Images of the North African Slave Trade in White Europeans and a Quote from Hitler

I’ve put up several posts already critising Sasha Johnson for her quote stating that Blacks will enslave Whites, for which she was thrown off Twitter. Johnson seems to see herself as a British Black Panther, and so has demanded a Black militia to defend Blacks from the police, and an all-Black party. Which roughly follows the Panthers’ programme and activism.But she’s pushed this even further, following the pattern of the activist style of politics that Conservative historian Noel Sullivan views as the real origin of Fascism into overt racism with that Tweet.

But from the middle ages to the 19th century Arabs from north Africa captured and enslaved White Europeans. This only ended in the 19th century with the French invasion of Algiers. The slave raiding increased with the rise of the Barbary pirates in the 16th century. Mediterranean Europe was particularly affected. Whole communities were attacked and carried off in France and Italy, but it also extended to Britain and Ireland and even as far afield as Iceland. I found this contemporary drawing of White European slaves being landed by the captors at Algiers c. 1700 in The History of the World, Vol 2: The Last Five Hundred Years, Esmond Wright, general editor, (W.H. Smith 1984), page 265.

The same page also carried this picture of Mulay Ismail, who ruled Morocco from 1672-1727. Morocco was another north African state which relied for its economy on slave raiding.

It’ll surprise no-one that Adolf Hitler also celebrated the conquest and enslavement of those he considered inferior races in Mein Kampf. He wrote

For the development of the higher culture it was necessary that men of lower civilisation should have existed, for none but they could be a substitute for the technical instrument without which higher development was inconceivable. In its beginnings human culture depended less on the tamed beast and more on employment of inferior human material.

it was not until the conquered races had been enslaved that a like fate fell on the animal world; the contrary was not the case, as many would like to believe. For it was the slave which first drew the plough, and after him the horse. None but pacifist fools can look on this as yet another token of human depravity; other must see clearly that this development was bound to happen in order to arrive at a state of things in which those apostles are able to loose their foolish talk on the world.

Human progress is like ascending an endless ladder; a man cannot climb higher unless he has first mounted the lowest rung. Thus the Aryan had to follow the road leading him to realization, and not the one which exists n the dreams of modern pacifists.

Adolf Hitler, My Struggle (London: The Paternoster Library 1933), page 122.

These show that not only is Sasha Johnson ignorant of the White slave trade, or just doesn’t care, she also shows the same attitude towards those she considers racially inferior and an enemy as Hitler. Only the colours have been swapped. It is, in my view, fair to call her a Nazi. And her supporters, including the members of her Black militia and prospective members of her proposed Blacks only party are also Nazis.

Now I think that she’s probably just young, stupid and got carried away. But she still deserves to be treated like any other Nazi until she grows up and sees sense. After all, to many people before the Nazi seizure of power, Hitler was a joke. There’s a line in the Bernardo Bertolucci film The Conformist, about a young man who joins the Italian Fascist party after he shoots the paedophile, who tried to attack him, that’s very pertinent. ‘When I was in Munish, there was a man ranting in the beerhalls. We all used to laugh at him. That man was Adolf Hitler’.

Trailer for Mike Leigh’s ‘Peterloo’

The left-wing British film director, Mike Leigh, has a film coming out about the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ in 1819 when a defenceless crowd that had gathered in Manchester to hear the radical politician, Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, was charged by cavalry.

It was a period of severe economic recession, unemployment, political discontent and stifling censorship of freedom of speech, protest and the press. This passage from The History of the World: The Last 500 Hundred Years, General Editor Esmond Wright (Feltham: Hamlyn 1984) describes the conditions at the time.

At the end of the war England entered upon a long depression which brought to many even greater hardship than the war had done. Industries lay depressed with the sudden cessation of wartime demand, agriculture no longer enjoyed the protection that Napoleon’s blockade had brought and began to contract, while European countries, impoverished after years of conquest and exploitation, could not afford to resume their former level of trade. It was, in fact, twenty years after 1815 before British exports recovered to their previous level. Added to the existing problems of unemployment and low wages were some half a million demobilized soldiers and sailors, suddenly thrown onto a labour market that could not absorb them. The years from 1815 to 1820 were mong the darkest in English history when many feared, with some cause, a repetition of the events which had torn France apart in 1789.

Radicalism – an extreme form of politics which advocated fundamental reform of the constitutional and financial system – grew to brief importance under such popular leaders as Cobbett and Hunt. In their hatred of industrialization they preached a naïve ‘back-to-the-land’ philosophy which seemed attractive to populations of former peasants exposed to the insecurities of town life. Significantly, the cause of the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, when a defenceless crowd was charged by squadrons of cavalry, was a speech by Hunt, not on the problem of wages or unemployment, but on the subject of land reform.

Most labour movements in the first half of the century had this strong agrarian background. A majority of the new town dwellers were peasants by origin, unaccustomed to the regularity of factory work and the overcrowded life in slums and tenements. They turned instinctively to solutions that offered simpler, better understood relationship in which men seemed to be something more than mere instruments of production. Working people gave their support to Radicalism, not because they understood or even cared very much about abstract democratic principles but because it represented a protest against the unacceptable conditions of life. To its few middle- and upper-class supporters it was much more – a progressive, democratic demand for a government responsible to the popular will and an administrative system based on efficiency rather than privilege.

To such suggestions the governments of the fay responded with severe repression. The Tory party remained in office from the end of the war until 1830, first under Lord Liverpool, later under the wartime hero, the Duke of Wellington. Their belief was that the British constitution was perfect and that any attempt to disturb it must be put down firmly. Trade unions were illegal until 1824 and even after that striking was still a criminal offence, public meetings and meeting-places required to be licensed and newspapers were subject to a crippling stamp duty of five pence a copy. Together with such measures went a crude system which paid a meagre dole to labourers whose earning were inadequate to support their families (the Speenhamland system of poor relief) and which had the effect of impoverishing whole areas of the country. (p. 396).

This sounds very much like the kind of Britain Tweezer, Bojo, Rees-Mogg and their followers would like to return to us to. A country where unions and strikes are banned, restrictions on public meetings and censorship of the press. Except when it supports the Tories, of course. Blair and Cameron both tried to bring in legislation limiting demonstrations. They’ve been banned within a certain area of parliament, and Cameron wanted to pass legislation outlawing public protests if they caused a nuisance to local residents. Which is a convenient way of suppressing public expressions of dissent while claiming that you aren’t intending to do any such thing. ‘The government is fully behind freedom of speech and assembly, but this will be an intolerable nuisance to the people actually in the area’, is how the argument would run. And they’d also like to see more people slaving away in cruel and exploitative conditions in poverty, with a benefits system totally unable to cope.

Which is what makes Leigh’s movie of such contemporary significance. Here’s the trailer.

I caught a few moments of Leigh being interviewed on the Beeb the week before last. He was talking about how the incident was an important event in Manchester’s history. Walking around the historic part of Manchester, he pointed out buildings that had been there at the time and which had been included in the film.

Leigh’s known for his improvisational approach to film making, but the interviewer said that this movie felt more scripted, and Leigh agreed. I can’t say I’m a fan of Leigh’s work – it’s a bit too grim for my tastes – but this is something I’d like to see. The Peterloo Massacre is nearly 200 years ago, but it still has resonance and immense importance to the early 21st century Britain of Tweezer and the Tories.