RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/africas-bigger-slave-problem-lloyd-billingsley/

Last year Joe Biden said African Americans who don’t support him “ain’t black,” but this year the Delaware Democrat is open to reparations for slavery, America’s “original sin,” according to the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. A neglected historical account provides enlightenment on slavery’s true origins and its most enduring practitioners.

In 1856, British Army officer John Hanning Speke set out to find the source of the Nile. Speke’s massive Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile documents the African societies he found, and the widespread practice of slavery.  “To catch slaves is the first thought of every chief in the interior,” Speke wrote, “Hence fights and slavery impoverish the land.”

Many Africans were “caught in wars, as may be seen every day in Africa, made slaves of, and sold to the Arabs for a few yards of common cloth, brass wire, or beads. They would then be taken to Zanzibar, resold like horses to the highest bidder, and then kept in bondage by their new masters.”

As slaves, the Africans were “circumcised to make Mussulmans of them, that their hands might be ‘clean’ to slaughter their master’s cattle and extend his creed. For the Arabs believe the day must come when the tenets of Mohammed will be accepted by all men.” True to form, “the slave is willed to his successor.”

On Arab slave ships, “old women, stark naked, were dying in the most disgusting ‘ferret box’ atmosphere.” By contrast, “Slavery had received a severe blow by the sharp measures Colonel Rigby had taken in giving tickets of emancipation to all those slaves our Indian subjects the Banyans had been secretly keeping.”

Speke found an ally in chief  Mbumi who “knew that the English were the ruling power in that land, and that they were opposed to slavery.”  In some parts of Africa, Speke found, “cows, sheep, slaves have to be given to the father for the value of his daughter.” The Wahuma people kept slaves and “do not allow their daughters to taint their blood by marrying outside of the clan.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17096/lothrop-stoddard-muslim-life

The Muslim world “sunk to the lowest depth of its decrepitude” in the eighteenth century; “the life had apparently gone out of Islam, leaving naught but a dry husk of soulless ritual and degrading superstition behind.” Meanwhile, Europe discovered ocean routes, established economic hegemony, and exploited its power as “mistress of the world” to indulge in “recklessly imperialistic policies.” Its conquests of Muslim-majority lands prompted a massive “flood of mingled despair and rage” against the West.

The “great Mohammedan Revival” began with the Wahhabis in eighteenth-century Arabia and entailed a “profound ferment” and a “stirring to new ideas, new impulses, new aspirations. A gigantic transformation is taking place whose results must affect all mankind.” This process was well underway by 1921: “The world of Islam, mentally and spiritually quiescent for almost a thousand years, is once more astir, once more on the march.”

The “great Mohammedan Revival” began with the Wahhabis in eighteenth-century Arabia and entailed a “profound ferment” and a “stirring to new ideas, new impulses, new aspirations. A gigantic transformation is taking place whose results must affect all mankind.” This process was well underway by 1921: “The world of Islam, mentally and spiritually quiescent for almost a thousand years, is once more astir, once more on the march.”

Do not try to reduce causation to interests. Beliefs and passions count at least as much.

When Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) is still recalled, it is as a prominent racist who had a major but malign influence on the budding field of international relations, who acted as theoretician for the Ku Klux Klan, and who contributed the concept of Untermensch (sub-human) to the Nazis.

Stoddard, however enjoyed a high and favorable profile during the 1920s. He had earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and traveled widely. President Warren Harding praised him, and F. Scott Fitzgerald obliquely referenced him in The Great Gatsby.

Stoddard also wrote a prescient 1921 study, The New World of Islam, a survey of 250 million Muslims “from Morocco to China and from Turkestan to the Congo.” Despite his consuming racism, Stoddard impressively recognized trends underway in Islam. As Ian Frazier observed in the New Yorker, “Whatever his philosophy and methods, his guesses sometimes proved out.”

His book had a substantial impact on public opinion, including on such notable figures as the German strategist Karl Haushofer, the Lebanese pan-Islamist Chekib Arslan, the Indian scholar S. Khuda Bukhsh, and Indonesia’s President Soekarno. So, despite Stoddard’s well-deserved ignominy, his New World of Islam is well worthy of scrutiny on its centenary.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/denial-evil-dennis-prager/

One of the most highly regarded books of the 20th century was Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death.” Winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, the book is regarded as a classic for its analysis of how human beings deny their mortality.

But there is something people deny more than mortality: evil. Someone should write a book on the denial of evil; that would be much more important because while we cannot prevent death, we can prevent evil.

The most glaring example of the denial of evil is communism, an ideology that, within a period of only 60 years, created modern totalitarianism and deprived of human rights, tortured, starved and killed more people than any other ideology in history.

Why people ignore, or even deny, communist evil is the subject of a previous column as well as a Prager University video, “Why Isn’t Communism as Hated as Nazism?” I will, therefore, not address that question here.

I will simply lay out the facts.

But before I do, I need to address another question: Why is it important that everyone know what communism did?

Here are three reasons:

First, we have a moral obligation to the victims not to forget them. Just as Americans have a moral obligation to remember the victims of American slavery, we have the same obligation to the billion victims of communism, especially the 100 million who were murdered.