"The pimp who became God"

[level_head]

It's an interview with Morgan Freeman.

I like this fellow, and have great respect for him. We have tremendous political differences -- and areas of agreement. Tucked into this interview are both sort of points, but here's one that relates to the slavery issues we've been discussing:(The interviewer:) For this reason he cites Glory, the heroic

Comments

[sir_dave]

Generally this is right, but no one wants to admit it. Bob Geldof said in a documentary that before the Europeans became involved, 40% of African economic activity was conducted through internal slavery.

My understanding is that tribes would raid each other for slaves and then get their captives to do all the work.

When the Europeans turned up (after the Arabs) they simply had more money, and people who were already slaves were sold to them for better prices. That's not to say that it was good that they were slaves or that we bought them, but basically, why do we not say that African practices corrupted us?

Which is worse - to buy people of another race, or sell people of your own race? Well perhaps that is a hard comparison.

I am sure that there has been some racial prejudice here at one time or another. What I'm also sure of is that the authorities only ever wanted to recognise that it was in one direction; that for many years any facts which would bring bad publicity to ethnic minorities were heavily stifled; and my own view is that in encouraging large scale migration from other countries we have brought in people who have an expectation of racial intolerance from their former neighbours, and have projected their expectations onto the indigenous population, who have been silly enough to suppose that the scale of the complaint was in any way representative of the truth.

An example of this is the burning down of a Hindu temple in a Midland city, thought to be by Moslems; ok I don't have a definite report on who did it, but it is very like the tensions in India at the time it took place. India has exported to us Hindus, Moslems, and their mutual hatreds, which carry on locally only slightly abated.

We have a nasty statistic that will not go away, which supports everything I say above. That is that the majority of racially aggravated assaults here are made by minorities. Since the minorities are about 3%, that means that a person from a racial minority in the UK is 30 times more likely to commit a racially aggravated assault than a European. And yet, the indigenous population is supposed to be the cause of our problems.

Well let's suppose this is a problem with the courts and the police leading to bad statistics. If it is, then they are causing it in the teeth of an educational system that has required white pupils (only) to declare that they are racists without a shred of evidence, or else be thrown off their courses.

The truth is we have been brainwashed by a politically motivated agenda for thirty or forty years, that the problems of the racial minorities have been enormously overstated, that the vast majority of inter-racial violence has originated with the supposed victim races, but no-one has been allowed to state the facts.

How far this is or could be true of the USA I cannot say. But I also cannot say this in the UK, because we have sleep walked through utter fallacies for decades,and no one is able to connect facts with the ideas they have been fed with. The only thing that makes facts meet with public recognition is when there is a bombing. 7/7 and the attempted repeat of 21/7 are the only reasons that we have begun to connect with reality at all; because we can no longer afford not to do so.