The White Slave Trade of Africa

My reaction is, "eh, he's probably right." I've changed a lot of my opinions on the Confederate States of America. They did secede to protect slavery, and they did attack Northern military bases and the like. They Constitutionally did have the right to secede (10th amendment) but they acted... abrasively. 

Anyways, I think my real problem with this focus on the Confederacy is that Southern identity is attached deeply to the Civil War and the CSA when that was really only a small part (4 years) of Southern history and not actually the proudest part of it. 

It was from the south that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, James K Polk, Francis Marion, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, John Randolph of Roanoke, Sam Houston, Henry Clay, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, William Gilmore Simms, and Abraham Lincoln (born in Kentucky, lived in the Little Egypt section of Illinois which was settled by southerners from Kentucky) came from. We also invented almost every modern musical genre in existence, created the Southern Gothic Genre of Literature (and have had the best writers in the country), defined the military culture of the United States (as the military has always been a southern dominated institution), and we have invented the best and (probably the only) native cuisine in the United States bar none.

To put what i've just written in perspective Southerners founded the country (George Washington), wrote the Declaration of independence (Thomas Jefferson), wrote the Constitution (James Madison), freed the slaves (Abraham Lincoln), conquered the West (Thomas Jefferson, James K. Polk), created America's greatest folkloric heroes and frontiersmen (Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone), while inventing almost every type of modern music, the only native cuisine of the US worth speaking of, wrote some of the best literature the United States ever produced, and defined the most powerful military on planet earth. 

I find myself thinking that these achievements are more worthy of celebrating than a failed four year independence struggle that was triggered because we feared losing our slaves.     The confederacy holds a place in the average southerners heart because it was an independence struggle against invading Yankees that most of our forefathers took part of. It's akin to what would happen if the American Revolution was lost against the British. The Lost Cause was always destined to be romanticized in our minds.

Perhaps, but it is still a great achievement that led to the national strength and prestige of the modern United States. There is not a nation in existence today that was not established at the expense of some other group. The idea that Americans are supposed to feel some kind of special moral guilt or consternation over conquering and dispossessing a people at a time when conquest and empire was the norm is as ridiculous as asking modern Mongolians to feel a special type of guilt and consternation for Genghis Khan's murdering ten percent of the world's population and raping countless thousands of women.

No, they are just proud of their people creating the largest land empire on the planet. This kind of moral guilt on the part of European people and their colonies is a particularly Western thing that comes from a post Christian worldview and is ridiculous. From time immemorial people of all civilizations and ethnic backgrounds have been playing the game of empire conquering and ruling their neighbors (this includes the Native Americans you are talking about) and in the end the West won the game. Is this moral by modern standards? No, but neither were the Viking raids from your country for instance, and yet the Vikings are still celebrated for their achievements. 

So, I think that unless people are willing to apply these standards to every other country on planet earth I still count this as an achievement. Another thing to point out is that most non western countries really do not care about the naughty things they've done in the past. The North Africans don't care about what they did in the video this topic is about. The Islamic world doesn't care about conquering 2/3rds of the Christian world and forcibly converting them to Islam, enslaving countless millions, and reducing religious minorities to Dhimmis in a form of religious apartheid (in fact they'd probably do it again if given the chance). The Lakota Sioux, who constantly complain about our taking their "Sacred Black Hills" do not care that they got the Black Hills in the first place by violently conquering and dispossessing, the Cheyenne Indians. 

Yes we fought wars against the Indians, we won and we expanded the country from sea to shining sea as the Romans did in the Mediterranean, as the Mongolians did in Asia, as Alexander of Macedon did in his his empire, as Canada did in hers, and as Spain did in Latin America, and as countless peoples throughout history have done in theirs. In less civilized times people followed the "right of conquest". Whoever could take and keep the land had a right to it. It was the West that ended this in the 20th century when they yielded their empires to the people they were ruling over. We live in a more civilized time now but feeling guilty about past conquests is ridiculous.

Fair enough. I may be a bit culturally biased as the Westward expansion of the United States is kind of big deal here. Many of our movies, heroes, and notions of ourselves come from the West. If America had not expanded Westward it would not have become the superpower it is today.

It's just that in the United States (and from a lot of Europeans) the counter to that is always, "you went and expanded westward and committed genocide against the poor noble savage peace loving tree hugging Native Americans and you are eternally stained with guilt for your ancestors having done that." 

The problem is that in academia it is very debatable that what was done can properly be called genocide (a complex subject but the argument is that dying by disease and as a result of warfare is not genocide proper) and those Natives were not all peaceful, tree hugging noble savages; they actually committed a bunch of atrocities of their own. 

The reason I put the conquest of the American West as an achievement is because it made America what it is today, the same way that an Italian might be proud of the Romans spreading classical civilization through their empire and setting the stage for modern Europe though that came through great brutality. I agree that conquests in general are immoral and unthinkable in today's society but without it my country would not be what it is today.

Also, to make one thing clear about the video that the topic is based on. I think that the video is badly titled because it may give some uninformed people the impression that blacks were enslaving whites here. The people enslaving the Europeans were not black people (at least not fully); black people come from Sub Saharan Africa, which is SOUTH of the Sahara desert. The people from the Barbary Coast doing the enslaving of Europeans here are North Africans, Berbers, Arabs, and the like which are closer racially to Middle Eastern people. These enslavers were part of the Middle Eastern-influenced Arabic Islamic world rather than the various peoples of Sub Saharan Africa like the Bantus, Khoisan, Nilotic, Somalian, etc. peoples. These North Africans enslaved black people right along with the white people.