Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 10:18:47 -0400 (EDT)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: Re: The trouble with Holocausts



Roxanne writes:

>Professor Pagden's claim that the African diaspora to the New World
>surpassed in scale -- "not to mention sheer barbarity -- ...anything which
>had taken place before" is not supported by most research.  Raymond Mauny,
a >French authority on Africa, asserts (in *Les Siecles obscurs de l'Afrique
>noire*, 1970) that from the beginning of Islam in the seventh century to
the >twentieth century, around 14 million Africans were transported to the
Muslim >world.  Five million Africans were exported in the nineteenth
century alone >and, if most estimates of the rate of two out of three slaves
dying en route >to the coast is accurate, we are left with a figure of 10
million dead, and >a total of 15 million people effectively removed from
East African society. >Indeed, if we accept the estimates of witnesses like
Livingston to the >effect that four out of five slaves died en route to the
coast, the total >becomes the catastrophic figure of 25 million people
snatched from East >African communities in one century alone!  By
comparison, the trans-atlantic >slave trade is commonly estimated to have
transported 10 million Africans to >the New World during some 300 years...   


Slavery has been a global phenomenon for thousands of years and was not the
product of racism, but the inevitable outcome of societies containing the
powerful and the powerless.  Can we say the same about the Jewish Holocaust
and the deliberate murder of 6-8 million in eastern and central Europe?
What about the Armenians?  Or East Timor?  Year Zero (Kampuchea)?  JH
Parry's estimate of 180-200 million native lives lost as a result of the
settlement of the Americas to 1700 hints at the futility of postulating
racist or nationalist explanations for genocide.  Surely, it is an
unavoidable feature, a natural concomitant of humanity's salient
characteristic; the struggle over the division of goods and services.  The
same could be said for bourgeois concepts like "human rights" or
"democracy".  The claims by some Jews that Judiasm (as in some bogus
"Judeo-Christian" tradition) is more "moral" than Naziism I consider so much
cant.  Both are the expression of different political/economic groups in the
pursuit of power and, therefore, are "morally" equal.

Brown University, a baroquely fascist institution in my own native state of
*Rhode Island* (Parson Weems take note) profited enormously from the
African-American holocaust, the vestigial results of which can still be seen
within a stone's throw of that bucolic campus.  Next month, my daughter
Ellen graduates from Rhode Island School of Design, which was built
literally on the deaths of thousands of factory workers during the pneumonia
"epidemics" of the 1870s and 1880s occasioned by draconian working
conditions along the Blackstone River.  My point is, both these august
institutions exist as honored features of modern civil life as a direct
consequence of the sufferings endured by the victims of economic
development.  Perhaps Rakesh's descendents will duly note the willingness of
white workers like myself to countenance the "removal" of, say, 500 million
people of color to safeguard our freedom to wipe our arses with scented
toilet paper.  

The racial component, in the case of the Jewish and African holocausts, were
of a pedagogical nature, justifying to credulous constituencies facts which
were largely economic in origin.  The racial dimension assumed greater
importance after both were largely over.  The Jews themselves have the used
the Holocaust and its "uniqueness" (and, by extension. the "uniqueness" of
their Jewishness) to promote the large-scale land piracy in the Middle East
that is modern Israel.  The spectre of slavery was --`til the other day --
quite a profitable one for black American "leaders" in the Democrat Party.
Their economic clout, in comparison to that of American Jews, assures them a
long period in the wilderness of American civil society; there is no serious
discussion of memorials to the several million blacks who "served" this
country, largely unwillingly, as slaves.

In reference to Padgen's "Eastern" alternative; native and free laborers in
India began to compete seriously with Africans *after* ceasing to be either
natives of India or free laborers, i.e., when they became migrant indentured
servants in the European sugar colonies.  Look especially at Piaget's
*Division of Labor in Racist Societies*.

And thank you for your frank comments on the fellatio thread, which is now
thankfully ended.  My often inadvertent attempts to link sex and politics
are more often than not problemmatic.  Good luck, too, in Santa Monica, and
finishing up your dissertation.  I'll be traveling myself soon.

I'll see you in the Fall. 

Louis Godena



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