Transmuting History Into Gold: Reparations for Historical Wrongs

Any discussion of reparations for the past wrongs in the world system inevitably focuses on slavery. But any consideration of the slave trade must begin with the slave trades that exist today. A press release of the Islamic Association for Palestine of January 24, 2001, entitled: “PA Uncovers Prostitution Ring In Gaza Run By High-Ranking Officers” notes the emergence of a slave trade in women in the Gaza Strip. What the report does not note is that the slave trade, mainly of Aryan women (blue eyes, blonde hair), is part of a much larger Jewish slave network that spans Eastern Europe. As described in Amnesty International, “Israel: Human Rights Abuses of Women Trafficked From the Commonwealth of Independent States”, AI Index MDE 16/17/00, the trafficking in Aryan slave women by Israeli Jews is, as Minister of Justice Yossi Beilin acknowledged, fully legal.

The Jewish slave trade that has emerged in Eastern Europe and the CIS after the fall of Communism revives the ancient network of slave routes that dragged slaves from these areas to the Mediterranean and the Muslim Middle East for centuries. In medieval Europe, the very designation “Jew” was a synonym for slave trader, so common were the (often Khazar) Jewish slavers. In Western Europe, and to a lesser extend in Eastern Europe, Vikings kidnapped people and sold them into the slave markets of the Middle East. Slave raids in Ireland lasted for centuries and destroyed much of what had been a stronghold of European culture in the early Middle Ages. Europe would only escape from the omnipresent clutches of the slavers with the Muslim loss of naval dominance in the Mediterranean, beginning with the Christian victory at Lepanto.

Later, the British, who enslaved other Europeans long after all others had ended such practices, would populate their temperate zone colonies with White slaves, mainly Irish and from the British lower classes. The vast majority of White Australians are famously the descendants of slaves, even if the slaves were called “prisoners” (remember, poverty was a crime at the time). And a majority of European-Americans are also descendants of White slaves, even if the slaves were called “servants” (remember, the Black slaves purchased in Africa were also termed “servants”). I myself, a European-American from an old family in Florida, am the descendant of people enslaved by the British and brought to work on plantations in North Florida. European-Americans have so thoroughly lost their ethnic heritages that few even are aware of the slavery of their ancestors, even if the pejorative terms used to describe White slaves survive (e.g., red-neck, white trash). The taboo against discussion of White slavery is so great that few people even realize that the distinguishing quality of British imperialism was its creation of temperate zone colonies through the White slave trade.

Of course, the question of reparations for slavery really focuses on the question of the slavery of Blacks. Nobody really cares about the slavery of Whites, let alone Aryan women from Eastern Europe today, although there is some Turkish interest in the Melungeons in Appalachia (descendants in part of enslaved Ottoman, Muslim sailors dumped by the British in their North American colonies). Most good people are at most indifferent to the Jewish taste for rape of Aryan slave women, figuring it is somehow their birthright, because of the Holocaust. But what about reparations for Black slaves, the question dearest to the heart of American Liberals?

The question of Black slavery is just not that morally simple. Black slaves, whether sold into the Muslim world or into the Atlantic world, were almost entirely enslaved by other Blacks. Let’s leave that aside. Blacks entering the Atlantic world were disproportionately bought and sold by Jews, even though the American Historical Association has, by resolution, banned the study or discussion of the disproportionate role of Jews in the slave trade. Let’s leave that aside, and just focus on the United States, and ignore the important role of Jews in the slave trade. Blacks were slaves of Whites and of Indians and of Blacks. Blacks owned Indians, Blacks owned Whites. Some of the major slave owners were Indians. Even President Abraham Lincoln (who thought the freed slaves should be shipped back to Africa), in his Emancipation Proclamation, freed only the slaves in the rebel states, maintaining slavery in the states that were part of the Union. One old story illustrates the depths to which slavery can bring men: there is an account by Petronius of a retired Roman soldier who retired, and lived off the proceeds of selling his own children by the slave women he owned. While slavery is a great and corrupting evil (even if it approved of by all major religions in their holy books), it is flatly impossible to parse out the precise legal responsibility of specific individuals and institutions for the slavery of past centuries for the purposes of cash reparations. Certainly no one who believes in reparations for slavery would accept an offset against reparations for the fact that Europeans and only Europeans forced the worldwide abolition of slavery.

But how honest is the quest for reparations? Of course, no one cares about White slaves, whether they were my ancestors or are the Aryan women sold by the Jews into brothels from Kosovo, to Tel Aviv, or even Gaza City. Let’s leave that aside, choke down the hypocrisy of leaving it aside, and look at the very political correct question of Black slavery.

Consider the question of the Zanj. The Zanj were the Black agricultural slaves in Abbasid southern Iraq who staged a great revolt in 869-883. The story has been recast as a simplistic anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Iraqi story of vast concentration camps by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Bernard Lewis, both noted Zionist activists. Lewis has long argued that Black Africans should have an eternal enmity against the Muslims, and has long fought to legitimize Zionism, largely by devaluing Islam. Gates so crudely recasts the story of the Zanj in terms of concentration camps that I can almost hear him drooling for an eternal stream of “Holocaust” reparations from the Muslims. While the political intent of these Zionist activists is bleakly transparent, who decides the identity of the ultimate victim and of the eternal payer of reparations? The short answer is the winners.

Justice has noting to do with reparations for historical wrongs. Let us not be naive, and expect there to be reparations for the victims in “Palestine, Kashmir, Algeria and South Africa”. The 100 million Christians who died in the artificial famines and concentration camps of the mainly Jewish Bolsheviks lost, and nobody cares about their fate.

This is not the time for apologies and payback for the Palestinians: rather it is the power of Zionism that demands payback from the Palestinians, for the high crime of resistance, if for no other crime. It is, of course, the central claim of Zionism that the legitimacy of their seizure of Palestine and the extermination of the Palestinians is based on payback for the Holocaust. Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) even accuse the Palestinians of being the masterminds behind the Holocaust.

The Germans, living under Allied Occupation even today, pay, but pay at bayonet point. In 2000, some 22,000 Germans faced thought crime prosecutions for questioning the legitimacy of these reparations. Every year, the number of “Holocaust survivors” grows, from 100,000 in 1945 to some 2 million today (even ignoring claims like that of Elie Wiesel (who has now quietly retracted his longstanding claim to have been incarcerated in Auschwitz) that all Jews are Holocaust survivors, or of ADL boss Abraham Foxman that Holocaust survivors are “infallible”). Is it necessary to add, parenthetically, that Israeli army spokesmen have justified the killing of Palestinian children by sniper teams by stating that Palestinian children doubt the Holocaust?

Consider the recent $1.25 billion that Swiss banks agreed to pay to powerful Jewish organizations like the World Jewish Congress. The lawsuit was brought in the United States before a Jewish judge. There was no plaintiff, and yet a class-action lawsuit was allowed on the theory that there must be lots of plaintiffs who had not yet been found. The banks were faced by a boycott by every US state, many major cities (like New York) and the US government, and were attacked in a relentless hate campaign from a thousand Jewish lobbies, newspapers and TV stations. No evidence of even one Jewish bank account being illegally withheld was ever presented. The Swiss, always able to do the math, determined the cost of the extortion was lower than the cost of lost profits and the cost to their reputation. The German acquiescence to yet more reparations to forced laborers is even more shameful: it comes even as Germans held in slavery into the 1970s have no right to redress. Of course, almost all the extorted money will be absorbed by powerful Jewish organizations like the World Jewish Congress or rapacious Jewish lawyers.

Payback nothing to do with justice, since it is the powerful who get paid, and the weak who pay. The formula for reparations to phony Jewish victims proves this: money is taken from people with no provable responsibility, for improvable acts of dubious historicity, to be paid in the name of “victims” who are infallible, with the money being pocketed by powerful lobbying organizations that can destroy any critic or opponent.

And finally, remember the speech of Max Nordau, at a Zionist Congress before World War I. He argued that Zionists should claim that six million Jews would be killed in the war everyone knew was coming, World War I, and that Palestine would be awarded to the Jews as payback.

Mr. James Joseph Sanchez is PhD Doctor (Middle East).