Video: The West Led The World Out Of Slavery

The first point is that everyone had slaves. People of all colors became slaves - for economic reasons, because of war, because slavery, as odious as it was was simply a normal way of life. Arabs were extracting millions of African slaves centuries before Christian nations did - for about thirteen centuries, compared to the three centuries European nations ran the Atlantic slave trade.

Arabs marched African slaves across the Sahara desert, and, as such, they died more often. It was customary to castrate them, and many died from this practice. The Arabs also enslaved more than one million white European Christians. The term "slavery" in fact comes from the word "Slav." The Slavs inhabited Eastern Europe and were taken by the Muslims of Spain in the 9th century - not to mention that Africans had been enslaving each other for thousands of years.

The point is that slavery - the second point is - that slavery was not about race. And it's important. It's not about race. The only reason we think it's about race is because philosophers like David Hume in the 18th century ranked human beings and put Africans at the bottom, saying that they had no souls.

The Enlightenment imposed the concept of race on a practice that had been going on for centuries - in order to justify that practice. And why did they have to justify it - and this is the point? Becauuse people in the West began to question slavery's moral validity.

The fact is that people of all colors owned slaves, both as part of the Atlantic slave trade and outside of it.

In the United States and Caribbean, Black people - Black people - owned thousands of Black slaves. And so did the Native Americans. Nearly 20,000 of the Five Civilized Tribes sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War, fighting to keep slavery alive. 28 percent of the Black population who were free pledged their support to the Confederacy. All of the thirteen Southern states of the Confederacy had substantial numbers of Black slave owners.

There were more the 250,000 free Blacks and nearly 4,000 of them were slave masters, who owned more than 20,000 slaves. The practice of slavery was legal, after all.

We need to remember that governments did not own slaves. Slave owners did. In fact, the U. S. government fought a war to end slavery. How much should the descendants of the 400,000 Union soldiers who lost their lives fighting to free the slaves pay to the descendants of the slaves they freed?

Giving people lump sums of money does not work! Economists often point to the Georgia land lottery of 1832 in which parcels of land were distributed randomly. What happened to the descendants of those who were lucky enough to be given this land? Are they the richest families in Georgia?

No. In fact, within one generation after the distribution of the Georgia land, one could not distinguish between those who had been given land and those who hadn't. Certainly my own direct experiences of working for twenty plus years in the inner-cities with families on welfare demonstrates this time and time again. Rather than give a man a fish, it is always better to teach him how to fish. All giving the fish does is make the giver feel better. Reparations might relieve white people of their guilt, but it will do little else.

So back to my initial question, why are we only discussing whether the West should pay reparations for slavery? Because while slavery was common to all civilizations, only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it - very late in its history: Western Civilization!

Not even the leading moralists on other civilizations rejected slavery at all. Rather than be ashamed as Westerners we should stand proud for having led the world out of a mentality where slavery was the norm. And we should vote against this motion.

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