ROD LIDDLE
Lefties love having a go at the nation which practised slavery least: Us!
GUESS which national newspaper has just confessed to having had deep, historical links to slavery?
I say national newspaper but these days its pygmy circulation is confined pretty much to North London
The Guardian has just confessed to having had deep, historical links to slavery and has promised reparationsThat should have been a decent clue, then.
Yup, of course, it’s the achingly liberal, right-on, Guardian, which can show you racism in a handful of dust.
You’d need a heart of stone not to burst out laughing.
The paper has just issued a cringing apology: “The Scott Trust and Guardian apologise unreservedly for their roles in this crime against humanity.
When there were black plumbers, black electricians, black lawyers in the UK — but Guardian editorial meetings were whiter than a Ku Klux Klan dinner dance.
The paper has also decided to pay £10million “reparations” for its evil history.
And that’s the next problem.
Because being habitually stupid, The Guardian has bought into all the convenient myths about slavery.
The myth which suggests that we alone in the West were wicked. Uniquely wicked.
It couldn’t be further from the truth.
And perpetuating that falsehood causes rancour and divisions.
Virtually every society on the planet has practised slavery at some time or another.
That’s what we humans are like, sadly.
The Egyptians, Romans, Sumerians, Vikings, Chinese — all had slavery.
The Ottoman empire and the caliphates had slavery.
Everybody was at it.
But none more so than on the continent of Africa.
There, slavery was embedded in virtually every economy.
In countries we know today as Ghana, Nigeria, Benin, Sudan — the list is almost endless — slavery had been practised for hundreds and hundreds of years.
And then we, in the West, came along and exploited that slavery.
Historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University have estimated that of the Africans captured and then sold as slaves to the New World in the Atlantic slave trade, around 90 per cent were enslaved. . . by their fellow Africans.
Our exploitation of the existing slave trade was of course wrong and caused untold misery for hundreds of thousands of people.
But we were basically tapping into a vile practice which was already in existence.
And how long did we continue with slavery?
For about 140 years.
From the 1660s until 1807.
Something we did for moral reasons.
Misguided and hateful
We, along with Haiti, were one of the first countries to light a beacon against the enslavement of humans.
Meanwhile, slavery continued — in Africa, just as it had done for hundreds of years before our arrival.
And of course elsewhere.
These days there are calls for reparations from the UK — and Portugal, France and Spain and the USA — for their involvement in the slave trade.
But if any country should be paying reparations it’s the likes of Ghana and Nigeria, surely?
Why, out of all the thousands of societies that practised slavery, pick on the country which practised it for one of the shortest periods of time and tried to persuade the world to end it?
But the whole thing now has become part of that misguided and hateful creed, critical race theory.
A theory which divides black from white and creates a victimhood mentality.
No surprise that all these years later, The Guardian is on the wrong side of history again. Sun.
