Paradocracy

A recent post by a popular YouTube channel charges the United States and Great Britain as the great kidnappers of millions of slaves. While it is awfully convenient for any sophist to lump the two countries together, especially given the fact that they are so popularly maligned and that they are home to highly self-critical peoples (a shared quality noted throughout their histories), it is just as convenient for the sophists to keep placing the blame on everybody but the Africans in Africa: the very people who physically captured, kidnapped, and enslaved the Africans before selling them. Instead, as is so often the case, it is the ‘white man’ who, for his conspicuous triumphs (those over slavery being one of them), his wealth (which makes him a target for ‘reparations’, absent due process), and his self-critical nature (nearly ubiquitous in the U.S. and Britain), is saddled with all of the blame; even where the ‘white man’ in question has no connection whatever to slavery, and even where all logic, reason, and evidence points elsewhere — in this case in the direction of a continent largely free from intellectual ire in the modern age. 

Ironically, it is in Africa that we find so many barbarous practices still in place today, albeit ‘illegally’. Indeed, the following are African countries commonly cited for ongoing (illegal) slavery or ‘slavery-like’ practices, which (of course) largely elude any scrutiny by the same people who are busy blaming the ‘white man’ for the narratives that they’ve concocted in their own minds or that they’ve otherwise swallowed whole from other sources: those African countries still engaged in the immoral practice of slavery include, at minimum, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, Sudan, South Sudan, Libya, Eritrea, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, and Nigeria. 

Notwithstanding this unfortunate reality, we are too often bogged down in quasi-intellectual debates with pseudo-intellectuals, such as this YouTuber who, as stated, charges the Americans and the Britons as the great ‘kidnappers’. For the sake of accuracy, let us address this point — not that I have any faith in this explanation sticking, but the facts are worth stating nonetheless.

At the time that the slaves were sold during the transatlantic slave trade, they were legally purchased and kept as property; thus, to the extent that any slaves were legally acquired, they were not ‘abducted’, at least within the relevant contexts and legal frameworks of the time. Of course, to the extent that they were ‘slaves’, they were certainly kept against their will, but that condition made them ‘slaves’, not ‘kidnapped’. Take note of the fact that ‘kidnapping’ requires that both conditions are met: ‘being abducted’ and ‘being held captive’. In the case of Africans being sold into slavery, the lion’s share of ‘captures’ and ‘kidnappings’ were committed by Africans in Africa — the captors and kidnappers who did the lion’s share of abductions, enslavements, and holding of people against their will. 

As for any legal argument or definition which might frame or judge these historical affairs any differently, it thus does not apply, nor does any statute or precedent subsequent to the date of the acts in question. In law, this treatment of human action is regarded as ‘ex post facto’ reasoning, and this method of handling any legal dispute or historical matter is specifically illegitimate per established legal tradition, common law, and the rules of logic. 

Ex post facto reasoning has long been rejected as an illegitimate means for assessing or resolving past events. It was rejected early in Roman law: retroactive laws were condemned by the late Republic and codified by the sixth century AD in Justinian’s ‘Corpus Juris Civilis’. In English common law, retroactive criminal punishment was clearly illegitimate by the seventeenth century, as expressed by jurists like Sir Edward Coke, who held that conduct cannot be criminal unless it was already defined as such when committed (nullum crimen sine lege). Courts also rejected retroactive punishment because it undermined legal certainty and parliamentary supremacy: judges could not lawfully punish based on standards created after the fact, nor could Parliament be presumed to intend retrospective criminal liability without explicit wording. This principle was later (in 1787) duly entrenched constitutionally in the United States (through Article I, Section 9, of the United States Constitution). 

As for the popular punching bag and the ridiculous caricatures of the evil ‘white man’, the truths are these: (1) Africans captured then held as slaves (in Africa) or sold into slavery (by trade) were often prisoners of war, members of rival ethnic groups, or individuals enslaved due to debt or criminal punishment, typically as a result of conflicts between African kingdoms and tribes; (2) Slavery was already an established practice in Africa long before European involvement; (3) By the time colonial powers had solidified their control over Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they imposed new laws that often outlawed the practice of slavery, and their legislation eventually suppressed the transatlantic slave trade, abolished slavery within their jurisdictions, and set legal precedents that other countries and colonies eventually followed. 

However, it is precisely in African countries (along with countries that are distinctly communist or primarily Muslim) that we find that physical forms of slavery still exist today — and yet, as stated, the people leveling so many of these accusations against the ‘white man’ do or say little to nothing about any of it. It seems that they would rather pound the table for their preferred versions of ‘justice’ or ‘reparations’ (without due process, mind you) as they relate to their narrow concept of the distant past, whereas they are either unwilling to address slavery in its current forms (where they are likely to be met by less receptive ears, and where the prospects of financial gain are nil) or they simply haven’t gotten their marching orders to do anything about it, and (for the stated reasons) they never will.

Ultimately, rather than the truth, the framing of this history all too often reveals the prejudice and political preferences of the narrator. A proper reading of history judges the events in their time, rejecting to our utmost the temptation to bring the events into the present context, where it would be simpler for us to judge. That is when it becomes something other than history; that is when it becomes propaganda.