Dawn Ritch, Contributor
WILMOT "Mutty" Perkins, the talk-show host is indeed a very brave man to visit that den of intellectuals up at Mona, and, in effect, tell them that the Holocaust and slavery ultimately brought benefits to Jews and Blacks. In general, I agree with him.
The acquisition of a state of Israel was a benefit he says, but I think it was a disaster most of all for the Jews themselves.
With the notable historical exception of the Vatican, a state ought not to be a religion, yet latterly a few fanatical Arab states have even followed Israel's lead.
The state of Israel was born of religious fanaticism, and, in turn, has bred fanaticism in reaction to itself and its supporters.
In the middle of the last millennium the Arabs were the most sophisticated and benevolent societies of all, during the time of the Ottoman Empire.
This was generally acknowledged, and, historically, the Jews were the ones responsible for spreading and inculcating Arab knowledge and civilized living to Europe.
This included medicine, maths, trade and finance and, in their own singular contribution to modern times, classical music.
The Jews had lost the Holy Land long ages before, and had been routinely persecuted even in the Diaspora where local European populations envied them for their elegance, brains and riches.
They were the Lord's wandering people who made civilization bloom all over the world. They, along with the Gypsies, another wandering people, homosexuals, and the mentally retarded, were gassed in Nazi Germany in a horrific slaughter rightly commemorated, but unfittingly sentimentalised.
The Jews' families recently received only token financial reparation, because their combined vast sums of money left in dormant Swiss bank accounts went to paying audit fees to the then Big Five international auditing firms.
The state of Israel from its inception has pursued the violent acquisition and occupation of Palestinian lands, and the subjugation of the rights of the Palestinian people.
Without hope of remedy, the Palestinians, in desperation, resorted to suicide bombings, and fanatical Muslims now follow suit on a far grander scale in the United States.
This is both a consequence of reaction against Israel and its American sponsor, and fundamentalist isolation in some Arab countries where only elderly men are allowed to read and interpret history.
Some benefits
Slavery led to the island of Jamaica being mainly inhabited by blacks and their descendants.
Bob Marley's widow, Rita, I understand, has gone to live in Africa where she is setting up schools. I, for one, resent that Jamaica to whom she owes so much was not the beneficiary of her kindness.
She is one of the very few Jamaicans who would rather live in Africa. Somehow I expect to see her back because, if born here, she will miss the excitement and what all agree, are our colourful people. She might as well have emigrated to Cayman.
Because of slavery, we not only speak the English language and have English law in Jamaica, but we also got only those African slaves that nobody in Barbados or the American mainland wanted.
Jamaica's black population is, therefore, descended only from the most physically ill or damaged, and also the most indomitable.
In the 18th century, the British were forced to sign a peace treaty with the Maroons in Portland before the town of Port Antonio could be inhabited by white settlers.
Not only do we speak English, but we kick foreign butt. Of late we've just been kicking our own, but that is not the fault of slavery.
It was a colonial decision to place the most warlike here in the hope that we would be better controlled. And indeed we are, because we have not yet found it necessary, as Mutty pointed out, to surgically remove the clitoris from our female population, as happens in ancestral Africa.
Our former English masters, however, knew us better I think than we care to admit. They knew that, without discipline and leadership, we develop a very bad attitude.
The public should note that according to a current statistical survey in the United Kingdom, the female West Indian there is better educated, and a higher achiever of success than the male West Indian. So slavery worked out pretty well, for West Indian women at least.
Political correctness
Of all minority races in the U.K., Africans and Asians seek the highest academic qualifications, according to the same survey.
It's just not politically correct to talk about these things which means that they are tasteless, inappropriate and ought not to be countenanced. Hats off to the British, therefore, for asking the questions.
The ideology of political correctness itself was developed over time and proselytised worldwide by America.
Always ones for technical education, they ended up removing much of the content from it.
In this the United States was followed most egregiously by Britain, who has not taught her own history in decades in her own schools, and at the first year university level. Only the Tudors, Nazi Germany, and the Soviets.
The rationale for this severe abridgement in available human knowledge, was that any other period of English history involved conquest and imperialism.
And little English boys should no longer want to become adventurers, and take pride in battle and conquest. It was wrong, and the reading of Rudyard Kipling was no longer encouraged.
For this they were awarded "Brownie Points" by America and the international community.
At long last, however, the British people are accusing their Government, particularly the current Labour Government, of "dumbing-down" British culture.
As to reparations, I have no real objection to collecting on a 500-year-old debt if reparations are being handed out.
All the Rastafarians tell me they insist upon is equity, and that England, Spain, Holland, Portugal and France take joint and not singular responsibility for slavery, and this must come with the public acknowledgment that the blood of West Indians runs in their veins and the veins of Europe's royal houses. Better terms of trade for these islands would be just gilding the Rastafarian lily.
So how could slavery have been such a bad thing in retrospect?
Bloodshed and slaughter happen on truly inhuman scale in the history of mankind. We are supposed to learn from it.
The Jews got gassed, and along with African slaves became the only real victims in the history of mankind recognised by political correctness.
Yet even that "most honourable" status didn't prevent the Jews being cheated only recently out of their Holocaust reparations by the international financial community.
If the Zionists shut down the state of Israel, they can charge huge reparations anew, and maybe get to keep it this time. Though where all this money is to come from to pay both them and us is beyond me.
Most major world economies have already sunken into recession. It's not as though they can go and plunder private, dormant bank accounts again.
Moreover it doesn't seem right to take money to penalise people who made it possible for me to be born Jamaican in the first place.
By rights I should be paying them.
