Wednesday, August 07, 2013

Putting things in perspective

In the big scheme of things the sins of the US against the peoples of Africa pale before those of Europe. People in Africa and of African descent in the Caribbean know this. It is only Western Leftists that like to pretend that the US importation of 400,000 African slaves in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade is a greater sin than the European importation of 8 million slaves from Africa into Brazil and the Caribbean where many of them were worked to death growing sugar cane. It is only Western Leftists who think that asymmetrical political relations between the US and various African countries are morally identical to what the Portuguese did in Angola and Mozambique, the French did in Algeria, the Belgians did in Congo, and the British did in Kenya. The CIA's murder of Lumumba and overthrow of Nkrumah were bad, but they are not on the same moral plane as tiny Belgium's murder of 10 million people in Congo. The perverse desire of American Leftists to paint the US as the source of all evil to the exclusion of all other sources is an inverse form of chauvinism. For them the US has to be the sole focus of everything evil even when as in the case of the international slave trade  it had a  very tiny role.

1 comment:

Withywindle said...

Keeping in mind that numbers such as "Belgium killed 10 million Congolese" are also highly arbitrary. We don't know how many Congolese there were, and we don't know how many died. 'There were 20 million and half died' is possible, but not certain.

I would suggest a principle of charity: it is always possible that fewer of your interlocutors are as willfully stupid as you seem to suggest.