If the Bible is not authoritative, and if some secular “philosophy” or Weltanschauung is not accepted by a society as the popular semblance of truth, “authority” or social consensus may be lost. At such a point, as we have seen in our own history, what “science” prescribes may be the whim of a simple, thoughtless person or group; it can then become the fancy of the mob. There is then no authority, and what is patently insanity may well become the common perception, the common view of truth and reality.
In our society, a leftist decision has been made to pursue a revolution in the spirit of Marx. Having witnessed the failure of the Marxian revolution to bring about positive, sustainable social change, however, something had to change. In a country without class distinctions (as in the United States in contrast to the European class societies), promoting revolution required that another
socially divisive strategy should be developed to pit the social “have nots” against the social “haves.” It was deemed appropriate to take advantage of American history, including slavery, and of its lingering proclivity to produce a fairly trivial number of durable racists and a general racial divide throughout the nation. A permanent split between blacks and whites could be produced through the appropriate racial propaganda to generate blind hatred among the “oppressed class.”
Why did slavery come to America? It came for the same reason it has come to most societies in the history of mankind. It came because there were organizers who could profit from it. And why were the victims always black? Of course they were not. Many different groups were. And one should not overlook the fact that there were also black slaveholders. The history of slavery has hardly been uniformly of blacks oppressed by whites. In our own history, blacks were enslaved and many whites knew this was unjust. They labored to achieve justice and freedom for the slaves; it took a long time to overcome the democrats, long located largely in the southern states, who throughout our history worked against the freedom and the pursuit of opportunity for blacks.
In a separate blog I have addressed the legacy of the democrat party with regard to slavery, Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, and the contemporary disaster of democrat welfare and education policies in our city centers to keep blacks in oppressive conditions. Current abortion policies, incidentally, were initiated by some who viewed abortion as a sort of genocide for American blacks, who have been far more victimized by the practice than have the whites.
Numerous groups were oppressed in early American history, not merely the blacks. The Irish immigrants, the Mormons, native Americans, Asians, and others were oppressed and persecuted, driven from their homes or, as the Irish, forced into desperate working conditions in mines and enduring extreme poverty. People came to America seeking freedom, but some of the people immigrating brought their tastes, their politics, and their prejudices with them, just as today’s contemporaries fleeing California and New York threaten their new neighbors with the politics the immigrants import. Those groups and those whom they influence are the reason that social injustice can persist in a country. The surprise is that in spite of the presence of such negative influences, progress toward justice for the American black has been
surprisingly swift from a historical perspective since Abraham Lincoln. Of course we would love to see progress come more quickly, but the evidence of good will toward our black compatriots is everywhere.
Unfortunately, the race baiters who see a division of our country along ethnic lines are working with all their strength to radicalize and indoctrinate American blacks into a racist tribe ready to carry out the revolutionary intentions of their indoctrinators. These America haters are numerous and powerful enough to convince many blacks that persecution is endemic and inevitable among whites, and even to convince some whites that they are personally guilty of the suffering of the blacks. Some who willingly portray this guilt are simply expressing an opportunistic political position, of course.
The introductory thoughts expressed above expressed that when a nation’s perception of obvious truths becomes distorted, usually through the breakdown of the traditional carriers of socially accepted realities, the most insane propositions can be pawned off as truth and there is no haven for intellectual stability or good sense. People can then express senseless ideas with perfect seriousness. In normal times, when the forces of indoctrination are not out of control and idiocy still appears to most people as idiocy, such nonsensical notions would simply be embarrassing.
The notion that most clearly characterizes our age of insanity is that of paying reparations to blacks for all their ancestors suffered. We usually try to compensate those who did the suffering, so in an attempt to sound more justified, advocates will assert that they have “genetic issues” stemming back to the suffering of their enslaved ancestors. It may be that those making such a claim actually do carry some mental residual from slavery, since even expressing that claim makes one wonder whether they may be mentally impaired.
It would be rather difficult to determine all the individuals whose ancestors suffered from the sometimes harsh conditions characterizing America’s early history. There were numerous groups. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I would perhaps be prepared to receive the $5 million dollar reparations suggested recently for those whose ancestors were black slaves. My great great grandmother was driven from her home in Nauvoo Illinois in the middle of winter by a frenzied mob. At an age when one could retire today, she drove a team of horses across much of the country to enter what ultimately became the state of Utah at a time when there were no amenities for pioneers, who were confronted by Indians and uncultivated, arid lands, and with many other difficult conditions to overcome. Those pioneers struggled and suffered much more than some of the blacks who chanced to be more fortunate and whose masters were faithful and kind Christians. There were actually some such slaveholders who made sure their slaves lived in conditions better than the working class of England described by Charles Dickens during the early industrialization of that country. Finally, it should be noted that the slave population was certainly not treated worse than the native Americans who fell subject to America’s “manifest destiny” that saw the Indians experience sufferings that might be compared to those who experience genocide.
As a descendant of immigrants from Scotland and Europe, and who went straight from the Midwest to Utah, there was no history of slavery in my family, so I expect to be dismissed from the obligation to pay reparations to the great great grandsons of former slaves. I suspect there are a few (million) other Americans who are not actually guilty of having ever enslaved anyone. Perhaps the issue would never have arisen if we all had still read occasionally in the Bible or if we had all successfully learned to read anything at all before our beloved country became insanely “woke.”