Should Africans Apologize for Slavery?

That's the question asked in a BBC article. A Nigerian Civil Rights Congress has called on traditional African rulers to apologize for their role in the slave trade.

"We cannot continue to blame the white men, as Africans particularly the traditional rulers, are not blameless," said the Civil Rights Congress.

As the organization points out, African rulers collaborated in the slave trade, selling other Africans to Europeans.

I have talked with people who have a picture of advanced Europeans swooping down on Africans, capturing them, and taking them off into slavery. But such was not the case. At the beginning and through the height of the slave trade, Europeans held mostly coastal enclaves in Africa, many of which existed at the mercy of local rulers. Europeans didn't have the manpower to seize the massive numbers of slaves that would be transported to the Americas, nor did they have the drugs that would later allow them to penetrate the African interior without being struck down by tropical diseases against which they had little resistance. Slaves were procured through local rulers, many of whom sold their captured enemies, or hunted down less advanced people from the interior and sold them to the Europeans.

It is interesting that an African organization has the courage speak out on the shared complicity of Africans in the slave trade. It's obviously a touchy subject, and it would be far easier to just blame Europeans. I applaud the intellectual honesty of the Nigerian Civil Rights Congress.

A Good Point From the Left

Like many on both left & right, Chris Bowers at Open Left took note of the recent Public Policy Polling survey that found only a minority of Republicans sure that President Obama was born in the U.S., and 25% of Democrats who think President Bush intentionally allowed the 9/11 attacks to take place. Eight percent overall actually think Bush is the antichrist, and ten percent think it's Obama. (I guess Bush retired from the job). 

Bowers points out that birtherism & trutherism aren't analogus and suggests that another question should have been asked of Democrats.

they missed a chance to poll the actual Democratic equivalent of the "birther" conspiracy theories: that Bush stole the 2004 election. Those two conspiracies are equivalent because they deny the legitimacy of the President. Thinking that Bush was involved in 9/11 is more like thinking that Obama has a secret plan to indoctrinate American children with Islamo-socialism.

According to Bowers, and I think he's correct,

belief in the stolen 2004 elections is more widespread among Democrats than Bush having foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. It certainly seems extremely widespread within the comment sections of the progressive blogosphere.

I applaud Bowers' intellectual honesty in pointing out that there is even more conspiracy theory nuttery on his side than the PPP poll indicates. Unfortunately conspiracy theory thinking is quite prevalent on both sides of the aisle.

Richard Cohen's Torture Article

Richard Cohen is one of the more intellectually honest liberals out there, and his piece called, "Torture's Unanswerable Questions," is no exception. In the key passage he asks what will happen the next time we have another terrorist leader in custody.

How do we get him to reveal his group's plans and the names of his colleagues? It will be hard. It will, in fact, be harder than it used to be. He can no longer be waterboarded. He knows this. He cannot be deprived of more than a set amount of sleep. He cannot be beaten or thrown up against even a soft wall. He cannot be threatened with shooting or even frightened by the prospect of an electric drill. Nothing really can be threatened against his relatives -- that they will be killed or sexually abused. 

He knows the new restrictions. He knows the new limits. He may even suggest to his interrogators that their jobs are on the line -- that the Justice Department is looking over their shoulders. The tape is running. Everything is being recorded. He is willing to give up his life. Are his interrogators willing to give up their careers? He laughs.

This scenario is very similar to one laid out previously by Michael Scheuer, with regard to the hypothetical capture of Osama bin Laden. Unfortunately that is where we are right now, with blind legalism in the driver's seat. The whole article should be read, especially by the moralistic fools who put the imaginary rights of terrorists above the security of the American people -- the same imbeciles who think that torturing a terrorist like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed somehow makes us morally equivalent to Al Qaeda. 

Richard Cohen Continues to Be Intellectually Honest

Richard Cohen has another column up in which he continues to demonstrate a level of intellectual honesty rarely found among torture opponents.  He asks, "What if Cheney's Right'? And that's a very good question. It's usually ignored by those who confuse their opinions with fact and pretend they know more than those who had full access to all classified information. Here's Cohen:

Torture is a moral abomination, and President Obama is right to restate American opposition to it. But where I reserve a soupçon of doubt is over the question of whether "enhanced interrogation techniques" actually work. That they do not is a matter of absolute conviction among those on the political left, who seem to think that the CIA tortured suspected terrorists just for the hell of it.

Cohen is obviously no fan of Cheney, and thinks he has no credibility, but he doesn't inhabit the same ideological dreamworld as many of his compatriots on the left. Earlier in the piece Cohen writes,

Yet I have to wonder whether what he is saying now is the truth -- i.e., torture works.

If he cared to actually look into it and do five minutes of research -- something most torture opponents haven't bothered with -- he would find that there are numerous examples of torture working to extract correct information. The only real question is whether torture worked in these particular cases, as Cheney and other officials claim.  But at least Cohen is willing to ask the question, rather then making an unfounded assumption about the answer.