Posted on 04/26/2010 7:37:49 PM PDT by jazusamo
Many years ago, I was surprised to receive a letter from an old friend, saying that she had been told that I refused to see campus visitors from Africa.
At the time, I was so bogged down with work that I had agreed to see only one visitor to the Stanford campus-- and it so happens that he was from Africa. He just happened to come along when I had a little breathing room from the work I was doing in my office.
I pointed out to my friend that whoever said what she heard might just as well have said that I refused to go sky-diving with blacks-- which was true, because I refused to go sky-diving with anybody, whether black, white, Asian or whatever.
The kind of thinking that produced a passing misconception about me has, unfortunately, produced much bigger, much longer lasting, much more systematic and more poisonous distortions about the United States of America.
Slavery is a classic example. The history of slavery across the centuries and in many countries around the world is a painful history to read-- not only in terms of how slaves have been treated, but because of what that says about the whole human species-- because slaves and enslavers alike have been of every race, religion and nationality.
If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings-- no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history.
But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and in the movies. The message that is pounded home again and again is that white people enslaved black people.
It is true, just as it is true that I don't go sky-diving with blacks. But it is also false in its implications for the same reason. Just as Europeans enslaved Africans, North Africans enslaved Europeans-- more Europeans than there were Africans enslaved in the United States and in the 13 colonies from which it was formed.
The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves picking cotton. But there are no movies or television dramas about it comparable to "Roots," and our schools and colleges don't pound it into the heads of students.
The inhumanity of human beings toward other human beings is not a new story, much less a local story. There is no need to hide it, because there are lessons we can learn from it. But there is also no need to distort it, so that sins of the whole human species around the world are presented as special defects of "our society" or the sins of a particular race.
If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilization, it is that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery, including in some cases armed resistance.
Only the fact that the West had more firepower than others put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. Yet today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery-- on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment.
It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who go back to mine history, in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization, have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire or similar atrocities in other times and places.
Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.
An ancient adage says: "Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof." But apparently that is not sufficient for many among our educators, the intelligentsia or the media. They are busy poisoning the present by the way they present the past.
Yes! -- a lot of people (especially young people) have the impression that slavery was an invention of the American South, unique in human history.
I wish liberals would read Sowell. Maybe after reading what he has to say, they would shut up and think.
Europeans and Americans ended slavery. No credit for that. Five or more generations later, the liberals are still playing on the guilt trip in order to undermine western civilization. And replace it with what?
They have this hazy idea of a future Utopia. Ignoring the examples of the past, they lay the groundwork for the next Stalin or Mao. Nature abhors a vacuum. A tyrant will gladly fill the Utopian vacuum of the left if they succeed in bringing down western civilization.
Thomas Sowell is at the top of my list for people I’d like to have a good long dinner conversation with.
Thomas Sowell is an American treasure. May he live to be 200!
thanks jaz, i was gonna paste a paragraph ‘nugget’, but every one was worthy of the bump...
“Europeans and Americans ended slavery. No credit for that. Five or more generations later, the liberals are still playing on the guilt trip in order to undermine western civilization. And replace it with what?”
Venesuela
“There must be many like Sharpton and Jackson who despise Sowell, because he speaks the truth.”
Evil me have always despised good ones. Good men point out what evil men could have been. That must be hard to swallow.
A few years ago, I taught seventh grade social studies which spent about a quarter of the curriculum on Africa. When I would tell my prodominantly balck classes about slavery continuing, they never believed me. I found a Lonely Planet travel video that actually went to a slave trading post, and though they wouldn’t show any slaves for sale on camera, they did show some people who claimed to be runaway slaves in hiding. Very informative for American kids.
Oh, the slave traders?
You guessed it; no southern accents, and not a white person around except the narrator.
I am enamored of Mark Steyn's latest gem:I never miss reading Thomas Sowell, like Steyn, like VDH he never misses the mark. - tet68
Nevertheless, we should be grateful to [Comedy Central's] jelly-spined executives for reminding us that the cardboard heroes of the American media are your go-to guys for standing up to entirely fictitious threats. But for real ones? Not so much.Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.
The people - whether intellectuals, intelligentsia, journalists, or politicans - who do this have no courage to deal with real villains. So in order to set themselves up as cardboard heroes, they pick easy fights with harmless people.
I agree! Nailed it!
Thank you, Mr. Sowell... for saying the words that must be said.
“...why not intercede in Darfur—...”
Because in Darfur, it’s muslims slaughtering Christians, and that’s just fine and dandy.
Doesn’t fit the agenda. If it was the other way around, i.e., a Christian civilaztion lawfully protecting their homeland from a muslim invasion/takeover, why then, it would be send in the Drones...similar to another certain Democommie president a few years back in the 90s...in a certain Balkan area of the world.
Another unique aspect was the effort is miseducating the slave by forcibly eliminating all practice of the slave's former language and culture, outlawing any degree of education the slave may obtain, and instilling within the slave a sense of racial inferiority.
Here is one of the Sowell pings. jazusamo is the keeper of the list. Ping him if you want to get on.
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