Posted on 05/16/2007 8:19:34 AM PDT by Mobile Vulgus
In another sad example of self flagellation by western elitists, the Guardian Newspaper in England published a column on how we Americans (and our English cousins) should not celebrate the founding of Jamestown, the first Virginia colony, 400 years ago because of... you guessed it... slavery.
Here we have another elitist congratulating himself that he is "informed" enough to know that slavery makes the founding of the USA a blight on humanity instead of the great event it truly is. Another leftist who cannot bring himself to be proud of anything the west has been responsible for because there were some bad things mixed in with the good. In fact, the bad things make us such hypocrites, goes this type of thinking, that all the good should be discounted over it. (It is always in fashion for Europeans to look down on the US, isn't it?)
In the Guardian, Historian, Benjamin Woolley, is wooly headed enough to say that the Queen not being around to celebrate the doomed Virginia colony is "understandable" because of how evil the USA is.
The Queen took a tour of Jamestown, Virginia, on Friday as part of the commemorations of its 400th anniversary. The site of England's first permanent colony in North America, recently uncovered in a series of spectacular archaeological excavations, is of huge historical importance. It is the reason the US is an English-speaking nation, with Anglo-Saxon legal, commercial and political institutions. However, the Queen will be not be present for the anniversary itself, which falls this weekend. The reason is a prior commitment that necessitated her presence in the US a week early: the Kentucky Derby, held last Saturday.Give me a break.The Queen's desire to escape to the safety of the world of horse racing is understandable. Compared to a punt even on a rank outsider, commemorating the arrival of a motley crew of 100 or so English renegades and outcasts on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay in 1607 has proved to be fraught with risk. Not only is there the solemn complication of the campus shootings at nearby Virginia Tech, but there is the small matter of Jamestown being the birthplace of African slavery, Native American genocide and the global tobacco trade, as well as of North American democracy and free enterprise.
Here's a question: how can the USA be the "birthplace" of African slavery? There weren't any Africans here before the English BROUGHT them here. This means that African slavery existed BEFORE they came here.
And what is with this classifying of tobacco as just as bad as slavery? Is this more smoking naziness?
Apparently it is. And were I an American of African descent, I'd be quite upset at a guy who claims that smoking a cigarette is just as bad as my ancestors being held in bondage.
And, naturally, this guy makes it Bush's fault, too.
Meanwhile, the darker, more complex dimensions of the Jamestown story have if anything flourished. The way the colonists treated Native Americans, the importing of Angolans pirated from Portuguese slave ships, the exploitation of the land to grow tobacco, the chronic infighting that nearly destroyed the settlement in its first months - these have become potent elements in attempts to make sense of the combination of high principles and base motives that are such a feature of American history - no more so than the country's recent history of engagement with the Middle East.It always amazes me how the slavery perpetrated by the Spanish and the French in Central and South America is ignored while leftist, elitists take after that in the USA. It seems never to be recalled that we sacrificed over 600,000 American lives to pay for the slavery that Europeans imposed on the fledgling American colonies, as well.
In any case, here we have another Brit elitist tsk tsking the evil Americans.
But, shouldn't we point out that the Jamestown colonists were British in the first place?
I'd say Woolley knows this and imagines his "guilt" for his countrymen is just as bad. Of course, this type of thinking also ignores the fact that the Brits were one of the most courageous anti-slavery proponents in their day as they used all their diplomatic and military might to rid the world of the African slave trade. I'd bet Woolley doesn't tout that accomplishment very often.
Woolley also ignores the fact that slavery was so common as to be entirely pervasive in the world during the founding of the Jamestown colony. Nearly every country then and nearly all before that time had slavery, so for it to have arrived on the shores of the New World with French, Spanish and English colonists is unremarkable.
And for intellectuals like Woolley to constantly castigate only the west for the institution of slavery is absurd to say the least. Especially when it continued in other countries for over 100 years after the end of it in the USA. And, in some instances, is still around today.
So, I say don't be ashamed to celebrate the founding of Jamestown despite the left looking down their noses at us knuckle dragging patriots. Be proud of what we have become despite the rocky road we took to arrive at this day. Because, in the end, shame is useless if used to condemn even the good because it makes the bad commonplace and normal.
Ya, slavery never existed prior to the founding of Jamestown.
Hmmm...he forgot the part about the Spanish and Portuguese arriving in the New World some ninety years before the Brits, and their brand of slavery was much harsher, never mind the fact that African slavery began inside Africa.
C'mon UK gurdian, credit where credit is due. You uncredible fiction publishers!
The “native” Americans had slavery down pat long before Europeans set foot on the continent.
England was one of those colonial slave-mongers.
Look it up in the dictionary:
Guardian n. 1. A protector of others 2. worthless commie rag published in UK, once used to line bottoms of bird cages until parrots stopped pooping on it, claiming it defiled their excrement.
75% of African slaves went to South America.
I used to love visiting Williamsburg, but the last time I was there, I was really put off that even the people running the place had become so PC. Doubt if I will ever visit Williamsburg again.
I remember when the Guardian won Ohio for Bush, with their “please don’t vote for Bush” campaign. Superb!
Are North American democracy and free enterprise to contrast with "African slavery, Native American genocide and the global tobacco trade", or we they added to emphasize just how bad it can be?
And from Wikipedia (take it with a block of salt) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade:
The first slaves to arrive as part of a labor force appeared in 1502 on the island of Santo Domingo now modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic. ... The first African slaves to reach what would become the United States of America arrived in January of 1526 as part as a Spanish attempt at colonizing South Carolina near Jamestown.... El Salvador, Costa Rica and Florida began their stint in the slave trade in 1541, 1563 and 1581 respectively. ... The 17th century saw an increase in shipments with slaves arriving in the English colony of Jamestown in 1619.So there was a more than a century of slave trading in the New World before Jamestown and nearly a century in North America before the English got here.
This was just a weak attempt by a historically illiterate Guardian writer to claim that the United States is at fault for all the evil in the world.
Between 1450 and the end of the nineteenth century, slaves were obtained from along the west coast of Africa with the full and active co-operation of African kings and merchants. (There were occasional military campaigns organised by Europeans to capture slaves, especially by the Portuguese in what is now Angola, but this accounts for only a small percentage of the total.) In return, the African kings and merchants received various trade goods including beads, cowrie shells (used as money), textiles, brandy, horses, and perhaps most importantly, guns. The guns were used to help expand empires and obtain more slaves, until they were finally used against the European colonisers. The export of trade goods from Europe to Africa forms the first side of the triangular trade.
..........Snip ................
The transport of slaves from Africa to the Americas forms the middle passage of the triangular trade. Several distinct regions can be identified along the west African coast, these are distinguished by the particular European countries who visited the slave ports, the peoples who were enslaved, and the dominant African society(s) who provided the slaves.
So, for example, Senegambia includes the Wolof, Mandinka, Sereer and Fula; Upper Gambia has the Temne, Mende, and Kissi; the Wndward Coast has the Vai, De, Bassa, and Grebo. (A forthcoming article will look in more detail at the people and kingdoms involved in the slave trade.)
Slaves were introduced to new diseases and suffered from malnutrition long before they reached the new world. It is suggested that the majority of deaths on the voyage across the Atlantic - the middle passage - occurred during the first couple of weeks and were a result of malnutrition and disease encountered during the forced marches and subsequent interment at slave camps on the coast.
Conditions on the slave ships were terrible, but the estimated death rate of around 13% is lower than the mortality rate for seamen, officers and passengers on the same voyages. (Again, a forthcoming article will discuss 'mortality rates of the trans-Atlantic slave trade'.)
Trans-Atlantic imports by region
1450-1900
Region
Number of slaves
accounted for
%
Brazil
4,000,000
35.4
Spanish Empire
2,500,000
22.1
British West Indies
2,000,000
17.7
French West Indies
1,600,00
14.1
British North America and United States
500,000
| 4.4 | |||
| Dutch West Indies | 500,000 | 4.4 | |
| Danish West Indies | 28,000 | 0.2 | |
| Europe (and Islands) | 200,000 | 1.8 | |
| Total | 11,328,000 | 100.0 | |
| Data derived from table II as presented in: The Slave Trade by Hugh Thomas Simon and Schuster, 1997, ISBN 0-68481063-8 |
|||
As a result of the slave trade, five times as many Africans arrived in the Americas than Europeans. Slaves were needed on plantations and for mines and the majority was shipped to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the Spanish Empire. Less than 5% travelled to the Northern American States formally held by the British.
Source: http://africanhistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa080601a.htm
The Celebration of Jamestown is the Celebration of America. Without America, you whiny Lefty Limey, you would be speaking either a) German or b) Russian right now, and without America, in a few short years Muslim madmen will be telling YOU exactly what you can and cannot write on penalty of death.
Faced with despots and tyrants old and new, leave it to a Liberal to decide that the biggest threats to world freedom are tobacco and slavery, a concept WE in America kicked over the side a hundred fifty years ago. If slavery is a going concern in the tiny, minuscule academic circles you function in, you might remind your fellows that slavery is alive in this century...it's in the Sudan, and it's against Christians, a persecuted minority group that you in the UK seem to have fewer and fewer of. (As cathedrals go, you in England have some very beautiful examples of completely empty architecture.)
Wake up and start loving your own heritage, Jasper.
There was no slavery, African or otherwise before Jamestown?
The 500th Anniversary of Columbus founding America was also marred by the PC police. There were very few celebrations of that. The 400th Anniversary celebrations lasted a year, I read.
Another no-nothing critic.
Anthony Johnson was black, and one of the first 20 blacks brought over to Jamestown as indentured servants
Anyone ashamed of American or Western history and culture should be forced to live outside the West. Put this bastard in Saudi Arabia or Communist China. Let him compare and contrast civilizations. Then make him apply for a visa to come back to the West.
This muddled kind of thinking (implying that helpless blacks were “kidnapped” from Africa, and brought here to function as slaves generation after generation) is so popular because it is so EASY and A-historical-—it’s had a perennial appeal to nativeborn American Leftists for well over 100 years.Do I catch a whiff of a suggestion that the Queen was or would have been “uncomfortable” at having to take the lion’s share of the white-skin-privelege guilt at being part of it all, historically, OR
that the British, through her agency, see NO association with what was after all OUR independently held position of keeping up the institution of slavery after Independence?
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