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Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Beat it, Ms. Fanon Mendes-France

Mme. Mireille Fanon Mendes-France, the daughter of the radical intellectual icon Franz Fanon, has apparently found a cushy job at the UN, and has cited the USA for a crime against humanity when it comes to the treatment of African-Americans.  She suggests that we pay reparations to this population.

You will not hear Uncle Cephas defending the "peculiar institution" or Jim Crow.  These are indeed blots on our history.  By it irks me no end to hear my country cited this way, and absolutely no-one else. But he has some things he would like to tell this UN "expert".

Ms. Mireille Fanon Mendes-France, you have no right to speak to us Americans. Had I the money, there are some men I'd like to dig up and ship home from your land of resentful ingrates, who have never forgiven us for making it impossible for you to labor under the benign eye of your beloved Stalin and enjoy the atoning, purgative effects of the Gulag.

Why haven't you and other UN experts also cited every African state from Morocco working down the Atlantic coast to Angola? The peoples there descend from the victors in the tribal wars that sent the defeated captives into slavery in the New World. The Muslim peoples from the Arabs to the Mandingo were notorious as slave hunters. The Muslim peoples of Africa gave up slaving only under the Maxim guns and bayonets of your forces and those of the British.  Why not cite all of our neighbor nations to the south, since the Latin countries also had and prospered from African slaves. And, of course, why not cite Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, and Portugal? Or, has voting SD and nurturing cleptocratic and aid-junkie elites in former colonies somehow absolved the descendants of those slaving nations?

Has your country paid reparations to the people of Haiti?  Come to think of it, there are African-Americans whom France sold up our way, as witnessed by the French Creole dialects which not too long ago were spoken by both black and white people in Louisiana.  Perhaps the double negative used in our Southern American English dialects may also be a legacy of your Latinate tongue.

It seems to me that the USA made an official apology for slavery in the post-Civil War Amendments, which have always been used by the advocates for African-Americans in all cases on their behalf brought to the courts of the USA--and since 1954, believe you me, our courts have heard the descendants of the slaves. Nor should you neglect that to end slavery, we Americans ended up with 300,000 Yankees dead in Southern dust; to say nothing of the thousands who returned home maimed for life. As for the South, its economy remained ruined for a century. The actual slaveholders were hit worst of all, since their economic slide was the greatest. As Pres. Lincoln said, every drop of blood drawn by the lash was repaid by much more drawn by the sword (and minie ball; and cannons named after your own Napoleon).  Indeed, our Civil War cost us more casualties than all of our other wars following it combined, until those of the Viet Nam War, added to all the others, got the total of the other wars just a bit higher than that for our Civil War.

Why not also ask Benin, the heir to the vicious state of Dahomeen, to chip in?  Every so often, the Dahomeen kings decided they themselves needed rum, calico, firearms, and Western tools more than their dead ancestors and gods needed human blood--and sold lots of war captives.  And I suppose you will also exempt the free immigrants we have accepted from West Africa in recent years simply on the grounds of skin color?  Remember, some of them may well be descended from slave hunters and sellers.  Africa itself was not "historyless" before our enlightened Western civilization came on the scene.

Mireille Fanon Mendes-France, as your father's daughter, you have no right to pontificate to anyone about the criminalities of governments.  Your father's intellectual legacy is a series of bankrupt, violent, dependent revolutionary states, especially his beloved Algeria, which descended into government by coup until, when left high and dry by the Soviet collapse, its young revolted for the simple right to buy and sell, and then descended into Islamicist civil war. Consider as well how Euro-Marxists such as your despicable, parasitical self taught Marxism to the likes of Pol Pot and his henchmen.

And, what will you say when your own countrymen re-read your late father and decide that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and rise up to purge their land of those migrants who have made your banlieux sinkholes of crime and violence, and now plague your continent with terrorism and rape? Something about the indigenous French (and immigrants who assimilate to them) wanting to "reclaim their manhood", perhaps?  Oops.  Forgive me.  Maybe I have mistaken the illustrious Mr. Sartre's comment on your father's work for your father's own words.

By the way, I have taught students who are "dark French", children of immigrants from your former colonies, who have utterly shocked me. How? Not by anything bad that they did, I assure you; but by their astuteness and willingness to make their own observations.  After a lifetime (I am a grandfather) of hearing from French intellectuals berate me on how atrociously racist my country is, your dark children made my jaw drop to the floor by telling me how "relaxed" racial relations are in my country---in parts of it that were once the happy hunting ground of the Ku Klux Klan; namely southeastern Maryland, which was once dependent on slavery in its tobacco fields, and southern Illinois, ever a free state, where abolition too often meant the total abolition of the African-American from our national life.

We have no use, Mireille, for the toxic legacy of Votre Chere Papa.  His time is gone, and those who would address current injustices by resurrecting it offer dead-end paths leading to petty, destructive, zero-sum identity politics that give birth to at least five new injustices for every one they end.  History teaches all who have eyes to see and ears to hear.  We have seen and heard what people like you offer, and bid you a not-too-fond Adieu.

2 comments:

  1. When the finger is pointing, it's got to be loud and obnoxious... or people may look at the situation more closely.
    The whole reason they would point the racism finger is to avoid pointing it at themselves.

    - reade #1482

    ReplyDelete