The second is simply morally reprehensible. Just as we don’t hang the children of murderers who “got away with it,” decades earlier - because such actions (crimes) are NOT heritable. Likewise, as the global injustices of the past have accrued to the entire population alive today. It’s impossible to hold Oliver Cromwell’s heirs accountable for the horrific and genocidal Irish Slave trade that Oliver Cromwell instituted in the 1600s, nor charge the scions of former black slaves and Southern Plantation owners accountable for the blood the predominantly Irish Union soldiers shed over black freedom (more than 80% of New York’s Union troops were of Irish descent) and the defeat of that anti-Industrial, pro-agrarian Confederacy, which some “Reparations” advocates seem to agitate for today.
My father’s family came over prior to the Civil War, fought in that war and I am steadfastly against such absurd attempts to “set things right.”
WHY?
Because they (1) punish people alive today who did no wrong and (2) benefit people alive today (such as I) who’ve suffered no such abuses and shed none of my own blood in that conflict.
Moreover, no one group has moved mankind forward alone, at least not nearly as effectively and efficiently as has the interplay and mixing of the talents that various people have brought forward from various and different cultures.
The truth is that many of the world's greatest inventors were NOT good business people. They needed visionary financiers and investors to move their ideas forward and, in many cases, to adapt them to commercial purposes.
The late, great Reggie White and Hall of Fame NFL player was excoriated for noting, in effect, that different groups generally have different talents, differing strengths and weaknesses, BUT he wasn't saying that any one group was better, or worse than any other. His comments were part of a broader religious view that, each group/race had diverse "gifts," which, in his view, "formed a complete image of God [...] because He (God) was trying to re-create Himself." An image that society had pushed aside, leading to the aversion of racial unity. He specified that, "without assimilation, there's no desegregation, nor is there integration, because people of all ethnic backgrounds have to be able to compete economically in order to build their families."
While I don't share Reggie White's religious views, nor his view that, "homosexuality is a choice, but he was right that there are differences between the various cultures and races and that they succeed best when they are able to work together.
While sub-Saharan Africa had no Industrial Revolution of its own, numerous African-Americans have contributed greatly to America's greatness, especially over the last century. Besides the likes of George Washington Carver, whose works are still being implemented today and S. B. Fuller who single-handedly started a cosmetics empire out of virtually nothing, scores of other African-Americans have contributed to business (from George Crum, the inventor of the potato chip, to Granville T. Woods, who invented the device (the multiplex telegraph) that allowed train dispatchers and engineers to communicate with moving trains via telegraph, back in 1887) and medicine (Charles Richard Drew, inventor of the blood bank) to entertainment and sports, proving that while groups may GENERALLY have different strengths and weaknesses, there are also many who "cross over" and offer greatness in other fields of endeavor than the ones their group may be generally known and appreciated for.
That co-mingling of humanity is not only the best and most efficient path to human progress, it's what the identity politics embraced by "Progressives" and other Leftists, destroys.
Just being honest, with no offense intended toward ANY others.
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