Rafal Barnaś and Dr. Jakub Krzemiński
Warsaw / September 3, 2020
A wave of "protests" is sweeping through the US states against the mistreatment of black people in the US. Stores, cars and monuments are being destroyed. Aggression becomes more and more radical.
African Americans comprise around 12% of the total US population. Can all of them be considered supporters of radical BLM movement? Are those who take to the streets aware of what they are fighting for? Does the emerging postulate to pay blacks compensation for the years of slavery have any justification?
Riots are mainly attended by the residents of the districts with high crime rate. And the majority of the black people assimilated with the rest of the US population clearly do not see any sense in the "protests" that de facto destabilize the state structures.
The destruction of monuments takes place in a bestial, senseless and accidental manner. The proof is the destruction of the Tadeusz Kościuszko (national hero of the USA, Poland, Lithuania and Belarus) monument standing in front of the White House. It is worth adding here that Kościuszko was a great advocate of the abolition of slavery and those people who destroyed the monument didn’t even know who Kościuszko was.
It is worth remembering that the first slaves in the British colonies on the new continent were poor immigrants from Ireland, England and Germany. E.g., in the 17th century, about 700,000 English peasants emigrated to North America as servants on the so-called "5-year contracts". They were guaranteed free transportation to their "employers", but, in fact, they were ordinary slaves for 5 years and sometimes longer. Many of them died of exhaustion and malnutrition before their five year terms were over. And trading such contract workers was a common thing those days.
When black slaves from Africa (sold to white slave traders by other black people) began to be brought into American colonies across the ocean, the “contract slavery” was still practiced. More than that, the mortality rate among “the contract servants” was much higher than that of the African slaves because “the contract servants” were subjected to harsher conditions and greater exploitation.
It is also worth remembering that the main slave trade center was in the Netherlands, from
where black people were sold to the American continent. That confirms that the source of slavery was not where the organizers of the current US riots indicate. But who would profit from using some African Americans in the projects aimed at destabilization of once great country? This is an important question that needs to be answered rather sooner than later.