As discussed elsewhere, historical relations between Islam and the West have been utterly distorted in order to present the aggressors as victims and the victims as aggressors.

In this article, we look at a similar but even more urgent topic: how history in general has been intentionally distorted in a way that makes segments of the nonwhite population hate, despise, and even want to murder whites.

This is no exaggeration.  In a speech late last year, Brittney Cooper, a black associate professor at Rutgers University, spewed so much hate against "white people," to the point of concluding, "We got to take these MFers out!"  (Needless to say, she still teaches at Rutgers.)

At one point during her racist rant, Cooper said:

I think white people are committed to being villains, in the aggregate. ... What I think that white people viscerally fear, it's not that white people don't know what they've done — they know.  They fear that there is no other way to be human but the way in which they are human.  So you know, you talk to white people, and whenever you want to have a reckoning by them they say stuff like, you know, "It's just human nature.  If y'all had all of this power y'all would have done the same thing," right?

Right, indeed.  Some fifteen years ago, I wrote an article making this same point: if Europeans were abusive to nonwhites, that is not because they were intrinsically bad (a racist point, incidentally), but simply because they were able to.  And that's the virtual bottom line of all history: capability.

Europeans did not defeat and uproot American Indians, enslave Africans, and colonize the rest because whites lived according to some unprecedented bellicose creed innate to whites and alien to nonwhites.  Quite the contrary: they did so because they — as opposed to natives, blacks, etc. — were able to do so.  That is the fundamental difference.

Had pre-Columbian Native Americans developed galleys for transoceanic travel, or advanced firearms, or compasses, or organized military structures and stratagems, and had they arrived on the shores of Europe at its weakest point in history — what would they have done?  Would they have pillaged and plundered, conquered and subjugated, or would they have looked at the inferior pale savages and "respected" them in the name of "diversity," leaving them wholly unmolested?

What if sub-Saharan blacks were technologically or militarily more advanced than their northern neighbors in Europe during the premodern era, and therefore could easily have subjugated and enslaved them?  Would they have done so, or would they have left them in peace in the name of "multiculturalism"?

In her rant, Cooper acknowledges — but rejects — these rhetorical questions:

[I]t's like, no, that's what white humans did, white human beings thought there's a world here and we [whites] own it. Prior to them, black and brown people have been sailing across oceans, interacting with each other for centuries without total subjugation, domination and colonialism, right?

Not only is this "professor's" ignorance profoundly startling; it is the source of her desire to see whites liquidated.  After all, in her estimation, white people are intrinsically evil.  It's in their blood.

Back in the real world, all peoples — white, black, brown, yellow, red — warred on the "other" and, when capable — key word — went on the offensive in search of conquest and plunder.  Depending exclusively on their capabilities — bows and arrows (e.g., Africans) or guns and cannons (e.g., Europeans) — their efforts resulted in tribal or international hegemony.  As Michael Graham writes,

[w]hen thinking of pre-Columbian America, forget what you've seen in the Disney movies [reference to the 1995 Pocahontas]. Think "slavery, cannibalism and mass human sacrifice." From the Aztecs to the Iroquois, that was life among the indigenous peoples before Columbus arrived.  For all the talk from the angry and indigenous about European slavery, it turns out that pre-Columbian America was virtually one huge slave camp.

It's the same with Africans: they continuously warred on, slaughtered, and enslaved one another for eons before whites ever came to sub-Saharan Africa.  Moreover, as Michael Omolewa, a Nigerian diplomat, once explained,

the bulk of the supply [of African slaves sold to Europeans] came from the Nigerians. These Nigerian middlemen moved to the interior where they captured other Nigerians who belonged to other communities. The middlemen also purchased many of the slaves from the people in the interior . ... Many Nigerian middlemen began to depend totally on the slave trade and neglected every other business and occupation. The result was that when the trade was abolished [by England in 1807] these Nigerians began to protest. As years went by and the trade collapsed such Nigerians lost their sources of income and became impoverished.

These are not just historical observations.  Despite Western efforts to abolish slavery, there are currently more than 50 million slaves — all of them in the non-Western world.  To quote from one report,

[a]s the world marks 400 years since the first recorded African slaves arrived in North America, slavery remains a modern-day scourge. ... Africa has the highest prevalence of slavery, with more than seven victims for every 1,000 people.

None of this seems to matter to Ms. Cooper.  For this "professor," the scourge of slavery — indeed, any and every social ill — begins and ends with white, and therefore inherently evil, people.  Hence the need to "take these MFers out!"

Nor is she alone.  Many people in the West, above and beyond the woke crowd, subscribe to this version of history that juxtaposes evil, oppressive, conquering whites with noble, peaceful, and egalitarian nonwhites — a carefully manufactured lie that feeds a deep and abiding hatred for whites, including, and as a testament to its pervasive influence, among whites themselves.  

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Image: stevepb via Pixabay, Pixabay license.