Slavery and reparations
Do you know what happens if you help a man? He hates you. Men hate to be dependent on another man—it’s basically slavery. So if another man helps you then you hate and resent him. It’s why men have difficult relationships with their fathers—your father has a natural desire to help, yet, as a man, you have a natural desire to be independent; hence even as you are helped you learn to hate (and that’s before you factor in the fact that you’re in love with the same woman). It’s why the Christian injunction to “help your fellow man” actually causes more hate in the world—about the only men who will accept help are the complete down and outs on the streets who have lost almost all self-respect (and even they hate and resent the people who help them).
Of course, men have to cooperate to get anything done, but if you watch men cooperate it’s a stand-off social dance that tries to stay as far away from “help” as possible (even if the action is, at the highest level, help). Men want to be autonomous and self-reliant—i.e. like God—and they can only hold in contempt men who are servile or dependent upon other men (even if those men are “good” and “right”). Shakespeare observed that men hate to receive gifts from women—and it’s the same principle; the man is meant to be the provider, not the woman; and any man who feels dependent on a woman feels diminished and resentful.
Western conservatives like to say, as regards slavery, “Look at what the West has done for you—slavery was the norm throughout human history but only in the West did a benevolent movement develop to free the slaves.” They expect that this statement will somehow stop the call for reparations for slavery. On the contrary, it does just the opposite. What it says, in effect, is “you were so weak and hopeless, so unmasculine, that you had to rely on white men to set you free.” It’s a slap in the face—it’s just saying to blacks, “At the end of the day, you’re still dependents. Some of us white men are nice, so we decided to let you go—now be grateful.”
This isn’t how man works—and it’s only leftists, whether progressives or conservative liberals, who think this way. Worse, people who say “we ended slavery, this is why the West is uniquely good” provoke the rankest hate. At least outright slavers told you where you stood, but these people have the cheek to exercise the same power as a slave-holder—to free or hold you—and then say you should be grateful to us. It’s like if your father did your homework for you and then expected you to be especially grateful to him—on the contrary, you’d feel cheated and resentful.
So when conservative liberals say, “Only the West abolished slavery, and that’s why you should be grateful,” they only provoke hatred and contempt. Nobody likes a brown-nosing do-gooder, anyhow—whether they are black, white, or yellow. In fact, the emancipation movement was a liberal movement from the start—it was always decadence.
The modern left just takes the spirit behind emancipation to its logical conclusion: first, we freed the slaves—now, so it seems, they don’t perform as well as free men and that must be due to the environment, to deprivation, so the answer is “reparations” to top them up until they perform on par with the norm. So, as usual, it’s “two lefts” in contention—people who want to pretend it’s still 1813 and they’re William Wilberforce and people who have moved with the times and interpreted the spirit of Wilberforce into modernity.
Obviously, the people who are saying “…and you should be grateful…” will lose because the “emancipation” at stake today is not literal chains but social status and economic differentiation—the call for reparations is the Aufhebung in Hegelian terms, the reiteration of the same principle at a higher level. All they do when they say “only the West freed its slaves” is make everyone feel hate and contempt for them—just like that shabby homeless man with long matted locks feels hatred and contempt for the street pastor who gives him a warm soup and a brand new sleeping bag on a cold night. “Who do you think you are ‘saving the homeless’, ‘saving the blacks’—Jesus Christ?”. Notably, even Jesus didn’t engage in acts of calculated charity—he wasn’t that vicious.
Timothy Leary, LSD guru, fell in with the Black Panthers in Algiers for a while—eventually they got fed up with his antics and imprisoned him in a hotel room. After a few weeks, Leary escaped—and with puckish oirish humour said that what it had taken the blacks 350 years to achieve he had done in a few weeks. Leary was a “right-on” progressive, but even he held, at base, a masculine contempt for anyone who would allow themselves to be enslaved for a few weeks (let alone hundreds of years)—he was a free man, a white man, a European, a relative aristocrat.
It’s a bad policy—believe it or not—to humiliate your slaves, to rub their faces in the fact they are (or were) slaves. Yet conservative liberals are determined to do that, rather than say “all societies in human history have practiced slavery, there’s nothing wrong with slavery”—they still have the demon of Wilberforce in them. Man doesn’t care so much for economics—he cares about self-respect and how he is perceived by society at large; so all the money in the world and all the emancipation in the world will not salve a man with no self-respect; and the only people who think the abolition of slavery are good are women, feminised men, and the Jews (a clever slave race themselves)—and such people can only cultivate resentment and the spirit of destruction.