I believe that it is time for conservatives to rethink their opposition to reparations. By this I am referring of course to reparations over the scourge of African slavery. Even though it ended centuries ago, the effects have nevertheless been long-lasting, and have had ramifications down to the present. But in bringing this up, I am making no concrete proposals of a settled nature. I am merely making suggestions. It is simply that I believe that it is time for us as conservatives to have some hard conversations. And that is all that this is . . . a conversation.
I said “African slavery,” but perhaps I ought to be more specific. Most of us are aware of the Atlantic slave trade, where slaves were being brought to the New World via the Middle Passage. But during those same centuries, there was also an extensive traffic in slaves in North Africa as well . . . only here the slaves were being imported to Africa, not exported. The Barbary corsairs were the terror of the Mediterranean, and captured thousands of Europeans. And they would not just capture ships and enslave their crews, but would also conduct raids on coastal European settlements, as far north as Iceland and Ireland. They would carry off countless numbers of hapless victims. One estimate has placed the number of captured Europeans over this time period at over a million victims. Indeed, the very word slave comes to us from the Slavic peoples. Is it not time to starting putting some of this right?
But there is no way to start a conversation about reparations, which is what I am seeking to do here, without also suggesting a metric for sorting all of this out. As anyone who has done any genealogical work knows, most everyone’s ancestral lineage fades into obscurity pretty quickly. Except in rare cases, virtually no one can tell us any details about their great, great, great, great, great grandfather. Was he rich or poor? Dunno. Was he a slave or free? Dunno. Did he have bad things done to him, or did he do bad things? Dunno. Do his descendants need to get paid or do they have to pay? Dunno.
The problem seems insoluble at first glance. But this particular Gordian knot has already been solved for us in the conversation that has been going on when it comes to the other reparations conversation, and I am of course referring to the West African slave trade to the New World. The actual questions of actual lineage are every bit as complicated there, and so it was quickly figured out that there was a great need to simplify. This was because certain forms of justice always want to cut to the chase.
The simplification process of necessity looks like this. What we need to do is ask two basic questions. Are there any people around today who look like the bad guys back then, along with the corollary that asks whether there are any people around today who look like any of the victims? And then the second question is perhaps the more relevant one, which is “do any of these look-alikes have deep pockets?” In other words, is there any money to be had there? Shakedowns don’t work when there is no money. That is kind of a 101 issue, as any competent shakedown artist can tell you. It is necessary to emphasize that—according to this developing reparations metric—the answer to both questions has to come back positive. One affirmative doesn’t really give us what we need. There needs to be some sort of superficial resemblance, and there needs to be money.
For example . . . there is no denying that there are white people today who have money, and there were white people back in the day who were involved in the slave trade. This is therefore where the reparations people must look for justice. But we see the need for both questions to answered affirmatively in this simple fact. Black people today can also look just like a bunch of the culprits back then. But we don’t come after them for reparations today because that is not where today’s money is. Capisce? I mean, Africa was a continent rife with slavery before any whites ever even got there and then, after whites arrived, the slaves were generally captured by African slavers to be taken down to the coast to be loaded onto ships. And on top of that, there were a number of free blacks over here in the States who were planters and who themselves owned slaves. And so we are forced to settle on our new similar standard: 1. similar look, and 2. money.
I mean, if we were going to try to do this in accordance with certain old-fashioned notions of justice and equity, we might find ourselves objecting to the grandson of Finnish immigrants (who never had anything to do with any form of slavery whatever) having to pay the black descendants of a man who ran a lucrative slave post out of Nigeria. That would give rise to awkward questions, and so we should simply stick with our simplified metric— money and color.
With these principles firmly in hand, if you want to call them principles, we return to the matter of the North African slave trade, and the long-overdue reparations in response to the predations of Barbarossa and his ilk. As we swoop in to do our good deeds here, all we need to do is find some sad people who look like the victims of three centuries ago, and then some rich people who kind of look like the Barbary pirates. Remember, we have already surrendered the idea of trying to find some causal link, or any actual responsibility. That process would be way too complicated, and the math would make our heads hurt. Keep it clean and simple. Clean and simple.
In a fortuitous turn of events, shortly before I started drafting this modest proposal, President Trump launched a series of attacks on the Houthi terrorists of Yemen. Now Yemen is an oil-producing nation, and there are significant untapped resources there, in both oil and gas. There is one criterion. Now even though they are not quite in the Mediterranean area, one can’t have everything. They sure look like the Barbary pirates. There’s the other criterion. And, as just mentioned, they have money.
All we need to do in order to achieve radical justice, perhaps for the first time ever, is to confiscate all of Yemen’s oil and gas reserves, and give them to some beleaguered Mediterranean location . . . Monaco, say.
Now some might object and say that Monaco doesn’t seem all that “sad,” but they are tiny, and that is almost as good. But if you want to stick with traditional notions of unhappiness, we can give all these oil and gas revenues to Bulgaria.
Geopolitical peace would be a simple and straightforward matter, if we just thought about it for a bit more than we usually do.