Of course, any of these facts presented by Dr. Roberts are conveniently ignored, distorted, and whitewashed in today's politically correct schools

A Conversation on Race
Paul Craig Roberts
Apr 18, 2018
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We often hear that we need a conversation on race. Considering that Americans are a brainwashed people living in a false history, such a conversation would resemble the one the Russians were expected to have with the British in regard to the Skripal poisoning: “Yes, we are guilty. We will pay reparations. Where would you like us to send Putin for trial?” In other words, the only acceptable race conversation in the US is one in which white people accept the accusation that they are racist and offer to make amends.

Considering that the only slavery experienced by any living black or white person is income tax slavery, race is an issue only because it has been orchestrated as an issue along with gender and sexual preference. These divisive issues are the products of Identity Politics spawned by cultural Marxism.

In real Marxism, conflict is class conflict. Workers and capitalists have different interests, and history is a struggle between material interests. The capitalist is the villain and the workers are the victims.

In the pseudo Marxism of Identity Politics, the white race is the villain, especially the white heterosexual male, and racial minorities, women, and homosexuals are the victims.

There is, of course, no such thing as a white or black race. There are many different nationalities of whites, and they have done a good job throughout history of killing each other. Similarly, there are many different black tribes and Asian ethnicities who also have fought more among themselves than with others. But all of this goes by the wayside, along with the fact that in the world the “racial minorities” are actually majorities and the “white majority” is actually a minority. There are more Chinese or Indians alone than there are white people.

But orchestrated histories are not fact-based.

The working class, designated by Hillary Clinton as “the Trump deplorables,” is now the victimizer, not the victim. Marxism has been stood on its head.

The American ruling class loves Identity Politics, because Identity Politics divides the people into hostile groups and prevents any resistance to the ruling elite. With blacks screaming at whites, women screaming at men, and homosexuals screaming at heterosexuals, there is no one left to scream at the rulers.

The ruling elite favors a “conversation on race,” because the ruling elite know it can only result in accusations that will further divide society. Consequently, the ruling elite have funded “black history,” “women’s studies,” and “transgender dialogues,” in universities as a way to institutionalize the divisiveness that protects them. These “studies” have replaced real history with fake history.

For example, it was once universally known that black slavery originated in slave wars between black African tribes. Slaves were a status symbol, but they accumulated beyond the capacity of tribes to sustain. The surplus was exported first to Arabs and then to English, Spanish, and French who founded colonies in the new world that had resources but no work force. The socialist scholar Karl Polanyi, brother of my Oxford professor Michael Polanyi, told the story of the origin of the African slave trade in his famous book, Dahomey and the Slave Trade.

The first slaves in the new world were white. When real history was taught, this was widely understood. Movies were even made that showed that in King George III’s England, the alternative to criminal punishment was to be sold as a slave in the colonies. See, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAgfWhlc3gQ

Among the first New World lands to be exploited by the Europeans were the Carribean Islands, which were suitable for sugar and rice production. The problem was that the white slaves died like flies from malaria and yellow fever. The Spanish lack of success with a work force of natives of the lands they conquered led those in search of a work force to the slave export business of the black Kingdom of Dahomey. The demand for black workers rose considerably when it was discovered that many had immunity to malaria and resistance to yellow fever. This meant that a plantation’s investment in a work force was not wiped out by disease.

The resistance of blacks to malaria is due to the protective feature of the sickle cell trait that, apparently, only blacks have. See: https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/sickle_cell.html

Slavery existed in the New World long before the United States came into existence. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are today written off by Identity Politics as racists simply because they were born when slavery was a pre-existing institution.

Slavery had existed for many centuries prior to the Confederacy. Yet, in some accounts today one comes away with the impression that the South invented slavery. As the tale sometimes goes, Southern racists so hated blacks that they went to Africa, captured blacks at great expense, only to return them to the South where they whipped and abused their investments to the point of death and demoralized their work force by breaking up black families, selling children in one direction and wives and husbands in the other. This tale is not told as an occasional abuse but as the general practice. Economically, of course, it makes no sense whatsoever. But facts are no longer part of American history.

Northern states held slaves as well. However, the predominance of slaves were in the South. This was not because Southerners hated blacks. It was because the land in the South supported large agricultural cultivation, and there was no other work force. The South, like the United States, inherited slavery from the work force that European colonists purchased from the black Kingdom of Dahomey.

Why wasn’t there an alternative work force to slaves? The reason is that new immigrants by moving West could take land from the native Americans and be independent as opposed to being wage earners working on someone else’s land. The Western frontier did not close until about 1900. At the time of the War of Northern Aggression the Plains Indians still ruled west of the Mississippi River. It was Lincoln’s Northern war criminals, Sherman and Sheridan, who were sent to exterminate the Plains Indians. Ask the American natives, or what is left of them, who the racists are: the Northerners or the Southerners.

Black studies has even corrupted other aspects of history. Consider the so-called “civil war.” The name itself is an orchestration. There was no civil war. There was a War of Northern Aggression. A civil war is when two sides fight for control of the government. The South had left the union and had no interest whatsoever in controlling the government in Washington. The only reason the South fought was that the South was invaded by the North.

Why did the North invade the South? As was once understood by every historian and every student, Abraham Lincoln invaded the South in order, in Lincoln’s own words, expressed time and time again, “to preserve the Union.”

Why did the South leave the Union? Because it was being economically exploited by the North, which, once the North gained the ability to outvote the Southern states, imposed tariffs that benefited the North at the expense of the South. The North needed protection from British manufactures in order for the economic rise of the North. In contrast, the South’s economy was based on cotton exports to England and on cheap manufactures imported from England. Tariffs would bring the South higher cost of manufactured goods and retaliation against their cotton exports. The economic interests of the North and South did not coincide.

Slavery had nothing whatsoever to do with the war. Lincoln himself said so over and over.