Category Archives: Africa

Africa BC And AC (Before And After Colonialism)

Africa, Law, Private Property, Propaganda, Technology, The West

“Africa BC And AC (Before And After Colonialism)” is the latest column, now on The Daily Caller.

From their plush apartments, over groaning dinner tables, pseudo-intellectuals have the luxury of depicting squalor and sickness as idyllic, primordially peaceful and harmonious. After all, when the affluent relinquish their earthly possessions to return to the simple life, it is always with aid of sophisticated technology and the option to be air-lifted to a hospital if the need arises. Is there any wonder, then, that “the stereotype of colonial history” has been perpetuated by the relatively well-to-do intellectual elite? Theories of exploitation, Marxism for one, originated with Western intellectuals, not with African peasants. It is this clique alone that could afford to pile myth upon myth about a system that had benefited ordinary people.

What is meant by “benefited”? Naturally, the premise here is that development, so long as it’s not coerced, is desirable and material progress good. British colonists in Africa reduced the state of squalor, disease and death associated with lack of development. To the extent that this is condemned, the Rousseauist myth of the noble, happy savage is condoned. Granted, Africa’s poor did not elect to have these conditions, good and bad, foisted on them. However, once introduced to potable water, sanitation, transportation, and primary healthcare, few Africans wish to do without them. Fewer Africans still would wish to return to Native Customary Law once introduced to the idea that their lives were no longer the property of the Supreme Chief to do with as he pleased. …

… When all is said and done, the West is what it is due to human capital—people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy. Human action is the ultimate adjudicator of a human being’s worth; the aggregate action of many human beings acting in concert makes or breaks a society. Overall, American society is superior to assorted African and Arab societies because America is still inhabited by the kind of individuals who make possible a thriving civil society. …

… Read the rest. “Africa BC And AC (Before And After Colonialism)” is now on The Daily Caller.

UPDATED (10/23/017): Faking History To Make The Black Kids Feel Good

Africa, Ancient History, Education, Pseudo-history, Race

“Faking History To Make The Black Kids Feel Good” is the current column, now on The Daily Caller. An excerpt:

A known quantity in the faking department is Rev. Al Sharpton. In a video that gets considerable play on TV, Sharpton informs a rapt audience that “white folks” were cave dwellers when blacks were building empires and pyramids; teaching philosophy, astrology and mathematics. “Socrates and them Greek homos” were mere copycats, aping black civilization.

As revealed in “Helping The Sharpton and Obama Afrocentrism ‘Fade to Black,’” this mythistory has a presence in America’s schools, tertiary and secondary.

By now we know that mass media and government under both national parties routinely generate fake news to achieve political ends. That our progressive pedagogues propagandize the youth: That’s well-known and passively accepted, too. Less known is the extent to which fabricated history has been incorporated into curricula.

In “Black Athena,” Martin Gardiner Bernal of Cambridge, England, suggested that “Ancient Greece” had been “fabricated,” and that chroniclers of “classical civilization” had concealed its “Afroasiatic roots.”

Ditto historian George G. M. James, whose “Stolen Legacy: The Egyptian Origins of Western Philosophy” claims that a rather large chunk of ancient civilization is fraudulent. The Greeks stole it from the Egyptians. The Egyptians were as black as Al Sharpton and Idi Amin.

The school tracts known as the “Portland African-American Baseline Essays” are another counterfactual abomination to have percolated into America’s anti-intellectual schooling system.

The Science Baseline Essay, in particular, claims that thousands of years ago, Egyptians-cum-blacks “flew in electroplated gold gliders, knew accurately the distance to the sun, and discovered the Theory of Evolution.” …

… READ THE REST. “Faking History To Make The Black Kids Feel Good” is now on The Daily Caller.

UPDATE (10/23/017): On white, racist babies:

Helping The Sharpton And Obama Afrocentrism ‘Fade to Black’ (Part I)

Africa, Ancient History, Education, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Race, Racism

“Helping The Sharpton And Obama Afrocentrism ‘Fade to Black’” (Part I) is the current column, now on Townhall.com, or The Daily Caller, if your browser gets spooked by Townhall.com (because of the Russians, of course). An excerpt:

TWO PIMPS IN A POD

Boy, have whites done hard time under Barack Hussein Obama! To deliver his inauguration benediction, eight accursed years back, Obama commissioned one Rev. Joseph Lowery.

Lowery is to poetry what Beyoncé is to music. Both were greatly elevated by the outgoing, déclassé first couple. Lowery’s anti-white inaugural jingle beseeched the Lord to finally make “white embrace what is right,” allow “brown to stick around,” “yellow to be mellow,” and “the red man to get ahead.”

High art.

Indeed, on day one, Obama and his bitter and twisted better half hammered home that to be white in their America was never to be right. To be black was to have an eternal claim against whites, for no other reason than that they’re white.

Although America is the land of quotas, set-asides and affirmative action—a country that privileges minorities—the majority is, nevertheless, subjected to non-stop, relentless propaganda. Enforced by the tyranny of political correctness, this agitprop has led white Americans, most of whom harbor no racial animus, to believe racism saturates their society. So, whites say nothing when they’re roped into a Sisyphean struggle to appease the unappeasable.

Unappeasable is the job description of Rev. Al Sharpton, with whom Obama had made common cause. (Later, Black Lives Matter stole Sharpton’s thunder.)

With the election of Donald Trump, white America has essentially told these race pimps to talk to the hand (‘cause the face ain’t listening). They’ve had enough of the pigment burden. Besides, as a pragmatist and a doer, Trump is constitutionally indifferent to the racial-grievance industry.

So march Sharpton must.

Ahead of President-elect Trump’s inauguration, Sharpton’s “We Shall Not be Moved March” will take place on January 14. The reverend and his foot soldiers at CNN will meander to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. There, they will say stuff as memorable and meaningful as the ectoplasm that tumbled from Obama’s mouth, during his farewell address.

Let us hope that President-elect Trump “shall not be moved,” and that Al’s presence in the People’s House will be greatly reduced under a Trump administration. For as of June 2016, the White House Visitor Records logged 57 Obama-Sharpton love-ins.

Before he fades to black, in the memorable words of a Metallica ballad, an aspect of Sharpton’s lying persona should be exposed. It has been omitted from the tit-for-tat that goes for debate between Republicans and Democrats. …

… The complete column is “Helping The Sharpton And Obama Afrocentrism ‘Fade to Black’” (Part I), now on Townhall.com, or The Daily Caller. Please Like, Share on social media, and comment at the respective sites. Watch out for the follow-up (part II), “Faking History To Make The Black Kids Feel Good.”

On Trump Tribalism And Clinton’s Sinophobia

Africa, Capitalism, China, Democrats, Donald Trump, Economy, History, The West

“On Trump Tribalism And Clinton’s Sinophobia” is this week’s column, on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee for 2016, has something in common with Donald Trump: Sinophobia.

During a 2011 visit to Zambia, she warned about “a new colonialism in Africa.” This time, the Chinese were to blame. As Clinton sees it, the Chinese are extracting wealth from the continent by buying its raw materials. “We saw that during colonial times it [was] easy to come in, take out natural resources, pay off leaders and leave,” she griped.

Clinton was adamant. She did not want to see a European-style colonial redux in Africa.

Certainly Chinese state capitalism is not free-market capitalism. But is Chinese mercantilism not preferable to American militarism, an example of which is Libya, a north-African recipient of madam secretary’s largess? Not according to Mrs. Clinton.

As Clinton sees it (as do, no doubt, the Paul-Ryan Republicans and the Bernie Sanders socialists), the “old colonialism” saw underdeveloped nations “bilked by rich capitalist countries,” a phrase used by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress.

According to these highly politicized, socialist, zero-sum formulations regarding colonialism, class warfare and “income inequality,” one person’s plenty is another’s poverty. The corresponding antidote invariably involves taking from one and giving to the other—from rich to poor; from North to South.

The notion, however, of a preexisting income pie from which the greedy appropriate an unfair share is itself pie-in-the-sky. Wealth, earned or “unearned,” as egalitarians term inheritance, doesn’t exist outside the individuals who create it; it is a return for desirable services, skills and resources they render to others. Labor productivity is the main determinant of wages—and wealth. People in the West produce or purchase what they consume—and much more; they don’t remove, or steal it from Third Worlders. Wrote the greatest development economist, Lord Peter Bauer, in Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion: “Incomes, including those of the relatively prosperous or the owners of property, are not taken from other people. Normally they are produced by their recipient and the resources they own.”

Not unlike Obama’s Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, who “dramatically increased U.S. foreign aid” (as reported approvingly in Foreign Affairs magazine); Mrs. Clinton also committed more funds to the Agency for International Development during her tenure as secretary of state.

When it comes to Africa, it’s worth noting, however, that four or five decades since decolonization; colonialism, dependency and racism no longer cut it as explanations for Africa’s persistent and pervasive underdevelopment. “Pseudo-scholars such as [the late] Edward Said and legions of liberal intellectuals have made careers out of blaming the West for problems that were endemic to many societies both before and after their experiences as European colonies,” noted Australian historian Keith Windschuttle, in a 2002 issue of American Outlook.

The truth is that colonization constituted the least tumultuous period in African history. This is fact; its enunciation is not to condone colonialism or similar, undeniably coercive, forays, only to venture, as did George Eliot in Daniel Deronda, that “to object to colonization absolutely is to object to history itself. To ask whether colonization in itself is good or bad is the same as asking whether history is a good or bad thing.” …

READ THE REST. “On Trump Tribalism And Clinton’s Sinophobia” is this week’s column, on The Unz Review.