The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

It’s an ill wind . . . .

Why are some countries of Africa and the Americas so horribly backward, poor, and full of turmoil compared to others that are more successful, richer, and characterized by domestic order and tranquility?


Islam can account for only a smallish portion of this.

A better answer of broader application is that the former have not enough white people.

The latter have more whites and so are in greater measure participants in the global modern civilization built on the whole by the white peoples of Europe and carried by them wherever they went.

Are today’s Americans of primarily African descent better off, in net, and even in every way than the peoples of today’s black Africa?

Assuredly, as those who "go home" for a visit agree.

Are today’s Indians on the whole and in net better off, all over the New World, than their pre-Colombian ancestors were and than any Indians of today would have been, had Columbus and the Europeans never arrived?

Without a doubt.

Much the same is true of the indigenous peoples of Oceania.

Do more than 999 out of every thousand humans alive today have the blood of slaves coursing through their veins?

Sounds right. Probably more, come to think of it.

These truths and many others are forbidden history, today.

Others such as the truth that while Christian, European whites of the New World were purchasers and shippers and owners of black slaves, so were Muslims of the Levant, the Maghreb, Anatolia, and across the Indian Ocean.

And the sellers to both were African blacks.

Today’s African blacks are the descendants of African blacks who captured, brutalized, and betrayed into slavery the ancestors of today’s blacks of the New World.

Not one nation in Europe has boundaries that were not drawn repeatedly throughout the region's history by wars fought out by others.

And not one is a true nation state, or ever has been.

Likewise, not one area of the Mediterranean coast, whether on the northern or the southern side, has or has ever had since ancient times boundaries not drawn by advancing or receding foreign empires.

Nor has any one, or indeed any part of western or northern Europe, not been repeatedly conquered, invaded, and colonized by alien peoples.

Why are such things forbidden history, and by whom are they forbidden?

Well, whence came these moral dogmas?

The peoples inhabiting Africa, the Americas, and Oceania at the beginning of the age of European expansion held natural, just, and homogeneous common ownership of the entire vast and largely empty expanses of territory they, albeit thinly, occupied.

Their descendants, when you think of it and view it properly, still do.

Every European to arrive in these areas during the age of European expansion and since has been an unrighteous conquistador and a morally criminal ethnic cleanser, and all their descendants today still there live on lands and riches not their own, tainted if not outright poisoned with the injustice of 500 years of conquest and genocide.

And all of the white people of the New World also live unrighteously on wealth tainted with what was produced here by black slaves.

Hence all of the white people now living in the New World owe reparations to all of the blacks now living in the New World.

Would a list of other notably harmful and vicious moral dogmas of our time be useful?

Or anyway interesting?

Maybe.

More so than those of other ages?

Even recent other ages?

Well, no; I guess not.

Bien-pensant philosophers have often claimed the point of morality is to help men live in peace with one another.

But the point of history's most consequential and fateful moral convictions has been to  license coercion, hatred, cruelty, violence, murder, and  slaughter on a mass scale.

They have been weapons in the wrong hands, as one might say.

And the widespread beliefs are false that, in general and on the whole, when people spend money to tell you things they do so for your own good, they believe what they tell you, and what they tell you is likely true.

Indeed, the more effort they put into convincing you or into silencing doubt and opposition . . . . .

Update, later that same day.

A propos, see the post and the comments.

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