May 16, 2016
Source: Bigstock
Hogan and company also support the notion that white bondage was mostly carried out within a framework of law. Here they are swallowing the propaganda of the white ruling class who were permitting the mass kidnapping of white children off the streets of port cities such as London and Glasgow for shipment to America under no indentures whatsoever, or under forged indentures, or as criminalized paupers and “rogues.” Upon arrival these youth were often put to work clearing forests and draining swamps. They were regularly assaulted, ill-fed, and worked to death. Britain had a surfeit of poor white youth who represented a potential for a French-Revolutionary type of insurrection in the cities. The aristocracy was only too glad to be rid of them, and I draw my evidence for this from state papers and contemporary letters and eyewitness accounts.
Hogan accepts the official tale of the slavers themselves, as they obscured their monstrous crime against their own people. So for him, there is no mass “kid-nabbing“ (as it was first termed). He is blind to the fact that to facilitate white bondage under penal enslavement, the British ruling class contrived laws such as the Waltham Black Act, which made simple misdemeanors (stealing lace, breaking down an aristocrat’s fish pond, poaching deer) into felonies punishable by “transportation for life into the colonies.” In the 17th century the tens of thousands of prisoners these laws netted were not sent to slavery in British America and the West Indies on indentures. They were sold at the ports on arrival. As prisoners they had no rights. Diaries, letters, and eyewitness accounts give testimony to their horrible mistreatment and slave labor. Mr. Hogan won”t call these wretches “slaves,” even though they were clearly handled like chattel (cattle).
It seems that a powerful lobby has decided that black folk have a proprietary relationship with the word slave. “You blacks are the slave race,” they are told by their liberal white alleged “allies.” If this designation is false, however, then it constitutes an act of psychological crippling. The history of the white race is in many respects synonymous with the long history of enslavement, and if blacks have a copyright on the word “slave,” someone should tell that to the Slavic people, who for generations were targets of Viking slave raids and from whom the word “slave” is derived.
The weakness of Mr. Hogan’s assertions can be found in his gullible acceptance of the party line of the white ruling class with regard to their whitewash of their role in white enslavement. The white ruling class is excoriated with contempt by the left when they minimize crimes of the British aristocracy and capitalists against people of color, but Mr. Hogan will believe them implicitly when they aver that white bondage was operated within a legal framework, and it only involved “servants.”
The kidnapping of poor whites has precedence in Britain. It does not have a legal basis per se, but it has color of law and we find it in the systematic mass kidnapping of British people for maritime slavery aboard ship for the Royal Navy. I can anticipate the objection: The bondage was for a determinate period of time. Officially, yes. An Englishmen was kidnapped off the streets and country lanes of Britain with the connivance of the judiciary and conscripted for a period of years, but in actuality these determinate number of years was not worth the ink that had been used to write the paper, when it so happened that the victim of abduction was returning home from a five- or seven-year compulsory voyage. He saw the blessed shore of England at long last, prayed that his wife had not run off and that his children and parents still lived, and then a few miles from shore, another man-of-war sailed up to his vessel, boarded it at sea with a press gang, and kidnapped him again for another multi-year abduction. This could happen two or three times. The kidnapped sailor could be gone from Britain ten, fifteen, or twenty years and killed or severely injured during that time. I doubt Mr. Hogan would confer upon this naval slave that title because if the slave survived his ordeal he eventually went home. He had been a slave for a time, and to quibble over it is to do a grave disservice to the memory of tens of thousands of Royal Navy slaves. Impressment was one of the rotten roots, along with villeinage, that created a precedent for an institutional framework for white slavery concealed under cover of “indenture” or some other deceptive and cosmetic rubric.
In this passage, Hogan essentially accuses you and others of lying: “The inclination to describe these different forms of servitude using the umbrella term “slavery” is a wilful [sic] misuse of language.” Didn’t contemporary legal documents often refer to alleged “indentured servants” as “slaves”?
The truth was in the writings of the white slaves themselves who referred to themselves as such, and eyewitnesses to their plight who wrote accounts of what they saw. This is in my book They Were White and They Were Slaves.
As for willful misuse of language, I suppose I should apologize for defying the Establishment-imposed monopoly on how the word “slave” is to be employed, but I cannot, because like all monopolies this one is a form of restraint, enforced by thought cops indifferent to truths that violate the whole foundation of their monopoly on history and white self-image.
Hogan claims your book deceptively uses “selective quotations taken from nearly 200 different secondary sources,” that your motive is “to deny reparations for slavery in America,” and that your “denial has a pro-slavery ideological lineage.”
One usually can discern that something is defective about an argument when it is ad hominem, and we discover this ill omen in Mr. Hogan’s resort to Pavlovian incentives for stigmatizing a writer with pejoratives calculated to cue an intended audience of partisans that here is someone to despise and dismiss. If he’s writing mainly for the benefit of Mark Potok and members of the new religion of Multiculturalism and Diversity, then he’s in luck. If he seeks a wider audience, however, then I don”t see how such tactics help to make his case.
The idea of paying reparations to any aggrieved racial or ethnic group is something with no appeal to me. It devolves into one-upmanship in the game of guilt imposition. Even in the matter of the Irish Catholic slaves, the focus is too narrow, and the subtext is one that excludes English Protestant slaves, since the Irish narrative is too often beholden to a vision of near-perpetual victimization by the English, which excludes the reality that a vicious white ruling class in London has seldom had any compunctions against betraying and enslaving their own white English yeomanry.
Do the English pay reparations to the Irish for what Oliver Cromwell did in transporting Irish slaves to the West Indies? Do the Catholics pay reparations for the pro-Catholic Stuart King Charles II for having shipped criminalized and enslaved English Protestants to the West Indies? A world full of victims demanding payment is a definition of a madhouse, not a civilization. The reparations process is very often politicized, with war victors or the plutocracy with the most bloat apportioning the guilt and assigning the victim status.
As a revisionist historian, I wrote They Were White and They Were Slaves for the astonishing reason (to some observers) that it was a chronicle that had not been adequately addressed and thus was pure gold from the standpoint of historical rediscovery. My “sin” is to have detailed the history without regard to the idol of political correctness. My book is good news for black people: You are not inferior; you were not the only race or the main race in chattel bondage.
In an earlier email you wrote to me: “the work of my opponents (at least Hogan that is; the distaff side of the trio today admitted to me that she has not read my book), is so blundering (at least what I have read so far) as to actually add ammunition to my thesis.” How so?
At this URL, Hogan, Matthew Reilly, and Laura McAtackney make the case for one of the assertions in my book. They write:
“If a white servant assaulted another servant or a slave, it was treated as a misdemeanor and they were fined. If they assaulted their master they were whipped. Their indenture was legal property therefore a servant’s remaining time could be left in wills, traded for commodities and sold. Since one’s labor is inseparable from one’s person, this meant indentured servants in Barbados were treated as a sort of commodity. The distinction between voluntary and involuntary indentured servitude is also important, but all too often serves as justification for the existence of “white slavery”. It is true that some Europeans, particularly prisoners of war or political prisoners, were sent to places like Barbados against their will and without a predetermined period of servitude. However, upon arrival, those without contracts were, by law, required to serve the master who purchased their labor for a limited number of years, depending on their age. It is also true that many servants didn”t live to see the end of their period of servitude due to brutal treatment and unsparing work regimens, but while under the conditions of servitude, they were subject to the same laws that governed European servants, not enslaved Africans.” (End quote; emphasis supplied).
Apart from the risible fiction that all white bondage was “indentured” and for a “predetermined period” and therefore all of it was scrupulously governed by some kind of “European servant” legislation and jurisprudence, Hogan, Reilly, and McAtackney concede that “many” whites in bondage suffered “brutal treatment and unsparing work regimens” which proved lethal.
Even they admit that many whites were sent into bondage in Barbados and then worked to death. This is not slavery and it cannot be designated chattel slavery? By what sufficiently dainty term do we describe it? The death of many “servants” was by accident? Were their masters prosecuted and executed for this? What sort of human being who is beaten and worked to death is undeserving of the name “slave”?
Notice as well the knee-jerk assumption the three critics of white slave history exhibit: They expect us to believe that in every case where a white person in bondage is whipped, it was because “they assaulted their master.” How do they know this? Imagine the outcry if someone made such a characterization about the whipping of blacks in bondage”that the flogging was always their fault?
How is the experience of whites in servitude, who were at the mercy of masters of all types, reducible to the notion that no master ever unjustly lashed an un-free white person? This myth presupposes that whites were never whipped due to having tried to run away, or because they were too sick to work, or they refused the master’s sexual advances. By some miracle, the human predicament by which nonwhites in bondage unjustly found themselves on the receiving end of a lash is not shared by whites in bondage. Here we observe the subhuman status of whites in servitude as we demarcate the dimensions of the distortion: They died as slaves yet must not be called slaves; unlike black human beings who experienced servitude and were unconscionably whipped, whites who were whipped almost always deserved it.
Isn”t it true that several historians who can in no way be smeared as “holocaust deniers” or “white supremacists” essentially agree that white slavery existed in the colonies? In my research for The Redneck Manifesto, I found historians across the political spectrum essentially agreeing with the historical facts you raise in your research.
The cumulative evidence of A. Roger Ekirch in Bound for America (1990) is conclusive, though he employs euphemisms for white enslavement. He certainly does not fit the hysteric’s categories of “denier” or “supremacist.” Oscar and Mary Handlin openly refer to whites in servitude in the seventeenth century as “slaves. “ See “Origins of the Southern Labor System” in William and Mary Quarterly, April, 1950. Personally, I rely mainly on testimony of the white slaves themselves, their own writings and pleadings and those persons high and low who encountered them and wrote of them.
With all these allegations of people trying to deny white guilt, is it possible that others are trying to deny black responsibility? Couldn”t one argue that some people are lazily trying to use slavery as a blanket and bulletproof excuse for black academic and economic failure?
Some black people are angered that there is an entire industry in the U.S. centered on the so-called “Holocaust” of Judaic persons in eastern Europe decades ago, with museums in America and innumerable college classes, books, and movies, and a de facto “Holocaust” tax on Americans in the form of billions of dollars in US aid sent to the Israelis, while the descendants of the black people who worked the plantations and helped to bring to market the cotton”the greatest material prize of antebellum America”never did receive their “40 acres and a mule.” One wonders whether the recent energy devoted to black slave reparations and African-American museums and university curricula would be as intensely promulgated and ubiquitous if there was no “Holocaust” industry to remind American black people that they are not getting their share of the white guilt pie.
Certainly if reparations are to be paid for slavery in America, they must also be paid to the descendants of the white slaves who also performed the requisite labor that enriched the planter class and before there was much of a planter class on the eastern frontier, the white slaves of the 17th century performed the most back-breaking labor of colonial settlement: land-clearing.
So much of Hogan’s alleged “debunking” simply employs the fallacies of argumentum ad hominem and appeal to motive. But since he called your motives into question, what might be someone’s motive in denying the well-documented history of white slavery?
In my book I give examples of white British aristocrats speeding in their carriages to abolitionist meetings where the plight of blacks in America was decried, heedless of white children by the side of the road who had finished toiling 16 hours, half-naked in a mine; or having their arms and legs mutilated in the factory machinery of the early Industrial Revolution whose owners, such as Josiah Wedgewood, and the famous poet and mine owner Lord Byron, considered poor British whites entirely expendable.
Charles Dickens, who had been a child laborer in a chemical factory, termed this callous hypocrisy “telescopic philanthropy.” The white elite of Britain had the apparition of black enslavement constantly before their eyes, even though it was thousands of miles away, while they were oblivious to the English boys who were sold to chimney sweeps and who sometimes burned and suffocated to death in the chimneys of the magnificent mansions of the abolitionists. Almost no one was paying attention to their agony. It’s supposed to be naughty of me to refer to child labor in the factories, mines, and chimneys of Britain as white slavery. I do not know what else to term girls and boys stripped virtually naked toiling side-by-side in a mine for 16 hours stunted and blackened, or a factory, where they often were seriously injured or killed, because if they didn”t undertake this labor they would starve to death. They went to their labor before dawn and ceased their labors after dark.
Most of your readers are familiar with white self-hatred and this perverse loathing, coupled with the legacy of the betrayal of the masses of white paupers and laborers in Britain by their rulers, has created the current situation of ruinous psychological and spiritual alienation that would seem to desire demographic extinction of their own seed.
The SPLC claims that you are engaging in “an ahistorical reimagining of real events weaponized by racists and conspiracy theorists.” Speaking of “ahistorical reimaginings,” has the Southern Poverty Law Center ever addressed the Jewish role in the transatlantic slave trade?
Mr. Dees’s poverty palace is a satrap in the Israeli orbit. His hate mill seldom grinds the racist libels and murderous deeds of the settler-rabbis. Goyim-hating Chabad rabbis travel throughout the US to disseminate their racist doctrines, and the SPLC purrs like a kitten in the face of it. Dees and Potok are not going to reveal to their duped supporters”and their numerous cronies at executive levels of the US media”the pivotal role Judaic-Americans played in the merchandising of black flesh prior to the 20th century. Black academics such as the late Prof. Tony Martin of Wellesley College are marginalized and their career opportunities severely curtailed if they dare to inform their students of the vast Judaic role in black enslavement in the Americas, as detailed in the magisterial history books, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volumes I, II, and III.
Hogan claims that the purpose of reviving this alleged “myth” is that it “aims to shut down all debate about the legacy of black slavery in the United States.” Yet for someone who is apparently in favor of free and open debate, you claim he’s blocked you on Twitter. Would you be willing to debate Hogan for Taki’s Mag, and do you think he”d be willing to debate you?
I would very much hope that Mr. Hogan would be true to his fighting Celtic heritage and consent to go a round with this writer in Taki’s ring.
