Send this article to a friend:

July
26
2022

America Is Intentionally Being Destroyed by Organized Divisiveness
Paul Craig Roberts

If this trailer is an indication, we are about to be treated to a fantasy movie release in September in which black female warriors save Africa from being enslaved by the French. The film makers do not realize the irony of the setting, which is Dahomey, a black kingdom that conducted slave wars against other blacks and was the font of the slave trade. Almost every black slave brought to the Caribbean and to the English colonies in North America was a person sold into slavery by the black king of Dahomey. The female warriors in the movie declare that freedom is worth fighting for but in actual fact Dahomey fought to make money by enslaving black Africans.

Today Dahomey is known as Benin. On the beach at Ouidah there is a contemporary monument, the Gate of no Return, commemorating the lives of the Africans captured by the black Kingdom of Dahomey and sold to Arabs and Europeans as slaves or traded for firearms.

What might be the real purpose of this film? Could it be to brew more black hatred of whites and to justify this hatred and spread in into the black American female population, fostering the idea that just as in the movie, they also can violently throw off white oppression?

Or is a purpose to further bury Dahomey as the font of the slave trade and the source of black slaves? The official narrative in “black studies” and the 1619 Project is that blacks were enslaved by whites. As far as I know, no black was ever enslaved by a white. When Arabs and white Europeans purchased slaves, they purchased blacks who were already enslaved by the black kingdom of Dahomey.

The reason for the falsification of history in universities and by film makers is to drive more nails in America’s coffin by enculturating divisiveness in a multi-racial society.

How can white racism be the cause of slavery when the fact is that black slaves were the trading commodity of the Black Kingdom of Dahomey? As Encyclopedia Britiannica says, “Dahomey was organized for war, not only to expand its boundaries but also to take captives as slaves. Slaves were either sold to the Europeans  in exchange for weapons or kept to work the royal plantations that supplied food for the army and court.”

I would almost bet my life that Encyclopedia Britiannica will be forced to remove this passage and all correct reporting on Dahomey and the Slave Trade, just as Karl Polanyi’s history, Dahomey and the Slave Trade, has disappeared and can no longer be published. If the book were available and a black professor assigned it to the class, he would be run out of the university if not lynched by the woke thugs who comprise university faculties, administrations and student bodies.

Did white people in the colonies purchase slaves because they were racist and wished to have black people to abuse? Obviously not. They held land grants but lacked a labor force. Slaves were purchased as a labor force. As there was no free labor available to purchase for wages, the purchase of a slave was the only labor force alternative.

Did slave owners abuse their investment in a labor force as propaganda tracts such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin proclaimed? Does a person who has invested in a factory burn down his own factory?

Slave owners wanted strong, healthy, cooperative workers to produce the crops on which the plantation was dependent. It made no sense to work a valuable slave to death, to turn him against you by beating him or raping his wife. On the plantations, many overseers were black slaves. This was considered good management practice.  Let blacks have the responsibility for the work agenda.

Few black slaves ran away, and not even Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation could ignite, as he had hoped, a slave rebellion in the South that would draw its soldiers from the front lines. Although one today is not allowed to speak such truths, black slaves in North America were content. They had food, shelter, and security. They were not subject to slave raids by the black king of Dahomey’s slave raiders. They worked and were fed, clothed, and housed. In many ways they were better off than later day white wage earners dependent on the company store — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLVtJkpl_ug  Here is a modern rendition  of Tennessee Earnie Ford’s song– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9kb4-wUAU4

The much abused and denigrated South did not invent slavery. Slavery was an inherited labor institution dating from colonial times long before the idea of the United States existed. The first slaves in the colonies were not blacks as the 1619 Project erroneously and propagandistically claims.  The first slaves were white people. Jamestown was founded in April, 1607, by a few more than one hundred colonists, most of whom were bond servants. A bond servant is a person whose personal or family debts in England caused them to be sold into indentured servitude and transported thousands of miles across an ocean to where they lived in conditions described by this white child sold to accommodate the creditor of  his family’s debts:

“Loving and kind father and mother, I have nothing to comfort me, nor there is nothing to be goten here but sickness and death. A mouthful of bread must serve for four men. People cry out day and night. Do not forget me but have mercy and pity my miserable case. If you love me as your child, release me from the bondage and save my life.” The letter was written by a young boy, Richard Frethorne.  Obviously in those days life was cruel. White English parents would sell a son into slavery in order to settle their debts, and the black Kingdom of Dahomey would conduct war on other blacks in order to profit by selling captives as slaves.

The South did not fight to preserve slavery. President Lincoln promised to preserve slavery if the South would stay in the union and pay the tariff to finance northern industry. The South refused the deal and fought because she was invaded by northern armies.

In order to industrialize and expand the empire, the North needed to block cheaper and better made manufactures from England. The tariff, which had been the main matter of contention between North and South for years, would benefit the North and harm the South.  This suited the North but not the South.  On the eve of war Lincoln promised the South slavery forever if only the South would stay in the Union and pay the tariff, but the tariff was a more important issue to the South than slavery.

All of this was once generally known and heavily documented. But with the rise of black studies the knowledge has been stamped out.  American universities are lie factories just like the presstitutes, politicians, and public health agencies.

School segregation in the South, based on what I know of Atlanta, was class based, not race based. Kids went to neighborhood schools to which they walked. If you lived in a middle class neighborhood, you went to school with middle class kids. In my school there were no rich and no poor kids. If you lived in a rich neighborhood you went to school with rich kids. If you lived in a poor neighborhood, you went to school with poor kids. It is as simple as that.

Forced school integration required bussing and was seen by southerners as a Second Reconstruction, which is why they opposed it. Busing destroyed the PTA (Parent-Teachers Associations) that had maintained cooperation and discipline and gave parents a voice, which they no longer have, in the education of their children. To present Southern opposition to busing as racist is a lie.

Southern politicians had to show some opposition to the Second Reconstruction of the South.  They could not call out the national guard which would be confronted with the US military armed with nuclear and biochemical weapons, jet fighters and bombers.  So they did the only thing that they could.  They stood in the schoolhouse door.  This provided the requisite show of opposition.

What about segregated toilets, water fountains, restaurants , and the back of the bus?  When I was a kid infectious disease was the big scare like Covid today, especially TB and VD.  People thought you could get VD from toilet seats.  It was against the law to spit in the streets as it was thought it could spread TB.  In those days infectious diseases were associated with the poor who lacked the means of sanitary living, just as today infectious diseases are associated with homosexuals who are believed to be the spreaders of AIDS and monkeypox.  Blacks were disproportionally poor. Their segregation in toilets, water fountains, and restaurants reflected fear of infectious diseases.  Considering poor understanding in those days, it might have been mistaken, but it wasn’t racist. It is not that blacks were denied water fountains. It was white better-than-you northern liberals who turned public health concerns into “white racism.”

No one assumed that all blacks or even a very large percentage of them carried infectious diseases.  It people had seen blacks in this way, no one would have employed black women to help them with housework and children, and to prepare meals. Carrie ate with us. It couldn’t have been any other way. When it is lunch time, you can’t tell someone on whom you rely to go eat by herself. No one thought anything about separate water fountains.  If the white one didn’t work, we used the black one, and I am sure the blacks did the same.  You didn’t get arrested for it.

The back of the bus was the way the bus companies tried to accommodate its different classes of passengers.  In those days there were no shopping centers and families did not own multiple cars.  Public transportation was shared by dressed up ladies going shopping and by the black labor force. In those days, unlike today, a self-respecting woman would not leave the house unless she was appropriately dressed.  That meant high heels, stockings, a nice suit or dress, a hat, veil, and gloves.  If seating were co-mingled, women in their finery would be confronted with seats soiled by hard working black laborers.  And women with their perfumes would be confronted with the smell of hard work.  If the bus companies had had foresight about the propaganda use of back of the bus, they would have assigned whites to the back and the black labor force to the front.  The bus companies simply did not understand that a common sense policy would be declared evidence of racism. As kids we preferred the back of the bus.  The big wide window up above the cars was a perfect place to make faces at the car drivers, and it was close to the rear exit. Moreover, where the back of the bus was depended on the portions of black and white passengers.  If the passenger traffic was largely black, the back of the bus could extend to the front.  I have  been on buses where all seats were taken by blacks.  In other words, there was no line drawn across the bus beyond which blacks could not move forward or whites backward.

Facts are not part of the racist narrative. Today in America we live in lies.  There is nothing else.  As soon as The Woman King appears in movie theaters and Netflix, we will live in the lie of Dahomey’s black slave traders fighting for black freedom.


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]

 

Please Donate

I listen to my readers. In March 2010, I terminated my syndicated column. Thousands of you protested. So persuasive were your emails asking me to reconsider and to continue writing that, two months later, I began writing again.

In order to create a coherent uncensored and unedited archive of my writings, The Institute For Political Economy, a non-profit organization that supports research, writing and books, has established this site, thus gratifying readers' demands that I continue to provide analyses of events in our time.

In order to stay up, this site needs to pay for itself.

 

 

 

www.paulcraigroberts.org

Send this article to a friend: