1Junk-Bond: “A low-grade, high-risk security, typically issued by an organization seeking to raise capital quickly in order to finance a takeover.” Oxford Lexico
‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’— George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
“Having agreeably transacted affairs with the African Prince in his King’s Court in the Kingdom of Whydah (he demanded gold payment of one hundred dollars for each of his prisoners) we went to their warehouse where he had in confinement four thousand captives from his raid of the Tarkbar people, all in a state of complete nudity from which he gave me liberty to select one hundred and twenty-five as mine, and offering to brand them for me, from which I preemptorily forbid; commenced taking on cargo of negroes, successfully securing on board one hundred and ten.” Capt. William Foster, Journal of Clotilda, 1860, in present-day Benin and Ghana
“Looting is reparations.” Ariel Atkins, BLM Chicago Organizer.
“The problem with oppression and White supremacy is, White supremacy will have you criticizing the oppressed and worshiping the oppressors. Nothing falls short of a solution other than cutting a check. If you want to do something about reparations, cut the check.” Hawk Newsome, Chair, BLM Greater New York
“It’s all about bucks; the rest is just conversation.” Gordon Gekko, Wall Street, 1987, 20th Century Fox
Put aside the disturbing reality of BLM’s criminal violence, and now, financial reparations extortion. And put aside all of the legal ramifications to that organization and its enablers, in criminal law and domestic terror legislation (including the Patriot Act and RICO), and consider instead where its intellectual model even comes from—where this new genetic creation was conceptually incubated: In the history departments of America’s major universities (who then packaged and sold it to the legal academy, and to political science departments and public policy schools, with plentiful handouts to the broader social sciences and of course for its excitable ideological base camp, the Humanities). For the past nearly two decades, a new crop of historians has sprung up in large research universities including Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, UCLA, and Chicago, who have nurtured and cultivated a practice area known as “Empire,” broadly within a “Colonialism” framework, and through the deep irrigating rows in that field, fed a saturating stream of racism and oppression psychology, political class struggle, and ultimately the expectation of a bountiful harvest of financial pay-back and restitution.
It is junk history and junk scholarship.
This crop of historians—creative and well-supported—have engaged in a fascinating form of historical revisionism or a new “historicism.” It advances a “colonialism” and “empire” thesis that it appropriates from a rich, solid base of real economic history from mature scholars including Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, Gunner Myrdal, Friedrich Hayek, Charles Kindleberger, Douglass North, to former Eisenhower and Kennedy national security advisor W.W. Rostow at the University of Texas at Austin; Harvard’s David Landes; the economic history school at Cambridge University; even London School of Economics historian Nicholas Kaldor; Chicago’s Milton Friedman or Stanford’s Thomas Sowell—and then re-arranges, re-mixes and alters this genetic base of rigorous scholarship, and re-writes it in political and racial dimensions to include a general “oppression” narrative of “White Colonialism” and “European Empire” that lends itself to monetization, and into a reparations public policy platform, in the US, and now in Europe (evidently the “White Supremacy” Fatherland). Its thematic elements are centered in legal, social and economic guilt and ultimately in election mechanics and wholesale political reordering. It is the New Bolshevism. It is used as a financial extortion to satisfy grievance, and avoid more violence—a kind of “fine” or penalty in civil restitution theory, but more like organized crime and gang methods. And it obviously fits well into modern fear-based election influencing, as is evident in the identity of BLM and the DNC. And like Bolshevism, it celebrates violence for its own sake, with no idea or plan but perpetual psychological predation, economic control, and ideological coercion.[2]
Unfortunately the entire ‘reparations’ concept rests otherwise on some challenging scholarship. Congruent with other research, Gabriel Paquette has shown in his The European Seaborne Empires (Yale University Press, 2019) that the colonialism phenomenon was a product of a “chaotic pluralism,” or of such random private enterprise, that tying it to any particular nation—or campus, as in the case of current demands being made on the University of Chicago for “slavery reparations”—is impossible, or highly speculative, and therefore illogical, and ultimately, illegitimate. The entire “reparations” concept rests on faulty scholarship, and a flawed hermeneutics of historical interpretation. But it also stems from a classic scholarly “detour” after the ‘empire’ themes ran into trouble with incredibly complex records, conflicting information, and no clear unifying “grand theory” that could elegantly and conveniently present a thematic explanation as to European economic development and its manifestations in the New World. So academic historians invented one. One that also fit their natural suspicions, prejudice and hostilities: It must have all been the product of capitalism, along with a set of cultural behaviors including greed, possession, duplicity, and enslavement. And who better a villain than White Europeans themselves (who conveniently left the Western historians with understandable anthropological artifacts, and convenient academic bias confirmation.). And who better to have endured such disadvantages and exploitation than the ‘silent suffering:’ the primitive, the other. And who in more need of intellectual emancipation and advocacy—a ‘reframing” of history through the new tools of scholarship, and a final reckoning for the oppressor? The new history is a theory of revenge.
This made me wonder about the entire “reparations” construct going on now: how do you identify and assign a target and a center of modern liability, to a modern nation-state or corporation even, when empire and colonialism where of such porosity and chaos among an unruly, massive private sector of various individuals and small companies, and many with complicated trade agreements and shared resources? It seems you would have to dig up an awful lot of dead bodies to find out, and to extract your payment.[3]
A fundamental problem with the new ‘racial historicism,’ is that the scholars promoting it also have little if any credentials in economics and traditional political economic history (such as in the spirit of Smith, Locke, Hume, Ricardo, Mill, Malthus and others) and are instead fully pledged members of Cultural Marxism and its obvious weakness for explanatory history in class concepts, and by extension, race. They are also generally weak in statistical methods, and have limited, or no working experience whatsoever in the private sector; or in commercial and business enterprises, where economic history is tangibly centered (Thomas Picketty is an example). This leads to highly stylized, abstract and above all ideological mental models of history, and an attraction to retail politics and mass cognitive susceptibilities, where their wares can sell (especially if it advocates for redistribution through taxation). An especially attractive market is in the intake and breeding of new Ph.D recruits, fresh out of even more indoctrination from 4 or more years of academic influencing and molding.
The “de-colonization” concept also suffers from a broad mischaracterization of both its subject and its object: the development and growth of human colonies, societies, economies and other systems and features, are not so much the products of cultural anthropology or of social systems, but more strictly biological, like the growth of a forest or prairie, a coral reef or if you prefer, a natural animal colony (with man’s tool-making technology). So, to “de-colonize” is more to ‘de-humanize.” It is a misanthropic enterprise (it competes in that regard, with the UN’s Agenda programs in demographic and de-population management, in concert with private sector entities including the Rockefeller Foundation’s “Future Scenarios” program. The C19 program is one such manifestation).
The other cognitive error that de-colonization advocates make is to frame their entire worldview in history itself, and are blinded to “colonization” right in front of them. China’s slow absorption of Africa is an example, as is Israel’s de-population and geopolitical agenda in its “Pan-Israel” Middle East Transformation project, now in its 20th year (as for slavery proper, BLM also overlooks entirely the digital ‘Panopticon’ encroachment, in addition to its transformed cognitive basis). Indeed, by overlooking current Sino-Colonialism, the de-colonization school is missing one of the most profound geopolitical and social threats in the world today, while it busies itself with statues, flags and spray paint. (China is the modern slave state empire. And it is the BLM/Cultural Marxist/De-Colonization role model. This is incubating a powerful, growing consensus for a renewed “Anglosphere” to combat, in part, what is the de-colonization school’s real name: de-humanization).[4]
But it gets more inconvenient for the “reparations” syndicate: the single biggest block of identifiable common participants in the slave trade were Africans themselves. So, does that make West Africa especially, the epicenter of a reparations scheme? Certainly the spoils are rich in oil, minerals and land, and the Chinese, the most aggressive new “colonialists” because of it.[5]
Moreover, what does BLM have to say back here in the US, to the world’s modern slave owner class themselves: other Blacks? The American Black population makes up the country’s biggest concentration of ethnic predation in murder, prostitution, human trafficking, and drug crime, on other Blacks, while Black men run the inner-city Black gang syndicates, and recruit and “enslave” Black male youth, into the chains of their violence, extortion and social alienation. Blacks are the Black’s worst enemy, their greatest source of predation, commercial exploitation, manipulation and cognitive slavery. From Colonial history itself, to the “Reverend” Al Sharpton; from Louis Farrakhan to Jeremiah Wright to Barack Obama himself, who as a “community organizer” makes a career of provoking anger, envy, racial divide and most of all, self-hatred. He stoked the fires of revenge fantasy, joined by a cheering crowd of celebrity Blacks, including Oprah Winfrey and academia’s anachronistic racial opportunists such as Harvard’s Cornel West and Henry Gates.
But there is also another twist to BLM’s reparations agenda: whether the 14th amendment was even constitutionally ratified.[6]
Blacks themselves however, do not apparently accept the 14th amendment, ratified or not; in fact BLM is “ratifying” through its behavior and demands, that it was administratively deficient, as they are still evidently bound in chains, oppressed by their (global) White masters, and seeking to substitute economic freedom for taxpayer reparations in the US and EU.[7] BLM is effectively asserting (through their current criminal violations) that they were never freed (a “knee on our neck”). Moreover, there is a “Takings Clause” complication in reparations to slave owners (The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution includes a provision known as the Takings Clause, which states that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation”).[8] BLM criminal riots and destruction also fall effectively under the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the “subject to the jurisdiction” phrase of the Citizenship Clause. Blacks were brought to America on a Slave-ship, not a Citizen-ship: the were given a natural law emancipation under constitutional law, deficient though the amendment is in actual ratification.[9]
Moreover, if the abolitionist doctrine of natural rights of ‘property’ that each individual possesses in and of themselves, a Lockian “self-ownership,” then birthright would be a second-order right by, as Eastman argues, a process of acquired and earned rights leading to loyalty by effective contract (yet minors, even, cannot be party to contracts, nor vote as a citizen, but effectively through the parent). Why otherwise would the state issue a “social security” number to a newborn, but through application by the parent? The state is not sovereign over the child, unless abandoned, or able to act in loco parentis in any manner (or “cannot deprive or divest their posterity”).
Moreover, if BLM advances the position that they are still effectively enslaved (a ”knee on our necks”) and their enslavement is the product of White Supremacy ‘slave owners,’ then the entire reparations argument is turned on its head: payment must be made under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, not to the slave, but to the slave owner, as compensation and consideration under the constitutional Clause.
Moreover, all current BLM criminal violation, destruction of personal and public property, arson, physical violence, pain and suffering, must be also be compensated back to the public at large, and also pro rata to Whites in settlement of pain and suffering, trauma, damages, duress and loss of life and livelihood. Those current physical damages alone total over $10 billion, plus replacement costs, insurance premiums and loss of business. BLM’s domestic terror could be cited as a war crime as well, under UN law, and as a domestic constitutional assault characterized as treason, can also be cited under strict Constitution violation, as well as Section 2.3 of the US Department of Defense Law of War Manual which defines crimes against humanity as the principle that forbids the infliction of suffering, injury or destruction unnecessary to accomplish a legitimate military purpose. BLM insists it has a legitimate purpose and is armed, outfitted, organized and led as an effective standing army, directed explicitly as a combatant against US citizens.[10]
Minneapolis alone has been called “the most expensive civil disturbance in US history.” [11] BLM should also be required to post bond for its clearly enunciated intention to produce continual riots, property destruction and mayhem across the US not only until the election, but beyond, indefinitely, if they don’t get what they demand. Indeed, the State of Wisconsin as of 25 August, declared a state-of-emergency after an obvious BLM agitation program was activated in Kenosha, leading to mass rioting and destruction.[12] BLM is an extortion outfit. The ideological founder and central agitator behind BLM is former US president and University of Chicago Law lecturer Barack Obama, the “community organizer.”[13] BLM is his “plantation,” and academic servants and apologists such as former economic advisor and UChicago professor Austan Goolsbee and Harvard Law’s Cass Sunstein, his effective “slaves.”[14]
Indeed, the modern academy embraces and even opportunistically stokes and fans racial agitation, which merely feeds its student intake machinery and triggers more finance, grants, loans and donations (an immediate abandonment of all professional standards in an eager broadcasting and ratification of the George Floyd event by modern law schools, is an example). Perhaps the most immediate reparations solution is academia itself: an organized syndicate of special interests with an ideological axe to grind, and money to make by selling hatred and the fantasy of ancient vengeance and retribution—one of man’s most reliable passions. Some of the worst offenders come from our so-called elite universities—and further amplified, taught and activated in policy, especially through their law schools, which are the modern workshops and strategic centers for social justice.[15]
In modern finance, “junk bonds” are a form of corporate debt, issued by organizations that cannot qualify for credit-based lending. They have insufficient assets for collateral, have unclear prospects and competitive legitimacy, but will bait buyers with hopes and promises of a large ‘upside’ to make up for their underlying lack of resources and clarity. They rarely are redeemed. Such is the market for BLM and race theory: BLM is the modern cultural junk bond. It might indeed be an appropriate time to demand a refund in product liability and financial fraud terms, under ‘academic reparations.’ Too many of our nation’s students, including our young Ph.D professors, are suffering a form of cognitive slavery, and victims not of race, but ideology, and junk history.
As for history itself, suppose for a moment that Aristotle’s ancient observation and opinion of an involuntary slave class in his time, is alive and well today in ours, but replaced with a new slave— equally indentured—one notionally emancipated, but worse, has voluntarily surrendered his freedom and virtue to the comforting consensus of ideological solidarity, and his thinking, abandoned; a sword laid down in defeat. Suppose Aristotle’s slave is even more a phenomenon today; a larger class; a swelling mass, equally unable but mostly unwilling, to command the virtues of maturity, and the self-sovereignty of real citizenship? How would, or should, an “Aristotelean” interpretation find its bearings in such obvious modern intellectual slavery? And what student, or professor, who casually accepts the comforting narratologies of identitarian moralism mixed with envy and contempt, is deserving of being a “free man” in a free society?[16]
Our Nation’s young adults should instead be liberated by the highest of restitutions: an independent mind.
[1] V.S. Solevyev is a technology writer and legal scholar.
[2] “He is mobilizing resentments among Blacks and others, and organizing them into battle, to get what they want from other people. Community organizers divide and polarize. But long before he came along, there was an attitude going back to Woodrow Wilson, repudiating the principles of the United States.” Dr. Thomas Sowell, The Hoover Institute, Stanford University (Ph.D University of Chicago) on Barack Obama, Acorn, and other racial agitators, from Dismantling America, interviewed by Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge, 19 August 2010
[3] See https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/06/reparations-madness-mary-grabar/, and https://dissidentprof.com/index.php/8-home/155-reparations-a-history-lesson
[4] See ‘Why is Xi Jinping pitting China against the world?’ The Guardian, 23 July 2020
[5] See “It’s Time to Revive the Anglosphere: The U.K. should form a new union with Canada, Australia and New Zealand to work as a global partner of the U.S.,” WSJ, 8 August 2020. “The Anglosphere is the name given to all those countries in the world where the majority of people speak English as their first language, almost all of which have similar outlooks and shared values. The four “Canzuk” countries of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. are a prominent historical subset of this larger group, and there is a mounting case that some form of federation among them—with free trade, free movement of people, a mutual defense organization and combined military capabilities—would create a new global superpower and ally of the U.S., the great anchor of the Anglosphere. Although the Canzuk idea traces its roots back to early 20th-century debates over the Imperial Federation, when Joseph Chamberlain was the British colonial secretary, the discussions taking place among its proponents today—mostly conservative policy intellectuals but also a growing number of political figures—are rooted powerfully in the present and in a cool assessment of realpolitik. The Canzuk Union would immediately enter the global stage as a superpower, able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the U.S. in the great defining struggle of the 21st century against an increasingly revanchist China.” The problem with the De-Colonization Left, however, is that China is in fact their precise role model.
[6] https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/was-the-fourteenth-amendment-constitutionally-adopted/
[7] See the unfortunate racial agitation essay by UChicago political science professor Adom Getachew, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/opinion/sunday/decolonization-statues.html
[8] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/takings. The public use provision stems in part from the conversion of slave owner profits and economic benefits from slave labor, to the freeman labor taxation by government. Free slaves represented enormous new tax revenues to both Northern federal and state government that was shielded by private ownership, and largely in Southern, competing states.
[9] https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/was-the-fourteenth-amendment-constitutionally-adopted/
[10] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/law-of-war/principles/C314D298E401BA696E74DE30233D2D17
[11] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/george-floyd-protests-expensive-civil-disturbance-us-history
[12] https://www.fox6now.com/news/gov-evers-announces-state-of-emergency-in-wisconsin-curfew-set-for-3rd-night-in-kenosha
[13] https://mynorthwest.com/1922840/herman-fraud-human-rights-history-barack-obama-leadership-black-lives-matter/?
[14] My argument is somewhat cynical and sarcastic, but still logical, which is, if BLM considers themselves still “slaves” (a “knee on their neck”) then they must not accept the 14th amendment which freed them. If they are not free and still slaves, then they are owned, they assert, effectively, by “White” slave owners. Unfortunately they also trigger an interesting and still debated contention that under the Takings Clause of the 5th amendment, slave owners should have been compensated. So BLM’s reparations argument could be taken–by a strictly pragmatic legal theorist–as invoking a legal reparations duty to all current White Americans. But even putting that somewhat sarcastic argument aside, the 2020 BLM domestic terror violence has already created “the most expensive civil disturbance” in US history (potentially), and BLM has, in my interpretation, incurred a liability for damages of $10 Billion so far, and they should post bond for their public comments to continue and expand such terror. Obama, as the BLM founder, should have his estate liened as damages reparations.
[15] “The radicals have turned race into a lens through which to view the country’s history, and not simply because they are obsessed with race. They have done so because it allows them to identify and separate those groups that deserve affirmation, in their view, and those that do not. What is taking place is the re-segregation of America, the endpoint of which will be the rejection of everything the civil-rights movement stood for. The nature of this exercise, with its sledgehammer rhetoric that obliterates complexities in favor of one-dimensional “correct” interpretations, is as close to Marxist agitprop as one can get. The current radical trends carry the seeds of violence unseen in the U.S. I am deeply concerned about what has happened to our educational system. I spent almost 25 years in academia watching up close the neo-Marxist takeover of our college and university curricula (and pushing against it). Until we dismantle the educational cartel that indoctrinates our children, we will fail. –Dr. Andrew A. Michta, Dean, College of International and Security Studies, the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. ‘The Captive Mind and America’s Resegregation: Idol smashing and cancel culture are part of a broad ideological project to dominate society’, 1 August, The Wall Street Journal
[16] “The faction principally responsible for the regressive stagnation of civic dialogue referred to as “multiculturalist coercive moralists,” or “social justice warriors” confuse being offended with being oppressed. Coercive moralism turns on this single claim: to be offended is to be oppressed [and] the entire world is responsible for their psychological and emotional well-being. As long as multiculturalist coercive moralists cannot cope, their position is callous, feeble, and ridiculous, but above all hypocritical. And this, in turn, disqualifies them from being the self-appointed Warriors of Social Justice who will, by themselves and by coercive moralist fiat, reshape and transform our societies for the better.” –Otto Paans, Technische Universität Berlin
