Above, still from ‘The Woman King’, a fantasy movie about events in Dahomey, in what is now modern Benin. The irony is that in real life the kingdom of Dahomey was built on the enslavement of other Africans who were then sold to slave traders from Europe and the Americas. The warriors of Dahomey, some of who were female, continued to enslave other Africans long after slavery was outlawed in Britain and America.
Paul Craig Roberts – paulcraigroberts.org Aug 27, 2023
For decades liberals have beat into the heads of white Americans that they are racists responsible for enslaving blacks. The insistence on white racism was music to the ears of black activists. Here is racial provocateur Al Sharpton 21 years ago:
“The first thing we need to do is acknowledge that you robbed me. Let’s start there with reparations. . . . America must admit its sins in Africa and its sins against people of African descent.”
This lie has become institutionalized in the media, black racial preferences, and in university black studies departments and their graduates. Enough white Americans have been indoctrinated that the public has accepted black racial privileges in university admissions, employment, and promotion for more than a half century.
Americans have been falsely blamed, and no historian, no scholar, no investigative reporter stood up to correct the blatant misrepresentation of history.
For many years I have reported that the slave trade was an African institution. The black kingdom of Dahomey was the slaver state. The Dutch, Portuguese, British, and French ship captains were the transporters of blacks enslaved by other blacks to the new world. Apparently, Brazil was a larger market for enslaved blacks than England’s North American colonies.
Dahomey was a highly organized almost absolute monarchy as efficiently organized as the United States today, and perhaps more so, but with far more unity and social cohesion than exists in the United States. Dahomey had powerful enemies over whom Dahomey eventually prevailed due to its success in slave wars. The slaves provided trade goods for European firearms that Dahomey used to build its armies, including a regiment of Amazons, who proved themselves an effective fighting force.
Survival required that Dahomey was organized for war to expand its boundaries and to take captives from opposing forces as slaves, who were used to work the royal plantations that supplied food for the army and to trade to Europeans for weapons. In effect, it was the soldiers of Dahomey’s army who were the slavers. Every soldier to whom gun powder was issued was required to bring to the king the head of an enemy or at least one prisoner as a slave. Many of the enslaved blacks brought to the New World were black warriors captured as prisoners of war, and some were royal personages.
During the years that US universities were destroyed by foolish liberals permitting the inauguration of “women’s studies” and “black studies,” propaganda operations in which lies were propagated to ruin relations between men and women and between blacks and whites, I reported that the actual history of the slave trade was once well known and could be found, among other sources, in Karl Polanyi’s book, Dahomey and the Slave Trade. I regarded the fact that accounts of slavery blaming Americans and the US Constitution could flourish–as for example, the New York Times false “1619 Project”–to be evidence that education had disintegrated into rank anti-white propaganda. If black studies was really interested in scholarly undertaking, why was Karl Polanyi’s Dahomey and the Slave Trade kept out of print and unavailable?
The answer was obvious. Frauds have a narrative, and they are opposed to all facts.
Recently, a reader brought to my attention that a new edition of Karl Polanyi’s Dahomey and the Slave Trade had appeared, published as Monograph 42 by the American Ethnological Society. I don’t know what this society is, and I haven’t investigated it, but praise to the society for bringing back a definitive study of the slave trade. Little doubt that the classic will be dismissed by black studies departments as “white supremacy.”
Actually, Polanyi’s book is not a study of the slave trade. It is a study of Dahomey, in Polanyi’s view an “archaic economy.” Karl Polanyi was the leftwing, socialist, perhaps moderate communist brother of my Oxford University professor, Michael Polanyi, a distinguished physical chemist who later became a groundbreaking philosopher of science and knowledge. Karl’s major work is The Great Transformation. Once I was familiar with his work, and once I wrote a scholarly article about it, but the journal referees relied on his followers, and my criticisms or interpretations did not meet with their approval. It was long ago, and I don’t remember about it. Perhaps one day I will find a draft in a file.
The point is that Karl Polanyi was not an admirer of a market economy. It was important to him that there were other ways of organizing economic activity. It seemed important to him that whatever they were, government was involved. In Dahomey the King was certainly involved. Indeed, the primary source of revenue, the capture of slaves in slave wars, made the economy a government operation. Thus, Polanyi’s interest is not directly in the slave trade, but as slave wars were a primary activity in Dahomey, Polanyi cannot write about Dahomey and ignore the slave trade.
To be clear, Polanyi’s interest is not to make a case against Dahomey for originating the trans-Atlantic slave trade that “black studies” departments blame on white Americans. He is studying what he calls an archaic economy as an illustration of social organization that is not free market.
I don’t blame Dahomey either. I am interested in facts, not blame. Dahomey dominated the slave trade for 250 years, and Dahomey’s existence depended on it. Dahomey was not forced by white Europeans to provide them with slaves. Europeans were not allowed beyond the port and were no match for Dahomey’s army until the beginning of the 20th century, 50 years or more after the British Navy had stopped Dahomey’s revenues from the slave trade.
Today Dahomey is known as Benin. On the beach at Ouidah there is a monument, The Gate of No Return. The monument symbolizes the passage of the captives of Dahomey’s slave wars into slavery. What I want to know is how can such a public monument remain unnoticed by black studies departments that pretend to be educational?
Looking for the 2022 reprint of Polanyi’s Dahomey and the Slave Trade, I found a second book, also 2022, with the same title. Curious, I ordered it. The author is Vivian Chibuife, a black female African historian who self publishes.
Chibuife’s book was provoked by the 2022 movie, The Woman King, that portrays Dahomey’s Amazons as liberals opposed to slavery. Although Chibuife appreciates the movie’s emphasis on the achievements and abilities of black women, she takes exception to the falsification of history.
Chibuife gets in a few sentences blaming whites for their participation in the slave trade as customers, but she is too honest to produce a false account. In some ways she is more straightforward than Karl Polanyi. Her account of Dahomey and its rise is straightforward and parallels Polanyi’s. But she rejects all nonsense about where the slaves came from or that anyone wanted to stop the slave trade before the white British did with warships blocking the port.
Here are brief passages from her text:
“As a result of its harsh military actions and its limitless need for slaves, the kingdom of Dahomey had only hostile ties with its neighbors.”
“Dahomey began actively participating in the Atlantic slave trade in 1727 [prior to that accumulating a slave work force for itself] when it overthrew the coastal Kingdom of Hueda and seized control of the port city of Ouidah. Between 1659 and 1863, approximately a million enslaved Africans were loaded onto ships bound for the Americas, according to historians.”
One of the uses of slaves captured by Dahomey was their execution in human sacrifice to the king’s ancestors. This was a great waste of money and a cruel use of lives, and the barbaric practice helped the French to eventually undermine Dahomey as “barbaric.” The kingdom succumbed to the French in the the middle 1890s as the 20th century approached.
In closing I will again make the point I have often made that in a diverse, multicultural society composed of many ethnicities it is socially and politically disastrous to teach one race to hate another. But that is what the United States does. Blacks are taught to hate whites, and whites are taught that they are guilty. Such a society simply cannot survive, and the non-survival of the United States appears to be the main goal of American universities, Democrat party, and presstitute media. We are undergoing the intentional destruction of a once free and successful society.
As far as I can tell, there is no one to stop it.
The BBC was talking up “Black Futurism” the other day: Wakanda is typical of it, and it is a way of letting Blacks fantasise about Supremacy while not quite claiming it is real. The BBC thinks this is important
Roberts writing of things that are known to many, even people who are not interested in the subject. He should be more concerned why these facts are hidden and never taught in schools or college. More of a concern should be who is behind the hiding of these facts, and why would they want to do so. Hard to see how this can be fixed in the USA.
“In closing I will again make the point I have often made that in a diverse, multicultural society composed of many ethnicities it is socially and politically disastrous to teach one race to hate another. But that is what the United States does. Blacks are taught to hate whites, and whites are taught that they are guilty. Such a society simply cannot survive, and the non-survival of the United States appears to be the main goal of American universities, Democrat party, and presstitute media. We are undergoing the intentional destruction of a once free and successful society.”
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I would say the gassing and extermination of six million Jews is quite the albatros hung around the White-man’s neck.
“The meaning of albatross around your neck is a heavy burden or curse that one carries, especially one that accompanies significant guilt or stigma. The idiom comes from a poem where a sailor was punished by having a dead albatross hung around his neck for shooting the bird. The phrase can be used to describe something unpleasant or annoying that is impossible to avoid or get rid of.”
I think we shall have to try…
Nice to know more about this history. We know that slavery was (and still is ) a home grown industry, and that the Africans resisted efforts by others to stop this practice, they could have stopped it at any time but they did not. And, yep, the transporters may have been Europeans but the finance and business of slavery was, still is, a Phonecian industry. They took all slaves , Black, whites, islanders, to work and die at their colonies and ports. Such as Brazil, a major phonecian colony. Ever wonder what became of those people from Easter Island? They got enslaved, raided by “transporters” and taken to work the mines and disappeared forever.
Hmm no mention of our (((fellow whites))) that the Nation of Islam wrote about, who owned a lot of the slave ships and plantations where the slaves worked.
What did the slavers do when they saw one of the pirate cruisers of humanity coming, as John Mitchell named the Royal Navy ships engaged in suppressing the trans-Atlantic slave trade?
They chucked their cargo overboard, as their ships could only be seized if a slave was found on board, and, then, turned round to get another cargo. They figured the they could lose three out of four cargoes and still make a profit.
John Mitchell Jail Journal
In South Africa 50 million blacks dream to
slaughter 5 million whites Ruandan stile .
will Putin further this wishes like the
commy jews did ?
Surinam, Haiti, Martinique,Guadeloupe were
best example how french revolution inspired
the blacks .
many polynesian kanakas were cheated
and send into peruvian guano mines,
never returned .
The reason blacks will never learn the truth is because whatever has been done to them by TPTB has caused them to rapidly devolve and they cannot read. I’m guessing the next generation of blacks born in the U.S. will lack language skills and probably communicate via grunts and screeches (ebonics is pretty much that way now).
many polynesian kanakas were cheated
and send into peruvian guano mines,
never returned .
the USA was always the greatest slave workforce
driver in 1st+2nd worldwar until now . always
siping up the best educated + skilled (by their own)
of white nations . nations which took care to train
their citizens from taxmoney . USA robber state
never took care for their citizens , only to misuse
them for wars .
The primary policy or aim of the governments of all these western nations is to reduce & eliminate their white citizenry. All their pro-black & anti-white programs are established & directed to that eventuality.
This excellent article was a real eye-opener for me, and after searching online for Karl Polanyi’s book, I found a 2019 article by an African honestly discussing the human sacrifices mentioned by Paul Craig Roberts:
“A look at Dahomey’s gory history of human sacrifices on a large scale” by Ama Nunoo.
https://face2faceafrica.com/article/a-look-at-dahomeys-gory-history-of-human-sacrifices-on-a-large-scale
Also, well done to commenter “Costa latorre” on here for providing a very plausible solution to the mystery that has puzzled archaeologists for ages: What happened to the people of Easter Island? I think you have nailed it!
As I have loudly called out, the Jews are the 800 lb. gorilla in the room, 97% of slave ships were owned and operated by Jews. Look it up, it’s easy to do!!
The Day Of Atonement is close at hand! Yahwey IS coming, here, and soon.
There are many thing’s coming at this time in the world.
The africans have sponged off the white race for trillions and trillions of dollars, and are agitated by the Jews to hate whites who have caused them to live an african’s dream of existance.
They are the reason they live like human beings, in real cities they have been given instead of existing in cow shit and stick houses, eating foreign aid gruel sent by China if they dig for ores or else.
The thing is, Yahwey will destroy the Jews, and everyone else who hates the WHITE Adamic Israel, the people of Yahwey when he gets here.
There are many thing’s coming at this time in the world.
The africans have sponged off the white race for trillions and trillions of dollars, and are agitated by the Jews to hate whites who have caused them to live an african’s dream of existance.
They are the reason they live like human beings, in real cities they have been given instead of existing in cow shit and stick houses, eating foreign aid gruel sent by China if they dig for ores or else.
The thing is, Yahwey will destroy the Jews, and everyone else who hates the WHITE Adamic Israel, the people of Yahwey when he gets here.
Guess what other race hates whites? Blacks, to their utter shame, when Yahwey gets here
Isaiah 13:7 Therefore shall all hands be faint, and every man’s heart shall melt:
8 And they shall be afraid: pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them; they shall be in pain as a woman that travaileth: they shall be amazed one at another; their faces shall be as flames.
9 Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.
This guy is right about what’s coming, but he doesn’t realize that it’s Yahwey, not common”aliens”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U06GkT6mx04
Good comment by Nico X except for the word “eventuality”: it means anything that might happen, not what will eventually happen