This is the first post in a series on the business of isms and how they rely on foundational myths to monetise manufactured resentments.
Contents
Introduction - Selling the 20th Century
The Myths of Monetised Resentment (plus memes)
“Racism” and the Slavery Myth (no memes)
These narratives do not liberate their subjects from oppression, but recast their lives as a misery memoir of inescapable persecution.
This is the nature of a lucrative industry of mass produced discontent, which produces an ever-escalating narrative of urgent injustice to expand its political and financial power.
These myths are central to the concept of the 20th century as commonly understood. Their extinction will produce the new politics, which has yet to emerge, in the ideological interregnum we now inhabit.
THE SALE OF THE 20TH CENTURY
I say the 20th century began in the 1920s and ended around now. The invention of liberal democracy a hundred years ago was the recasting of politics as a sales cult. It relied on people buying in, to ideas manufactured for mass consumption.
Ideas like freedom, liberty, and democracy itself.
The propaganda system around which our politics is built is no longer capable of directing the desires of its populations. It is itself the problem, which makes obvious the otherwise unmentionable fact that every one of the crises we inhabit is a result of the managerial elites whose expertise, they said, qualified them to rule in place of the ignorant public.
The sale of the century is closing down. Fewer and fewer people are buying what is left on its shelves. In order to comprehend what should come next, and to form the politics of a life worth living, it is vital to explode the myths which were generated in the mass production of mankind’s hopes, dreams, desires - and discontents.
We cannot go beyond this evil if we do not understand what is good.
THE FOUNDATIONAL MYTHS OF MONETISED RESENTMENT
The Sale of the 20th Century relies on the production and repetition of profitable myths.
The midwives of these myths are the various industries of grievance.
Peddling isms and phobias partners with political ideology to birth the idea of progress as a perpetual complaint, whose ever-rising clamour is destroying our faith, freedoms, homelands and social cohesion.
This revolutionary capture of mass culture is driven by the invention, magnification and eventual manifestation of insoluble grievances between people for reason of ethnic and identitarian claims of disprivilege.
In every case they rely on myths to do so.
Today I begin with the business of American racism, rooted in the historical grievance of slavery. The resentment culture industry functions here to produce of permanent victimhood in the minds of Black Americans.
This widely exported model of insoluble resentment has produced one franchise of a lucrative enterprise - the justice of monetised grievance - whose progress corresponds to the complete destruction of social cohesion in the West.
It also comes with demands for 14 trillion dollars - from a professional black man who pulled a fire alarm in Congress. For example.
THE MYTHOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SLAVERY
Here is an examination of one major Sale of the 20th Century - the eternal grievance of “racism”, based on the legacy of slavery.
I am not saying “slavery did not happen”. I am saying slavery is mythologised by what its narrative excludes, as much as what it includes.
This is done to secure money and power. The cost is social instability and the promotion of a sort of mental illness as a career move.
Most social justice movements reduce to demands for money with menaces.
This is just one of them.
An overview:
Zora Neale Hurston
The “Niggerati”
WEB DuBois, grifter and Communist
The grievance business
The role of the culture industry
The second part treats some forgotten aspects of slavery.
White slavery by the Barbary States
1300 years of the Arab Slave trade
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Zora Neale Hurston, a writer championed as a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century, a group which styled itself as
“the niggerati”
She was the grandchild of slaves, and celebrated her upbringing in “Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black town in America”.
[Hurston’s] depictions of this self-ruled colored Eden have become legend, and in recent years have seemed to hold out a ruefully tempting alternative to the ordeals of integration.
The benefits of the self-segregated life have been attested to by the fact that Eatonville produced Hurston herself: a black writer uniquely whole-souled and self-possessed and imbued with (in Alice Walker’s phrase) “racial health.”
In 1927 she interviewed Cudjo Lewis, a former slave. He came to the US on the last slave ship to arrive in the United States, the Clotilde, in 1860.
Her 1931 account of his life was suppressed, and she could not get it published during her lifetime. It was released in 2018, as Barracoon.
It recounts the true story of Cudjo Lewis, the “last man to step off a slave ship into America”.
The reason it is so “problematic”, as our differently-saned friends say, is because it destroys the romanticised grievance narrative.
From “The Book No One Would Touch”,
What really makes it a difficult read though, is that while Lewis’s narrative of his time as a slave in the South is harrowing enough, what he says about the complicity of various African tribal leaders in selling their countrymen is, to say the least, discomforting.
This is not new information, certainly not in academic circles, but it does go against most modern popular culture.
Slavery was and remains a business for Africans.
“As Lewis told Hurston, he was captured in his village, Takkoi, during a raid carried out by one King of Dahomey. That king “got very rich ketchin slaves” and then selling them to white slave buyers, Lewis said.
The Kingdom of Dahomey lies in what is now the West African state of Benin.
Lewis is also quoted here in a Washington Post piece which says “publishers weren’t interested in his story”.
Slaves are still forced into labour in Africa today. This is done by Africans to Africans.
SLAVERY: “THE PRICE PAID FOR CIVILISATION”
In the West, their descendants and their fellow travellers continue to demand money on the basis of this industry, which provided a taxi from the Stone Age to the modern world for their ancestors.
Without this, Hurston would never have come to be a writer at all. She said this herself.
Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me.
She said this in her 1928 essay “How it Feels to be Colored Me”. The opening lines frame the controversial and ebullient views of a writer whose life is an object lesson in the production of poverty and obscurity by the expression of unconventional wisdom.
I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.
AMERICAN INDIANS AND SLAVERY
Few remember today the involvement of American Indians in the slave trade. A different tribe of Red people have seen to the exclusion of this fact from the fan fiction of contemporary “history”. American Indians captured each other in slave-seeking inter-tribal wars long before the arrival of the White man, a fact documented in the book War Before Civilisation as elsewhere.
American Indians such as the Cherokee also owned African slaves, with the wider practice examined in books such as Black Slaves, Indian Masters, which shows that the ownership of African slaves by Indian tribes continued even after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.
AGAINST A CAREER OF VICTIMHOOD
Hurston’s excellent account of race continues with a response to the chivvying attentions of the grievance mob.
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves.
It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past.
The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said “On the line!” The Reconstruction said “Get set!”; and the generation before said “Go!”
I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep.
She rejected grievance and a lifetime of Black victimhood.
I am not tragically colored.
There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all.
I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.
Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less.
No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Hurston neither excused nor celebrated slavery. She simply admitted it was a fact, and moved on.
She says instead that it happened, and one consequence of that was that of a life of opportunity which inspired her to look to the future, instead of weaponising the past.
COMMUNIST RACE CHISELLER WEB DUBOIS
The leading voice at the time was the chiselling communist WEB DuBois, who hated Hurston for her rejection of his career move into full time grievance peddling.
His entire career, for which he is still feted today, relied on the creation, magnification and broadcast of “The Negro Problem”.
What was the problem? In Dubois’ view, according to one scholar,
…the Negro is not a problem, although problems affect the Negro
DuBois spent his life talking up these problems for influence, money and esteem. He did well.
His position suggests that Black people cannot and can never live in peace with evil Whitey, and must exact tribute for this crime, which is the incorrigible fault and unavoidable product of White civilisation.
Does this sound familiar?
Zora didn’t see a problem, and did not see her life nor that of other “colored” people as one constellated by theym.
As such, she did not see eye to eye with DuBois, “the first black person to graduate with a Ph.D from Harvard”.
People like DuBois won, selling the previous centuries horrors to those of the present, as many groups continue to do so now.
The credentials, as ever, were helpmeets to this harm.
Black permanent victimhood is one of the major sales of the century, and it is an excellent example of how movements claiming to pursue justice and equality perpetuate the very negative stereotypes they say they exist to erase.
This translates into appalling social conditions, as a hysterical and permanent sense of resentment fuels the complete destruction of social bonds and norms, replacing normal life with a state of emergency.
This state of chaos and constant alarm is the goal of all communist revolutionaries.
WEB DuBois was a lifelong Marxist. Hurston, by contrast, was not. Her rejection of an easy ticket on the grievance gravy train is a major reason why she struggled to support herself despite - or perhaps because of - her outstanding talent.
AGAINST THE RESENTMENT-CULTURE INDUSTRY
She described her predicament of enduring poverty and her struggle to be published in a 1950 essay, “What White Publishers Won’t Print”.
Far from a mere complaint, it is the most intelligent and informative analysis of Black America I have ever read.
The fact that there is no demand for incisive and full-dress stories around Negroes above the servant class is indicative of something of vast importance to this nation.
This blank is NOT filled by the fiction built around upper-class Negroes exploiting the race problem. Rather, it tends to point it up. A college-bred Negro still is not a person like other folks, but an interesting problem, more or less.
Her barb at “college-bred negroes” such as DuBois is expanded into a critique of “The American Museum of Unnatural History”, which requires the reproduction of simplistic cultural stereotypes and will not broadcast anything else.
She said the fictions it produced were defended by the exclusion of the truth. “Let there be light” instead, she concluded.
She says this culture industry reduced “the American negro” to two “exhibits” - a grinning minstrel and a whining grifter.
The American Negro exhibit is a group of two. Both of these mechanical toys are built so that their feet eternally shuffle, and their eyes pop and roll. Shuffling feet and those popping, rolling eyes denote the Negro, and no characterization is genuine without this monotony.
One is seated on a stump picking away on his banjo and singing and laughing.
The other is a most amoral character before a share-cropper’s shack mumbling about injustice. Doing this makes him out to be a Negro “intellectual.”
It is as simple as all that.
Hurston also praised a 1926 novelisation of the roaring success enjoyed by a now wealthy class of Harlem entertainers. This, she said, gave an honest account which is condemned without ever having being read by all the right people.
Though many Negroes denounced Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven because of the title, and without ever reading it, the book, written in the deepest sincerity, revealed Negroes of wealth and culture to the white public.
WEB DuBois condemned the book for its title, as alluded to here by Hurston.
The entertainer/victim dichotomy she denounced is a reasonable fit for the depiction of the “American negro” of today. It has persisted because, as she also pointed out, it is an enormously profitable model.
PROFIT AND LOSS
For her destruction of this parodic dipole of “black” identity Hurston ended her days penniless in a nursing home, whose staff burned her letters and works on her death. A local black sheriff hosed down the flaming barrel and retrieved what was left.
Dubois enjoyed a lucrative and distinguished career, which included the founding of the grievance group the NAACP, editing its magazine, Crisis.
He was the “radical” leader of this organised grift until he departed, due to his intensifying Marxism, to pursue an academic career. He joined the Communist Party in 1961 and emigrated to Ghana, where he would die two years later.
Zora Neale Hurston died alone in poverty, her unmarked grave forgotten for decades. Its location, and all her literary output, would probably have remained unknown if not for the efforts of Alice Walker to remind the world of Zora, whose eyes were never on the easy prize of the lifelong exploitation of misery hype.
As her character Janie says in Their Eyes Were Watching God,
“Two things everbody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves.”
PART TWO - SLAVERY BEYOND WHITE GUILT
There is no grievance grift regarding slavery in the former Ottoman Empire and the wider Islamic world.
Despite the fact that the East African slave trade is the reason for the presence of Islam in Africa, there are few descendants of the centuries of enslavement of Africans by the Islamic world as the custom was to castrate male slaves.
It is said that up to six out of ten prospective male slaves died in the process of the removal of their genitals.
Historian Roger Botte estimates 12-15 million Africans were enslaved by the Islamic world, “with the active participation of African leaders”. Others put the number at 6.5 to 10 million.
Robert Davis, author of Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, estimated that, in addition, over a million white slaves were captured from Britain, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Iceland, Ireland and the Mediterranean between 1500 and 1800 by the Barbary States of Islamic North Africa.
There are no demands from Europeans for reparations.
According to the Cambridge World History of Slavery (Volume 3) the practice was limited by British and French naval and military action in the 19th century, but continued into the 20th.
The British outlawed slave trading in 1833, and used the Royal Navy to halt the Islamic slave trade from East Africa in 1857, in a notable use of “gunboat diplomacy”.
What is called the Arab Slave Trade went on for 1300 years. It focused heavily on the capture of girls and women to become sex slaves.
I have visited the old slave market in Zanzibar which preserves a building in which slaves were held before sale.
The keeper was himself a black African muslim. He was bemused when I asked him how he came to be a muslim, whilst he showed me inside the tiny subterranean stone box in which his ancestors had been contained by those who converted him and his people.
The slave market site is now partly occupied by the Anglican Christ Church Cathedral. The altar is placed over the spot where the whipping post once stood.
Slavery continues to this day in Africa, notably in supplying the workforce required to mine materials for “green” electric vehicles so beloved of the unreality-based community.
The Financial Times calls them “informal workers”. They mean the child slaves used to mine cobalt to produce the new iPhone.
The Global Slavery Index for 2023 claims a worldwide total of almost 50 million modern slaves, naming India (11 million), Pakistan (2 million), China (5 million) amongst those nations with the greatest number of modern slaves.
The table above shows only prevalence relative to population size, meaning the more populous nations with higher numbers do not feature.
It is extremely convenient for real life modern slavers for the debate about slavery to be restricted to the punishment of the people who did most to abolish it, by people who were transported from a primitive lifestyle into one of formerly unimaginable opportunity.
The business of grievance in this, as in every other case, also functions to conceal and enable a genuine evil.
If you think this was spicy, the antisemitism industry is next.
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Well said mate. I am a teacher and can confirm that the system is failing- new teachers last less than 2 years! but sadly it is producing young people who have a victim and entitlement mentality with lower self responsibility for actions. The call to follow Jesus is the only answer to this mess! By the way He is coming back soon it seems. That is very newsworthy!! Messiah 2030.
Mind blowing, again, Frank. Well done!