For many years, Western Civilization (Western Tradition) has been under assault from the Marxist Left – in schools, colleges, the media, woke corporations, etc. Why? Simply because the foundations of the Western Tradition (dating to around 1750) assume the individual’s right to “Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness”. It stands in opposition to the Left’s authoritarian collectivist / socialist objectives where the individual can only exist as a servant on the State plantation.

The Western Tradition, which ironically led the world out of slavery, is disingenuously being associated with the newly invented crime of “Whiteness” under the gnostic religion of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Every misfortune or failure of Non-White people is thereby attributed to White oppression. In another great leap of faith, CRT also convicts successful Non-Whites of being “White Adjacent”. According to CRT, people of color are not allowed to be successful without Government intervention, so Asians in the US, who are statistically more successful than whites, are shamed and punished for being “White Adjacent” under the CRT gospel. Just look at what Harvard and Yale did to Asian applicants.

A great example of the Left’s malevolent assault on the West is the “1619 Project”, an exercise in historical revisionism that assumes the US was not really founded on the revolutionary principles of the Western Tradition espoused in the Declaration of 1776, but rather, was founded in 1619 to establish slavery – the year that African slaves were first brought to the English colonies.

The high priests of CRT who push the 1619 narrative must avoid some very inconvenient truths about race and slavery in order to invent their nonsensical narrative. Here is a sampler:

— Historically, people were not enslaved for racial reasons – they were enslaved because they could not defend their freedom. Africans, Native Americans, Europeans and Asians all enslaved their own people. Ottoman Turks were much more progressive, enslaving anyone who was not a Muslim, regardless of race.

— Slavery was ubiquitous in 1619, prior to the Western Tradition, with 90% of the world’s population (including 90% of Europeans) enduring slavery or serfdom.

— Africans were sold into slavery by their own people, families and tribes. Often, the slave trade was controlled by African Muslims such as Tuaregs, who sold fellow Africans to outsiders along land and sea routes.

— The 1619 narrative conveniently ignores that as many Africans were sold into slavery in Islamic Arabia as were sold to the West. However, the Arabs neutered their slaves so they could not reproduce; thus you do not see the legacy of slavery in Arabia today. Ottoman Turks enslaved millions of Europeans and Africans for 400 years, along with hundreds of thousands of Americans taken off ships in the Mediterranean. Thomas Jefferson ended this practice when he sent the US Marines to terminate the Barbary pirates’ slavery operations in Tripoli, 1801-1805. — Voltaire, a founder of the Western Tradition, commented in 1756 about the practice of Africans selling their own people into slavery and commented: “A nation that traffics its children into slavery is more to be blamed than the buyer.”

Britain (led by the Christian Churches) began dismantling the African Slave Trade in 1807. For the next 60 years, 40% of the English budget was spent on this effort which freed 360,000 Africans and sank 1600 slave trading vessels. Meanwhile, 1500 British sailors sacrificed their lives in the cause. Yet African tribes continued to defend slavery as part of their culture into the 20th century!

The US later put an end to its slavery in the southern states, with over 600,000 white Union troops being killed or maimed in the war to end it. These soldiers had nothing to gain except the moral satisfaction of having ended slavery. In the process, Sherman destroyed the plantation system itself, so most of the wealth created by slavery was destroyed in the war to end it. Obviously, current US wealth is not built on slavery as the 1619 narrative claims. However, reparations were paid in the blood of Union troops.

But the most inconvenient truth of all is 1503, which was the first year Africans sold their fellow Africans into slavery in the New World, after having sold them to Arabians for hundreds of years. Spain and Portugal brought these newly purchased slaves to their colonies over 100 years before the English colonies did.

History demands that we replace the bogus 1619 Project narrative with the historical reality of 1503. Let’s not forget how Africans and the Hispanic colonies in Central and South America prospered on the slave trade nearly 200 years before the US was founded, and that the demise of slavery began only with the spread of the Western Tradition in the mid 1700’s.

Perhaps if the non-Western world had adopted the Western Tradition, all slavery would have ended long before it did. But the non-West did not adopt the Western Tradition, and slavery continued there.

It is time to relegate the “1619 Project” and CRT to the trash heap of dishonesty.

Scott Axelson is a Jamestown resident. Michael Dee is a Silver Creek resident.