The Big Lie of Slavery
The slave trade was the worst human-inflicted atrocity ever.
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It’s been repeated so many times that we accept as historical fact that about 15 million Africans died in the transatlantic slave trade over a period of 250 years.
This figure is reported by everyone from the United Nations to African Studies departments at major universities. I learned this figure in Black Studies courses in college and have repeated it in my own writing.
It turned out to be a lie. The death toll was closer to 50 to 60 million.
This Juneteenth, it’s time the truth is told.
I’m reminded of how Jews rightfully feel when some Jew-hating Holocaust denier tries to push absurd theories that Hitler and the Nazis only killed one or two million Jews instead of six million.
Not that two million wouldn’t still be an atrocity, but Jew haters peddle that nonsense for one reason.
To diminish the severity of the trauma and genocide.
To make us think that we ought not to make as big a deal of it. That it shouldn’t be cause for unending alarm about the dangers of Jew-hatred. Or that Jews don’t need their own home back. That the Holocaust is just one of many similar genocides undertaken by other unruly rulers in the last 200 years.
The Khmer Rouge killed 2 million in Cambodia. Nearly 1.5 million were killed in Circassia in the 1800s. The Ottomans massacred between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians from 1915 to 1917. About 800,000 Rwandans were killed in 1994. A million to 2 million Bangladeshi were killed in East Pakistan in 1971.
What are another one or two million Jews among the masses?
Thus, according to Jew-haters, the Nazi genocide that wiped two out of every three Jews in Europe was no big deal. Just another genocide in a long line of them.
Jews like me get outraged when we hear Nazi lovers spew that bullshit.
It turns out that far worse has been done to deliberately diminish and limit the severity of the African slave trade.
We should be even more outraged by this lie.
