The Goldberg Variations

As long as we’re looking for precedents, let’s not forget The Party of Death – no. 2 in the series.

what do blacks as a group owe America for the abolition of slavery?

A lien for 40 acres and a mule.
.

6: No, I think Adam has a point. The transatlantic slave trade was very unusual historically in a number of ways; slaves were certainly treated a lot worse than they had been in the Arabic/African slave trade of the preceding centuries.

This is better. Maybe the useful stuff will need to wait until the book is in hand. And since Goldberg’s book apparently uses economic arguments, say anti-Keynesian (although Hayek & Friedman have written their laugh-riots already) maybe some economic analysis of why the merging of industry, finance, and gov’t in service of imperialistic militarism has neither any relation to liberalism or fascism will get posted.

No Goldberg is no Hayek. Goldberg will sell more books.

The Free Press is a funny bunch- the publish some really terrible stuff, as noted, but they also publish some pretty good books like Cass Sunstein’s _Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech_. Are they an ideological outfit or just commerical?

See, now that’s how to write a blog post on Goldberg’s book, rather than, say, triumphantly announcing that Swarthmore doesn’t have an education major.

What? “Guilt by association” instead of “the universe to which Mr. Goldberg refers does not exist?”

Um, … OK?
.

Uncle Kvetch-

Actually, Andrew Sullivan already mentioned Goldberg’s book on his blog. Here is what he had to say:

“Jonah Goldberg’s party might be dragging citizens off the street, incarcerating them without charges for four years and torturing them (if you haven’t heard of Jose Padilla, you’ve been reading too much NRO), they might have suspended habeas corpus indefinitely, they might be wire-tapping your phone without warrants, they may be claiming presidential authority to ignore laws and treaties … but the real fascism can be found in:

‘a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.’

Be afraid.”

Rickm, that’s heartening. Not heartening enough to change my overall opinion of Sully, but enough to make me retract my prediction.

So who will the Times turn to? Is Mickey Kaus up to the task?

By “American slavery,” I meant “modern slavery driven by Western capitalist development” — if you’re going to argue that somehow the US version of slavery really was qualitatively better than the South American or Cuban versions, then let’s hear it, but I feel like that would actually constitute rhetorically playing into the hands of the enemy.

(I guess that one point might be that slaves in South America didn’t have the benefit of 3/5 of a vote being exercised on their behalf by the whites of their state.)

I was laughin’ away at this thread until the dreadful suggestion of a Micky Kaus/Golberg fest was floated. Oh No! The very thought causes a number of symptoms: headache, nauseau, cramps, sweating, heart palpitations. If that happens, I am blaming this thread! Imagine some slo mo sexploitation horror flick involving the Blob and Alien mating after an hour of excrutiating foreplay, under the benign supervision of Good Doctor Helen. We are talking bad, people, very very bad.
I think this thread will have to be destroyed, so that mankind does not have to confront this curse.

Adam, actually North American slavery was better in terms of life expectancy and other biological measures. The Chesapeake region had a positive population growth, especially after the Am Rev. This really had little to do with the kindness of the masters, but rather with climate (the winter provided an off season for recuperation from field work). This excess population helps explain why Jefferson would go along with the Brits in stopping the (official) Atlantic slave trade in 1804-1808: the internal slave market would benefit the Chesapeake planters, and stopping the Atlantic trade would protect the price they could get for them. I don’t have page numbers to hand, but I’m relying on Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity; Robin Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery; and Garry Wills, “Negro President” (the last on Jefferson) for this argument.

Incidentally, “slaves were treated like property, which is to say, pretty well” is also a pretty standard anti-capitalist rhetoric. I heard it from Chomsky (your own car vs. a rental) and I’m pretty sure it was in Mark Ames’ Going Postal.

CT is giving Goldberg an awful lot of attention. You prepared to argue that he deserves it?

…did not prevent CNN from hiring D’Souza as a commentator in 2004, nor did it prevent the American Enterprise Institute or the Hoover Institution from retaining him as a Jolly Good Fellow

This is one of the most sobering things about these imbéciles provocateurs – the position they are accorded in the mainstream political commentariat. I do understand that the Hoovers ≠ Stanford, but now that the Invisible Hand has taken Milton Friedman to the Big Market in the Sky, I am thinking that D’Souza is the most recognizable “Stanford-credentialed” individual for the average TV viewer. Does preemptive mockery help or hurt? I’m not sure.

Yes, the “ignore Goldberg because he’s a buffoon” camp tries to pretend that Goldberg is so minor he’ll go away. He isn’t. He’s a nationally syndicated columnist. He’s going to be published on Op-ed pages for the next 30-40 years all across the nation.

I’m blissing out! (swoon).

$100 says the Sunday NY Times Book Review assigns Goldberg’s magnum dopus*

Bazzzzt. The correct answer is Michiko Kakutani.

Yeah, yeah, but will the Rangers make the playoffs?

Michael, that’s not D’Souza’s most recent book. Where have you been?? His most recent book is the one where he proves the truth of Cartesian dualism by introspection (we have free will, you see).

” . . . so too, twelve years ago, did D’Souza show that Franz Boas and W. E. B. DuBois were the real racists.”

Not to equivocate here, but didn’t lefty scholars like Anthony Appiah and Walter Benn Michaels make this argument about the progressive complicity with racialism? If I remember correctly, the opening essay in *In My Father’s House* criticizes Du Bois’s racialist thinking.

“Also, just to demonstrate Goldberg’s ignorance, he writes that Carl Schmitt, an near-fascist (literally) is “hugely popular among leftist academics.”

But Schmitt is more popular among conservative academics!”

You can’t really be serious. At least in the American case, Schmidt is just rarely discussed. Who actually pays the attention to Schmidt? Not too many folks. Ellen Kennedy, a left-leaning academic at Penn or Paul Gottfried, a right-leaning academic from Elizabethtown or the folks at Telos, semi-heirs of the Frankfurt school.

Berube sightings are good news. I propose that he takes a shot at writing the NHL Closer at Deadspin.

We hoped Jonah would go away back when was selling Linda Tripp tapes out of Lucianne’s attic on e-Bay.

Mickey Kaus is an excellent guess to do the NYT review, especially now that bloggingheads has that NYT tie-in. And Kaus once said that Jonah is incredibly talented.

Matt#18: When they published Dinesh, Charles Murray, and The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (which accuses Ursula Le Guin of fascist tendencies), The Free Press was Adam Bellow’s baby: not so more recently, IINM.

Ursula Le Guin, fascist tool! I should have known.

@56: I don’t really buy that argument. Who makes it? References please.

@59: I’ve never heard that the end of importing slaves made plantation owners treat the slaves better.

What I do remember hearing is that the end of importing slaves resulted in ramped-up breeding programs, which probably meant more destroyed families as they were separated and sold as “breeding stock.”

IIRC, the end of importing slaves also spurred the “one drop of blood” racial classification which held that anyone with as little as 1/16 African ancestry (one great-grandparent) was black and therefore a slave.

Yes, the “ignore Goldberg because he’s a buffoon” camp tries to pretend that Goldberg is so minor he’ll go away. He isn’t. He’s a nationally syndicated columnist. He’s going to be published on Op-ed pages for the next 30-40 years all across the nation.

I know, brilliant isn’t it? He’ll be published for 30-40 years, and (unless he comes up with new material, which I suppose is theoretically possible), he’ll spend that entire time trying to make the visibly ridiculous claim that modern liberals are the heirs of the Nazis. Not only will this take up op-ed space that might be used for actually arguing for right-wing policies, but Goldberg’s book is sort of like a herpes virus unleashed into the wingnut editorialist community, attacking the credibility of anyone it touches. I see from The Corner that it’s already now safe to ignore and mock anything Tom Wolfe says ever again – previously, Wolfe’s occasional ventures into right wing drivel had to be taken with a modicum of seriousness because of Bonfire of the Vanities, but now we can just point to the blurb he wrote for “Liberal Fascism” and yuk him off.

I apologize for not wanting to get involved in the “our slavery was better/worse than anyone else’s” argument. I’ve stood in both the dungeon and the death room at the slave castle in Cape Coast, Ghana. I don’t think the men and women who were held there, died there, or were transported from there particularly cared about the moral ranking of their tormentors. Neither should we. Evil is evil.

30-40 years from now, claiming that liberals are fascists will be like claiming that beatniks are right-deviationists today. You’d be arguing in a superannuated style about ancient entities. No one will even know what you’re talking about, or care.

dsquared @64

Well if you’re unfortunate enough to come across Yahoo’s version of ‘answers to questions’, most of the rightwing trolls on there seem to think Hitler was a socialist anyway. So why should liberals miss out from their scattergun smears?

Thanks for the info on the Free Press, Josh.

Blind Lemon Jefferson and Ali Farka Toure, on the other hand, will be on peoples’ radios forever.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard either of those guys on the radio. Me neither.

Caribbean slavery tended to be nastier than North American slavery because Caribbean slavery was about sugar.

Cutting sugar cane is godawful work: much worse than picking cotton or planting coffee. The sugar cane likes heat and humidity, so cutting it means standing ankle deep in mud at 40 degrees C and 100% humidity, swinging a machete over and over again in a malarial swamp full of snakes, rats, spiders, stinging flies and mosquitoes.

From the time sugar got firmly established in the Caribbean (~1660) to the Napoleonic Wars, the average lifespan of a new slave fresh off the boat was around a decade. About 10% died in the first six months.

Also, until the 1780s, most of the small sugar islands were disproportionately male — there wasn’t much economic sense in bringing female slaves, because they died nearly as fast without doing as much work. In the US, the slave population was self-sustaining from pretty early on; in the Caribbean, this didn’t happen until the late 18th century.

Caribbean slaves were treated much worse than American slaves because (1) they were mostly going to die anyway, and (2) they were more of a threat — they all had machetes, and whites were usually a minority. Note that the only successful slave revolt was on Haiti, the largest of the sugar islands.

As a result, the Caribbean *consumed* several million African slaves — that is, it used them up and killed them, without allowing them to reproduce.

Anyway. I don’t think it minimizes the horrors of US slavery to note that there were places that were even worse.

Doug M.

insane sadism doesn’t seem to have been as common in North America. I woudn’t specualte why, but certainly it’s not becasue of capitalist rationality was more developed in the US, as D’Souza and ragout suggest.

I’m certainly not suggesting that slaveowners exhibited “capitalist rationality.” Under what definition of capitalism could it possibly make sense to call slaveowners capitalist? Marx must be turning over in his grave.

Anyway, a lot of bizarre tortures were removed from the Virginia slave code (by Jefferson) after the American Revolution. Of course, around the same time, slavery was ended (or phased out) in the North, banned from new territories, and the importation of slaves was banned in much of the US. So one reason why slavery wasn’t as bad in the US as in South America and the Caribbean was revolutionary idealism and the virtues of the founding fathers.

Under what definition of capitalism could it possibly make sense to call slaveowners capitalist?

Under the definition used in “Theories of Surplus Value”, among others, viz:

“where commercial speculations figure from the start and production is intended for the world market, the capitalist mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, since the slavery of Negroes precludes free wage-labor, which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists. The method of production which they introduce has not arisen out of slavery but is grafted on to it. In this case the same person is capitalist and landowner.” “

The salient difference between American slavery and other forms of slavery is that ours took place in a country that held it to be self-evidently true that all men are created equal.

and, funnily enough, all the examples you mention are mightily chuffed about the whole “creator” mention in the very next sentence and string ornate and glittery webs of theory from it but appear not to have noticed what it actually says.

Ragout, the PBS quote is okay for a TV special, but it’s a generalization (“the American South”); the three books I cite in 32 would give you a better understanding of the geographical and historical differences crucial to understanding the point we’re arguing (i.e., Chesapeake vs. deep south, tobacco vs. rice and sugar [early on the coasts] and vs. cotton [later in the inland], and so on). Besides, the quote you bring out seems to imply positive slave population growth before the 1808 ban. And besides all that, citing “revolutionary idealism and the virtues of the founding fathers” as even partial reasons for the difference in mortality rates of N Am vs Caribbean it doesn’t seem to (1) be very persuasive in the face of the climate and labor conditions arguments above nor (2) fit very well with your own economic rationality argument. If you can only read one of the books above in 32, you should try Wills on Jefferson in re “revolutionary idealism and the virtues of the founding fathers” regarding US slavery.

Ignoblus, don’t be such a stick in the mud. Part of our glee with Goldberg is our relief at being able to find a good laugh in these dismal times. Besides, it seems WorldNetDaily keeps you well-informed enough on the Monty Python Left that you don’t need CT to pile on.

Are people in this thread actually debating whether slavery was just plain old bad rather than really, really bad? And this matters why?

Are people in this thread actually debating whether slavery was just plain old bad rather than really, really bad?

No, we’re debating if there was a difference between the conditions for slaves in North America and the Caribbean, and what the reasons for that might have been.

And this matters why?

First, because of the claim made by D’Souza and repeated here by ragout, that if you hold another human being as property you’ll treat them well out of your own self-interest. This is a really pernicious idea and it’s important to show that history does not bear it out. And second, because as members of “the reality-based community” we just prefer having accurate views of reality. I think it’s perfectly possible to believe both US slavery was one of the most immoral and destructive social arrangements of modern times, and has profoundly warped American society down to the present, and that Caribbean slavery was even more brutal than in North America.

Lemuel, “treat them well” – compare to what? Maybe it’s a pernicious idea, but it’s not at all obvious to me that, say, the canuts in 1830s Lyon were treated better.

Ignoblus, don’t be such a stick in the mud. Part of our glee with Goldberg is our relief at being able to find a good laugh in these dismal times. Besides, it seems WorldNetDaily keeps you well-informed enough on the Monty Python Left that you don’t need CT to pile on.

Well, no, I don’t read WorldNetDaily. Ever. And the term “Monty Python Left” is taken from Rhetorical Ox. But what I’m concerned about has a lot to do with how people make such blanket judgements, how they lump people or ideas in with others based on superficial similarities, even when one person should be taken more seriously than the other. (And, please, do allow me the chance to think through something I haven’t thought about before.) I promise not to lump you in with Alexander Cockburn if you don’t lump me in with Jonah Goldberg. But how do we encourage others to make such disctinctions? Does giving him this much attention encourage others to make smarter disctinctions, to not go Goldberg on us? What responsibility, if any – and I’m open to but not quite comfortable with the possibility that we have none – do we have to encourage such behavior?

Ignoblus, Alexander Cockburn sure has been a bit eccentric recently, but can you suggest anything comparable with Liberal Fascism in his body of work? Please, I’ll order it right away.

Actually, the term “Monty Python Left” derives from this humble blog post, which deals with (among other things) Ward Churchill’s clarification as to whether cheese-makers and dairy producers in general can be said to be “little Eichmanns,” and a rewritten version of the relevant paragraph made its way into What’s Liberal? But hey, if it’s time for another repudiation of Churchill, sign me up! What did he do this time, host a family reunion for the Contras?

Besides, Uncle Kvetch has already admitted that Goldberg’s book proves that the left needs to clean up its act. We’ve got our left flank well covered here.

Personally, this sort of thing keeps me up at night, which is why I prefer to distance myself from those who distance themselves from those whose distance themselves from those who claim that those who claim that independent lefties like you and me are moles are moles.

Thanks, Michael. Something for me to think about.

And, Barry, of course a worthwhile point.

abb1, well, I do think Cockburn has said and published things far worse than “a bit eccentric” lately. If you really want examples, let me know. I’ve used up enough electrons here already.

(music)
Steal the Chillllldren!!

On Cockburn, there’s not just the bizarre climate change denialism. His newsletter Counterpunch recently published an article explaining that the “blessed peaceful period in Palestine only changed with the ascendancy of the Jews in the 19th c, who all this time had been nurturing their tribal Yahweh and their dream of concretising the metaphorical promises he supposedly made millennia ago,” and then adds:

Then there’s the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which sets out just such a programme in albeit an overtly grotesque form and is solemnly disowned by Zionists as a forgery, though a forgery of what is never made clear.

Cockburn didn’t write, just published it, but in my book suggesting that the Protocols might have been onto something is well out of bounds. So maybe Cockburn does deserve to get beaten up a bit more than he does.

On the other hand, this stuff comes at the end of a mostly admirable 40-year career and he still is a brilliant stylist when he makes an effort so it’s probably not fair to compare him to Goldberg, who as far as I can tell has no redeeming features at all.

I used to like making fun of Wingnuts, but thanks to Ward Churchill, I’m outraged by Margaret Sanger.

So, this Walberg guy has a conspiracy theory about Zionists and he mentions the Protocols in a stupid paragraph. Anathema, make him a non-person.

Bernard Lewis has a conspiracy theory about Iranian mullahs (‘the 12th imam’ or something) and he, nevertheless, is the most respected expert in the world and Glenn Beck is pushing that stuff on CNN.

So, yeah, OK, Counterpunch is as crazy as CNN.

In comment 12 dsquared said
“The transatlantic slave trade was very unusual historically in a number of ways; slaves were certainly treated a lot worse than they had been in the Arabic/African slave trade of the preceding centuries.”

If so, where are the descendants today of the Arab slave trade? There is a smidgeon of African mtDNA (i.e. from women) in Arabia, little else. Much of East and Central Africa was essentially a slave farm for centuries yet nothing remains of all those people. The word “genocide” comes to mind.

if you hold another human being as property you’ll treat them well out of your own self-interest.

I made no such claim. I said, “Since they couldn’t easily replace their slaves, slaveowners were motivated to keep them alive.” Keeping them alive certainly isn’t the same as treating them well!

Note also that this is not an “economic rationality” argument, nor is it a “capitalist rationality” argument, unless these terms are identical to simple rationality. For example, slaveowners had to be concerned with slave revolts and escape attempts. These are rather different from the problems faced by the typical employer of wage laborers. From the point of view of slaveowners, the ban on the importation of slaves presumably made violence and torture less attractive strategies for dealing with these difficulties.

As to Marx, we can see from D^2’s quote, and still more from the article he links to, that Marx wasn’t one to make facile equations of slavery and capitalism. Marx called slavery an “anomaly,” a precapitalist institution (the plantation) embedded in a capitalist world order (the world trade in cotton and sugar). I have no doubt that Marx’s lit-crit “followers” are preventing him from resting easy in his grave.

Oh, but AWB gets to party? (AWB, are you mocking me with your trackback prowess?) Alright then, I see how it’s going to be. I’ll do this all manual like: Here is the post I wrote, but more importantly, here is the Wallace Stevens poem about Goldberg. (That’s the whole reason I tracked your back in the first place.)

John Protevi,

I keep denying that I’m making arguments about “economic rationality,” and yet you keep criticizing me by pointing out my arguments (“revolutionary idealism”) aren’t based on economic rationality. Well, duh!

You lecture me about which Jefferson book to read, but make ridiculous arguments like “This excess [slave] population helps explain why Jefferson would go along with the Brits in stopping the (official) Atlantic slave trade in 1804-1808: the internal slave market would benefit the Chesapeake planters, and stopping the Atlantic trade would protect the price they could get for them.”

Actually, Virginia banned the importation of slaves in 1778, without waiting for the national ban. Stopping the importation of slaves to Virginia in no way helped Virginia to sell slaves to the deep south states (the “internal slave market”). By banning the importation of slaves to their state, but not to their competitors, Virginian planters caused themselves some economic harm.

most [Middle Eastern] slaves were concubines or eunuchs…considerably less brutal than the Atlantic slave trade

Routine castration sounds pretty brutal to me.

…then we would see their DNA in Arabia.

Is it possible that most of the slaves there were north-east Africans of semitic origin to begin with?

nxinxa, where exactly do you get this stuff about the DNA in Arab peninsualr population not having any AFrican DNA? Has someone done a test of the DNA of “Arab people” and compared to the DNA of “African people”? WHat are those categories? How do you determine history on the basis of DNA testing?

This is all lovely scientific cover for some really dodgy thinking.

‘Has someone done a test of the DNA of “Arab people” and compared to the DNA of “African people”’

Have a look at:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/298/5602/2381

And we have “This is all lovely scientific cover for some really dodgy thinking.” as well as “It only comes to mind if you’ve got a political axe to grind.”

This reminds me of the old joke about a psychiatrist walking down the street, someone says “good morning” to him, he thinks to himself “I wonder what he meant by that.”

“I’m afraid your link is not specific enough. Could you link the page dealing with “Arabia” and the “African DNA” you mentioned, please.”

Stare at figure 1, either the last line of the graphic or next to the last one. The only population they call “Middle Eastern” with any African DNA is the Mozabites, who live in Algeria.

This BTW is not the best reference, it is the first thing that popped into my head.

“Other forms of slavery were extremely brutal too, in this hemisphere and in the other one. The salient difference between American slavery and other forms of slavery is that ours took place in a country that held it to be self-evidently true that all men are created equal.”

Michael, it’s a fact that American negro slavery was not nearly as brutal as slavery elsewhere in the western hemisphere. Robert Fogel, the Nobel Prize winning economic historian, has documented the significant difference in “natural increase” between the relatively small percentage of African slaves brought into the US versus those consigned to Brazil and the Caribbean, where a much more brutal plantation system existed. See his “Time on the Cross.” I pray that an even-handed approach to historical facts (for which we liberal Democrats are justly renowned) doesn’t make people think that I’m one with the D’Souzas of this world.

See his “Time on the Cross.”

An utterly misguided and often outright fraudulent book.

He analyzed the frequency of whippings by counting the number of times a plantation owner’s diary described whipping individual slaves, ignoring the many mentions of whipping all field hands, whipping a dozen unidentified slaves, etc.

He estimated the frequency of families being broken up in the slave trade by assuming that only children sold alone indicated broken families and that all groups of children and adults sold together represented intact families.

He greatly exaggerated the proportion of slaves working in skilled occupations.

And so on.

See Herbert Gutman, “Slavery and the Numbers Game.”

Turns out that there are 5 clear clumps: sub-Saharan Africans, Europeans, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Amerindians. In other words the old-timey human races pop right out.

OK, I’m reading the paper now, and this claim is flatly false, but in an interesting way.

As with any factor analysis, you can identify as many clusters as you like. The paper does this with K=2,3, etc. First you have a cluster with Europe and Africa on one side, East Asia, Oceania and the Americas on the other side, and South Asia in the middle. At K=3 the Americas split off. And so on up to K=6, where the Kalash of northern Pakistan get their own cluster, along with the “canoncial” races. Only at K=5 do the clusters correspond to conventional racial groups. So of course that’s the level that “popped out” to nxinxa. But there’s nothing special about K=5 unless you already beleive that these are the races.

“But there’s nothing special about K=5 unless you already beleive that these are the races.”

Not quite: after 5 then individual groups. like tribes, pop out one by one. And anything from 2 to 5 gives old-timey races by someone’s definition. Maybe not 2 since it splits the world east-west while skin color splits it north south and most people think skin color when they think race.

abb1: I seem to remember (from some Jared Diamond’s book) that there’s a whole bunch of mostly unrelated ethnic groups in Africa.

Or, to quote one of the authors nxinxa cites as an authority:

“On a global basis we are finding that the majority of alleles for nuclear DNA polymorphisms are present in most populations around the world, though sub-Saharan African populations have more genetic variation (alleles), in general, than indigenous populations in any other part of the world. We interpret the data to mean that there was a major founder effect and loss of variation associated with the expansion of modern humans out of Africa.”

Which means it is utter nonsense to talk of “African DNA” – it would make more sense to speak of non-African DNA, i.e., if you really needed to divide humanity into five races you might as well regard the non-African chunk of the world’s population as a single race. But I’ve never seen anyone produce a decent reason for dragging race back into genetics.

Needless to say there’s plenty of people living in what used to be the Ottoman empire who may have inherited DNA from African slaves. Some have dark skin, some don’t.

If so, where are the descendants today of the Arab slave trade?

there is this whole country called “Dar al-Sudan” (land of the black people) which is substantially populated by Arabic-speaking black people and part of the Arab League, for example.

JP Stormcrow,

Thanks, that does look interesting. I found a PDF version of the full paper:

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/374384

The word “genocide” comes to mind. …..This was big time horrific genocide.

This is exactly what I meant by having a political axe to grind. You cite ONE study (with what the study itself admits is a smaller than needed sample of “Middle Eastern” populations for accurate genetic clustering) that really doesn’t directly address your point. The study only deals with the question of whether genetically determined ancestry is superior to self-reported ancestry in assessing epidemiological risks. But it is your only cite to back up your claim that, contrary to all historical record, there must have been some secret “horrific genocide” of African slaves in Arabia. If you throw around the word “genocide” so casually, with no evidence to back it up, that’s a sure sign of an agenda other than scientific inquiry.

Thanks JP and Kevin for the links to the study on African MtDNA gene flow to Arab populations.

From the cited study:

“In summary, these results are consistent with mainly female migration from eastern Africa into Arab communities within the last few thousand years. There have been many opportunities for such migrations between eastern Africa and southern Arabia during this period. However, the most likely explanation for the presence of predominantly female lineages of African origin in other parts of the Arab world is that these may trace back to women brought from Africa as part of the Arab slave trade, assimilated into the Arabian population as a result of miscegenation and manumission.”

… which correlates exactly to historian Gates’ point that I cited. You dismissed this in favor of a “horrific genocide” theory, which has no backing in either history or genetics. It was, in essence, pulled out of your ass. Axe, meet grinder.

Of course, John said all this much more succinctly!

Nice paper, and it says precisely what I said: there is evidence of African mtDNA in the Middle East, nothing from the Y. The men were either castrated or killed.

No, it doesn’t. You originally said, “If so, where are the descendants today of the Arab slave trade? There is a smidgeon of African mtDNA (i.e. from women) in Arabia, little else….The word “genocide” comes to mind.” And you also said,
“We don’t even see more than a trace of mtDNA from African females…If Gates’ “intermarriage” ever happened we would see the DNA today. This was big time horrific genocide.”

The “nice paper” called the female-mediated gene flow “extensive”. If you are looking for a synonym for “smidgeon” or “trace”, well, “extensive” is not it. So to now claim that it “says precisely what I said” is precisely a lie.

Neither slave trade history nor population genetics supported your point so now you have changed your argument to, well, there is evidence of female DNA but no male, so therefore it must mean that “all the men were either castrated or killed.” In fact you imply that the study said as much, when it clearly said no such thing.

The genetic study only supports a finding that there is little recent male-mediated African gene flow in current Arab populations, but much greater mtDNA gene flow. From that you have made a broad leap from the lack of the male flow to an imputed reason–genocide: one that is not supported by history. Is genocide the only possible reason for the lack of a significant male-mediated gene flow from Africa? No, all the genetic analysis does is indicate that the African male-mediated genes DID NOT REPRODUCE IN SUFFICIENT NUMBERS to influence the genetic makeup of the larger Arab population. Is being killed the only way that one can fail to reproduce? Of course not. Given that most of the African slaves in the Arabian peninsula were females, used as concubines or domestic help, and that the smaller number of male African slaves included eunuchs, as well as soldiers, thus reducing the likelihold of significant male reproduction, the differences in the gene flow is entirely predictable without resorting to wild theories of “bigtime horrific genocide” as you described it. If one also factors in the historically high Arab birthrates, it is entirely predictable that African male-mediated gene flow would be out reproduced in Arab populations.

And as for the enunuchs, they were usually bought as such, not castrated after purchase, and the eunuchs were not exclusively black. There were many white eunuchs as well. Eunuchs were utilized to fulfull specific social functions They were used as guardians for the harems, and also as protectors and advisers to the elites. Many of them, in return for the early horror of castration, were able to attain high positions of power. As much as we find the whole thing quite abhorrent today, intentional castration to fill societal functions has a long history throughout the world, and genocide was not the engine propelling the existence and use of eunuchs.

The original blog entry deals with Jonah Goldberg’s attempt to wield the word “fascism” around so wildly and recklessly that it loses all meaning. You are doing the same thing with the word “genocide”, and then you claim to wonder what all the fuss is. Are you really so obtuse, or merely playing at it?

Shorter nxinxa: what’s all this fuss about my ill-founded accusations of genocide? Lighten up. It’s just a word.

Anecdotally, there are distinct “black” subgroups (regarded as such by themselves and their neighbors) in several Arab populations, including Iraqis, Palestinians and Bedouin Israelis.