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May
04
2019

White People Will Be Rubbed Out Along With Their History
Paul Craig Roberts

Recently I wrote of the failure of white liberals to realize the consequences of their good intentions toward preferred minorities.  https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/05/01/insights-from-the-cast-iron-shore/  

The cost of this miscalculation rises by the day. Now white people in America are to be stripped of their history, because white history traumatizes preferred minorities.  At George Washington High School in northern California an historic mural depicting the school’s namesake has been declared offensive. 

(You can read the mural’s history here:  https://richmondsfblog.com/2019/04/09/historic-wpa-murals-at-george-washington-high-school-are-facing-destruction-due-to-controversial-depictions-of-native-americans-and-african-americans/ )

This means that history itself is offensive as are the Founding Fathers as some of them, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves.  Al Sharpton says the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., is “an insult to my family.”  He demands that the funding for the national monument cease.  Next Antifa, or some other collection of violent morons, will vandalized the Jefferson Memorial and then agitate for its removal.  We will also have to burn the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution as they are “racist documents.”  And take Washington’s picture off of the one dollar bill and Jefferson’s off of the two dollar bill, which has already disappeared from circulation. 

The lack of any historical awareness is testimony to the complete failure of American Education at every level.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are not responsible for slavery. Slavery was an institution that existed in the English colonies a century before Washington and Jefferson were born. For them it was an inherited institution. It was all they could do to free the colonies from the British. The reason there was slavery in the new world is that there was no work force with which to develop the resources. With no labor to hire, labor was purchased as chattel. 

The first slaves brought to the North American British colonies were white. As Don Jordan and Michael Walsh document in White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (New York University Press, 2007), the first slaves were white children. Beginning in 1618, the authorities in London began sweeping up urchins from the slums and shipping them to the colonies. “They were sold to planters to work in the fields and half of them were dead within a year. Shipments of children continued from England and then from Ireland for decades.”

Undesirables—convicts, prostitutes, beggars, Quakers, Catholics—were pressed into slavery and sold in the colonies. 

The Irish were a large source of slaves. Under Oliver Cromwell’s ethnic-cleansing policy in Ireland, unknown numbers of Catholic men, women and children were forcibly transported to the colonies and sold as slaves.

Kidnappers snatched people from English streets and sold them to planters’ agents. “London’s most active kidnap gang discussed their targets at a daily meeting in St Paul’s Cathedral.”

And there were “indentured servants,” many of whom remained indentured for their lifetimes.

Jordan and Walsh report that today in the US there are tens of millions of white Americans who are descended from white slaves.  If the tens of millions are more than 47 million, there are more white descendants of slaves in the US than black descendants.

White slaves suffered all the horrors, if not more, that the subsequent black slaves suffered, but their story is not part of the educational curriculum. Blacks and their white advocates would never stand for it, because white slavery detracts from the racist image that black studies has created, an image that conveys special victim status to blacks just as the Jews have acquired by the holocaust.  But the facts are, report Jordan and Walsh, that black slavery emerged out of white slavery and was based upon it.  They quote the African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr:

“When someone removes the cataracts of whiteness from our eyes, and when we look with unclouded vision on the bloody shadows of the American past, we will recognize for the first time that the Afro-American, who was so often second in freedom, was also second in slavery.”

When black slavery superseded white slavery, the source of the slaves was the black king of Dahomey.  The English colonists were merely the black king’s customers.

But just as it is impermissible to question the holocaust, it is impermissible to question the uniqueness of black Americans’ experience of slavery.  History is falsified, because falsification serves the material interests of those who falsify history.

White Americans, still a majority, are refused permission by the preferred minority to retain “offensive” statues, murals and monuments of the founders of their country. A small percentage of the population claiming special status by virtue of their “unique suffering” expect the majority to accept an historical cleansing in which their history is swept away as “offensive.” 

Once the evil of Identity Politics succeeds in its demonization of white people, white people along with their history will be swept away by their enemies that they stupidly empowered.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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