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The Underdevelopment of European Pride
by
The most powerful moral assault on European pride and identity is the idea that Western civilization achieved its greatness, industrial economic take-off in the eighteenth century, and subsequent mass affluence in the twentieth century, by exploiting and under-developing the rest of the world. This is one of the biggest lies inflicted on millions of European students in the last half century. The truth is that the diffusion of European technology has been the ultimate factor responsible for development outside the West.
The claim that whites built modern America, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia by "stealing" the land from the original inhabitants, dehumanizing them and sequestering them into reservations, has exacted an enormous moral price upon Europeans. Europeans are a high trust people who believe it is important to treat others fairly as individuals regardless of in-group vs out-group distinctions — unlike other races, which tend to care only about their extended family members within the moral boundaries set by their in-groups. Our hostile elites have exploited this sense of fairness to make Europeans feel guilty about everything their ancestors did in the past. Not a month goes by without a headline that whites "should return stolen lands to Indian tribes."
It does not matter that economic calculations would demonstrate that the total sums of money invested by slave traders in the process of industrialization amounted to less than 1% of the total capital invested during the key period of industrialization between 1760 and 1810, as was argued by Roger Anstey in his extensive 456 page book, The Atlantic slave trade and British abolition, 1760-1810 (1975). This book is now a blanc space in the internet, whereas Williams's 1944 thesis remains sacrosanct in academia, elaborated, celebrated, and imitated a thousand fold. ...
The most powerful moral assault on European pride and identity is the idea that Western civilization achieved its greatness, industrial economic take-off in the eighteenth century, and subsequent mass affluence in the twentieth century, by exploiting and under-developing the rest of the world. This is one of the biggest lies inflicted on millions of European students in the last half century. The truth is that the diffusion of European technology has been the ultimate factor responsible for development outside the West.
Stolen Land and the Atlantic Slave Trade
The claim that whites built modern America, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia by "stealing" the land from the original inhabitants, dehumanizing them and sequestering them into reservations, has exacted an enormous moral price upon Europeans. Europeans are a high trust people who believe it is important to treat others fairly as individuals regardless of in-group vs out-group distinctions — unlike other races, which tend to care only about their extended family members within the moral boundaries set by their in-groups. Our hostile elites have exploited this sense of fairness to make Europeans feel guilty about everything their ancestors did in the past. Not a month goes by without a headline that whites "should return stolen lands to Indian tribes."
Another claim intended to inflict guilt is that Europeans "deliberately" introduced slavery into Africa, rather than making use of a millennial practice, disrupting the "normal" economic activities of Africans and trapping them into vicious inter-tribal wars over slaves to be sold to rapacious whites. This story has been recounted in hundreds of books and journals singularly focused on slavery.
Not only blamed for the poverty of others, but others have been morally elevated as the ones responsible for the achievements of Europeans. One of the most influential books in this respect was Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944), which argued that an inequitable "triangular trade" pattern, based on the slave trade and the production of "colonial goods in American plantations, played a "critical role" in British industrialization. The British would not have been able to pay for new industrial technologies were it not for the huge profits they obtained from the selling of slave-produced "tropical goods" such as sugar, tobacco, and cotton to European consumers.
Not only blamed for the poverty of others, but others have been morally elevated as the ones responsible for the achievements of Europeans. One of the most influential books in this respect was Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944), which argued that an inequitable "triangular trade" pattern, based on the slave trade and the production of "colonial goods in American plantations, played a "critical role" in British industrialization. The British would not have been able to pay for new industrial technologies were it not for the huge profits they obtained from the selling of slave-produced "tropical goods" such as sugar, tobacco, and cotton to European consumers.
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| How about the Arab Sex Slave Trade in White Women? |
It does not matter that economic calculations would demonstrate that the total sums of money invested by slave traders in the process of industrialization amounted to less than 1% of the total capital invested during the key period of industrialization between 1760 and 1810, as was argued by Roger Anstey in his extensive 456 page book, The Atlantic slave trade and British abolition, 1760-1810 (1975). This book is now a blanc space in the internet, whereas Williams's 1944 thesis remains sacrosanct in academia, elaborated, celebrated, and imitated a thousand fold. ...
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