Lunacy and Racism of Slavery Reparations

To continue with last week's theme of the wave of prog Fakery now overwhelming us, let's turn to the demand for reparations for slavery, a particularly pernicious chunk of prog Fakery. This piece, by the way, was originally much, much longer, but I cut it back: I hope I didn't do it too much violence, but I don't want to be that repetitious ol' bore in the basement; Joe Biden has that gig locked up . . ..

The topic of slavery reparations has bounced around for a long time. The call came out many years ago re the "need" to pay these reparations, but did not go anywhere. In recent days, however, the demand has grown increasingly strong and strident, and has moved steadily into the field of "respectability and possibility." We see, for example, the "woke" city council of Asheville, North Carolina, July 16, voting (no consulting of tax-payers) to provide some sort of "reparations" for slavery to its black residents--"some sort," because, as you see from the story, "reparations" actually means creating a new bureaucracy to run vague programs. In other words, it creates cushy government jobs for progs and their allies; I doubt black residents of Asheville will see much, if any, of the funds. It comprises, in another words, another delicious slice of prog Fake pie. As with so much else championed by the progs, slavery reparations will lead only to turmoil and increased government control over our lives, precisely what the prog proponents of "reparations" actually seek. As I have noted before, for the progs, black lives do not matter, except to the extent that these lives serve to advance the prog agenda.

Let's start with the simple matter of, "Who pays whom?" After WWII, we saw limited reparations paid to those, mostly Jewish, who had suffered in Nazi concentration camps, or lost immediate family or property to the Nazi regime. Friends of ours, for example, an older married couple both of whom had survived the Nazis, received a payment from the FRG as "reparations" for the deaths of their parents, loss of their home, and for the time they themselves had spent in a death camp. They used the money to move from Honolulu, where we also lived, and to help with the purchase of a small condo in Albuquerque. After we left Hawaii and moved to California, we visited them in New Mexico; they only mentioned reparations once, around 1965, to my father, "They sent us this money. We never asked anything from today's Germans. They are not the Nazis." Note, furthermore, that the Communist GDR dictatorship did not pay reparations, claiming that they were not the heirs of the Nazi regime and had no responsibility or liability for the Holocaust.

We, therefore, see more than a couple of bothersome issues when it comes to reparations. Holocaust reparations went to people still alive who had suffered under the Nazis, and got paid relatively soon after the event. The Bonn government of the FRG agreed to pay reparations, as noted, while the East Berlin government of the GDR did not--I am not aware that Austria was asked to pay. When, however, it comes to slavery, who pays? A number of European countries--e.g., Britain, Portugal, Spain, France--brought African slaves to the Americas. Many European enterprises, while not directly implicated in the slave trade, benefited from that slavery, e.g., Manchester cotton mills. When the USA and other former colonies in the Americas became independent, slavery existed in many of those new nations. So who pays? Europe, the USA, etc? How about the Arabs involved in the slave trade? How about the African tribes who caught and sold the slaves to the Europeans and the Arabs? Do the governments of today's African and Arab nations owe huge reparations to black Americans in both North and South America? What about the native Americans who owned slaves? What about the black Americans who owned slaves? What about white indentured servants?

In the USA's case, who bears responsibility? The US government or the government of the now deceased CSA? Southern state governments? The pro-slavery Democrat party? It was, after all, US government troops who put an end to slavery in the US with the loss of hundreds of thousands of young men--including Republican President Lincoln, himself. Will the descendants of those who fought and died in the struggle against slavery be exempt from paying reparations? Will the descendants of the Republican abolitionists in Massachusetts be exempt? And on and on and on . . .  that onion has endless layers.

Let us march on. Assuming we can figure out who would pay--and, of course, all know who would, but let's pretend we don't--to whom would they send reparations? We can safely assume that no living American ever was slave to another living American. Once again: nobody alive today in the US was a slave in America; nobody alive today, with the possible exception of some refugee from Somalia or Libya, in the US has owned a slave. Slavery, of course, ended in 1865. That means we would have descendants paying descendants. But who descends from slaves? In most cases, how do we know? Not all black people in America descended from slaves, and many black people have immigrated to the USA after 1865, and were neither slaves here nor descendants of such slaves. So that, therefore, presents a problem for any HONEST program of reparations.

Now we get into some really dangerous and crazy stuff. Who is black and entitled to reparations? Joe Biden tells us that a black person who doesn't vote for him is not "really" black. Is that the criteria we will use? Putting that aside, we still have the question before us: who is black? How many "black" people in the USA are 100% black? Not many. So will we set up South African-style panels to determine racial percentages? Will reparations get paid out in accord with those percentages? What do we do with somebody such as Obama who descends from white American slave owners on his mother's side, and black African slave owners and traders on his father's? Does he get some form of reparations? Or does he pay them?

We can go on and on with this. Do we want this discussion in our country? One that provides for constant turmoil and racial animosity? This is tailor-made for the progs and their relentless drive to create problems, confusion, conflict, all requiring the intervention of the prog bureaucrats, and necessitating evermore resources for the prog machine.