Rather than Indulging the Reparations Racket, Why Not Abolish Enslavement to the State?

Forty-five years have elapsed since the passing of Sylvester McGee, the last black American citizen who had been claimed by another American as property. Eighty-one years have elapsed since the death of Cudjoe Lewis, the last black American who had been born in Africa, captured by African slave traders, survived the often fatal middle passage in a slave ship, then vended to people who claimed him as property.

No living American for at least two generations has lived under the long-dead and universally reviled system of chattel slavery. No living American has ever been a slave owner, a title reflecting the abhorrent proposition that it is possible for one human being to own another. Notwithstanding all of these facts, the United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, which reports to Prince Zeid bid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the world body’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, has published a report contending that white Americans who have never participated in chattel slavery owe reparations to black Americans who have never experienced it. 

 

Sylvester McGee

“Past injustices and crimes against African Americans need to be addressed with reparatory justice,” the report asserts. This would supposedly require passage of HR 40, which calls for creation of a commission that would examine “Whether African-Americans still suffer from the lingering effects” of slavery, and whether “any form of compensation to the descendants of African slaves is warranted,” and, if so, “what should be the amount of compensation, what form of compensation should be awarded, and who should be eligible for such compensation.”

That august commission would be a shakedown soviet with the power to dictate how much the “who” is supposedly entitled to extract from the “whom” – with both parties in this redistribution scheme defined in purely racial terms. 

"The reparations could come in a variety of forms,” the UN panel pontificates, including "a formal apology, health initiatives, educational opportunities ... psychological rehabilitation, technology transfer and financial support, and debt cancellation."

The “legal framework” for this monumental program of plunder, the report contends, is provided by a series of UN treaties and conventions, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The UN panel demands that those agreements, and several that have not been ratified by the US Senate, be integrated in both federal and state policy. 

Nothing less than full implementation of the UN’s “human rights” framework would be sufficient, the panel asserts, because even if the elaborate federal “civil rights” program were “fully implemented,” this would be “insufficient to overcome and transform the institutional and structural racial discrimination and racism against people of African descent.”

Blue Berets' burden: UN "Peacekeepers" in Somalia.

It is bad enough that US tax victims pay for the United Nations; it is intolerable for us to be expected to pay attention to it, and indulge the preposterous pretense that it is our moral tutor.

Regarding the well-being of “people of African descent,” the UN’s most notable accomplishment in that continent was to facilitate genocide in Rwanda by disarming a targeted ethnic sub-group. For six decades the UN has been an aid conduit for African kleptocracies while organizing“peacekeeping” forces that have provided full employment – with benefits– for sexual predators.

Following its tour of the United States, the Working Group expressed entirely justified alarm over the “levels of police brutality” and the official impunity enjoyed by abusive police officers in the United States. In their visits to Washington, Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Jackson, Mississippi, the panel heard many black Americans complain that “from an early age they are treated by the State as a dangerous criminal group and face a presumption of guilt rather than of innocence.”

Panel members were frequently told that “the `War on Drugs has had a devastating impact on African Americans and that mass incarceration was considered a system of racial control that operated in a similar way to howJim Crow laws once operated.”

In its recommendations, however, the panel didn’t call for an end to what was insistently described to it as system of “enslavement.”Rather than calling for an end to the War on Drugs – that is, abolishing the direct institutional heir to chattel slavery – this troupe of globe-trotting moralists emitted pious piffle to the effect that prosecutors, judges, and legislators should consider “the costs of mass incarceration practices” while perpetuating this system of human bondage.

Nowhere in the 22-page report is there even an oblique acknowledgement of the role played by the United Nations in cultivating the misery experienced by millions of Americans of African descent. While theframework of Prohibition was erected by American progressives a century ago,the contemporary War on Drugs is a UN-promoted enterprise.

The UN’s 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs is the enabling document for the global anti-drug jihad. The U.S. government didn't fully embrace that campaign until ten years later, when Congress – at the urging of the Nixon administration – passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, which was a literal declaration of war on the American people. That legislation conspicuously noted that the U.S. government “is a party to the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs … and other conventions designed to establish effective control over international and domestic traffic in controlled substances.”

We have more to fear from the JBTs than from the Blue Helmets.

A few months later, Richard Nixon created the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) through an executive order. This agency amalgamated several agencies – including the IRS, the ATF, and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (the direct ancestor of the DEA) and was given permission to “bypass normal channels” to prosecute the war.

ODALE quickly drew up a thirty-city target list (which included every stop on the UN panel's recent tour), created multi-jurisdictional task forces with state and local police, and unleashed newly created SWAT teams to begin the blitzkrieg.  That UN-authorized domestic war, which has relentlessly escalated over the past 45 years, consciously targeted America’s black population.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” an exasperated John Ehlirchman admitted in a 1994 interview with investigative author Dan Baum. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.”

 

Ehrlichman attempts a Spock eyebrow -raise.

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs?” concluded the Nixon confidante and co-conspirator. “Of course we did.”

The UN-facilitated drug war is largely responsible for the fact – noted in the UN panel’s report – that “one out of every three black American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime.” At least half of those held in the federal gulag, and more than half of those in state-level rape cages, are being punished for drug-related offenses.

Once again, the UN panel’s report offers a satisfactory description of the irreparable economic and social harm resulting from a criminal conviction. A paroled convict, or one who has been given a term of probation, remains the property of the State, subject to the invasive supervision of a parole officer who can consign him to a cage again on a whim. As the UN’s “experts” were repeatedly told, this condition doesn’t differ dramatically from that of an antebellum slave.

Those who seek to destroy slavery root and branch must support an end to Prohibition in all its forms, as part of a larger campaign to reclaim the principle of self-ownership -- which, in an ultimate sense, would require abolition of the State. Of course, this wouldn’t occur to “experts” in the employ of an institution that sees the State in all its malignant variations as the center of human society.

This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast continues the series of exposes of pervasive corruption in Bonneville County, Idaho:

Dum spiro, pugno!