Month: September 2016

Vaccines

Published by Papa Giorgio

Jonathan Swift (1710):

➤ “Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…”

Again: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it…”

Or, put another way by Twain: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”

What I am saying is that many of the anecdotal positions I have heard taken on this issue do not stand up to the fact. And what we need is clear thinking. Like in other posts refuting Food Inc., and the many anthropogenic global warming supporters, what I am not saying is that we shouldn’t consider reducing the amount of vaccines given, or how they are bunched up. Just like I am not saying we should continue to eat sugar and corn-syrup laced foods, or that we shouldn’t be concerned for the environment. People tend to make these conversations either or. Again, what I am saying is that the facts used by many of these persons are just plain wrong.

Content Jump:

i. Amish
ii. Japan

OFF SITE: Debunking of the Pentagon “FunVax” Lecture.

The issue came up, in fact, in the latest CNN GOP debate:

I have noticed a pattern in this debate though.Those that are religious and have wild “New World Order” views and that like Prison Planet (Alex Jones), tend toward the view that vaccines cause all sorts of ills. Others on the left that have a distrust of Big-Money, corporations, likewise see all sorts of nefarious issues with them. (Why the left then loves Big-Government is beyond me, and treat IT as a non-corporation.) So lets begin this short trek that will surely grow over the years.

Big $$$$$

The first challenge I think is important is one I hear made against global warming skeptics, or creationists/Intelligent design persons, etc. It is the charge that “Big-Money” is powerful enough to change facts. So those that support “Al-Gorian” positions in global warming point out that because big-oil has lots of money… that this MUST influence decisions made in the general public. For instance, we can see how this type of argument backfires. In this small excerpt of a larger debate (seen here), Marc Morano responded to the Director of the Sierra Club, Michael Brune, who charged that Marc’s organization receive (cue *evil laughter*) “big-oil money.”

Brune made the point that receiving money from oil and gas was bad. Morano turned the tables not by arguing that oil and gas do not in fact give monies to these groups… instead he used the premise Brune put forward to his advantage:

✦ Implied premise by Brune: “It is bad to receive money from oil/gas”;
✦ Morano’s implied premise: “Okay, fine, if bad for ‘a,’ why not ‘b’.”

“….he’s [Brune] mentioning funding by the way which I think is funny. The Sierra Club took 26 million from natural gas and Michael has the audacity to try to imply that skeptics are fossil fuel funded.”

The same happened in conversation on the topic of vaccines. One person told me that “the billion dollar industry is attempting to discredit, and bury, things.” And, “There is also billions at stake, so buried data is the M.O.” So I invite those reading this to watch the two videos. The first video deals more factually with the main study people use to support their autism connection to vaccines. The second video gets into motivation. And one must keep in mind that in philosophy there is a fallacy that states that one’s view of truth is built into the geography of one’s birth: the genetic fallacy. But no matter if you were born in the very animistic view of nature via a Papua New Guinea birth, or a Canadian birth… Einstein’s theory of relativity is JUST AS TRUE. In other words, no matter how much money is involved, we can know the truth evidentially and not based on which side has more money.

To enforce the point one should have gotten already. If position “a” is true and “b” is false because of the “Big-Health Inc.” behind it, then I will use the same argument to say that the biggest donor block to Democrats, injury lawyers (after unions, teacher unions to be specific), who have a vested interest in supporting the “counter-vaccine” position and have pumped “Big-Money” into this view — ergo makes my position true/correct.

One can hopefully see the futility of weighing one’s argument on this approach.

In another conversation I gave an example of how people first attributed Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) to vaccines. But later it was found to be trauma, either through accidental means or abuse. The anecdotal position gave way to the evidential one.

The person I was talking to thought I meant something else and tried to correct me:

Not shaking baby syndrome, SIDS may be linked to vaccines because they are, and are you absolutely certain vaccines don’t harm, and everything is just myths? If so, how? How are you certain the peer review on vaccines are not compromised?

I responded that “No, I didn’t mean SIDS, I meant shaking baby syndrome.” However, i followed that with, “But okay, lets deal with SIDS.”

SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome)

SIDS as been studied well since the 80’s. There have been control groups, and babies without vaccinations as opposed to those with vaccinations shows no difference in SIDS. In one of the largest studies babies who were vaccinated fared better in the SIDS arena.

Note as well that babies of black families are twice as likely and to die of SIDS — Native-American infants are about three times more likely than Caucasian infants. So there is something else going on. Incorporating the above ethnic disparities with the rate of vaccines being “up-to-date,” we already see an issue of where evidence doesn’t meet the claim:

✦ …the percent of kindergarten students at 24 months of age with the 4:3:1 vaccine series was 76.6+4.2% among white children, 75.0+2.4% among Hispanic children, 72.0+8.4% among African American children, and 81.8+6.5% among Asian children.

So SIDS should be highest in the Asian communities, next in the white, etc., ~ you get the point. It is interesting to note as well that SIDS is at an all-time low:

  • As a result of efforts by the Institute and other organizations, the sudden infant death rate is at an all-time low. However there are still about 4,000 sleep-related infant deaths that occur each year in the US. (SIDS.org).

But how is this possible? America is at an all-time high in vaccinations? You can see how the anecdotal “illogic” starts to fall apart.

As with other issues in our political and religious realms [and the conspiracies/sloppy thinking that accompany both — from the New World Order to the above example of SIDS], many claims are not self-challenged by the people that hold them.

Rate of Vaccinations

Autism is on the rise… or, is being diagnosed more as we refine our ability to detect it. And I was — in conversation — given a link to a columnist I like who has a large database of articles supporting to one extent or another the position that vaccines are harmful. One article I thought was promising to challenge my point of view was an article entitle, “Where are the Autistic Amish?“

What a great study [I though to myself] that is truly a “double-blind” isolated population. However, I was soon wagging my head that a journalist I like left behind her critical skills in self-challenging her position. Whereas a schlub like myself can critique a story like this.

First, some background.

Like in the videos talking about this supposed link, Olmsted’s anecdotal evidence is cited ad nauseum as evidence that thimerosal causes autism. Thimerosal is a form of mercury, and almost always in anti-vaccine sites (like the two examples to the right).Mecury and Autism However, thimerosal is not mercury as you know it. Which is important. Before 2001, some vaccines contained thimerosal, a preservative made with ethyl mercury. But ethyl mercury, which is safe, is very different from methyl mercury, which is toxic.

The difference is important, says obstetrician-gynecologist Jennifer Gunter, author of The Preemie Primer. Consider, she says, the huge difference between ethyl alcohol, which is drinking alcohol found in wine and beer, and methyl alcohol, also called wood alcohol, which can cause blindness. (USA Today)

Again, this safe product is not in vaccines any longer, except for, multi-dose flu shots. So when I get my flu shot, I make sure that I am getting a single-dose version that will not have this safe preservative that is not mercury. But autism is still on the rise, to wit,

The Amish

Let’s get back to the article that Sharly thought was interesting (as did I). In a response to it from Autism News Beat: An Evidence-Based Resource for Journalists, we read a great excerpt from a critique:

…Olmsted’s anecdotal evidence is cited ad nauseum as evidence that thimerosal causes autism. The case rests on twin assumptions: that the Amish don’t vaccinate, and that they don’t have autism. But Olmsted never visited the cryptically-named Clinic for Special Children in Strasburg, where doctors treat dozens of children who exhibit autistic behavior. It’s not even necessary to visit the clinic. A simple phone call to a staff physician, such as the one I made recently, is enough to debunk “the Amish anomaly”, as Olmsted calls it.

“The idea that the Amish do not vaccinate their children is untrue,” says Dr. Kevin Strauss, MD, a pediatrician at the CSC. “We run a weekly vaccination clinic and it’s very busy.” He says Amish vaccinations rates are lower than the general population’s, but younger Amish are more likely to be vaccinated than older generations.

Strauss also sees plenty of Amish children showing symptoms of autism. “Autism isn’t a diagnosis – it’s a description of behavior. We see autistic behaviors along with seizure disorders or mental retardation or a genetic disorder, where the autism is part of a more complicated clinical spectrum.” Fragile X syndrome and Rett Syndrome is also common among the clinic’s patients.

Strauss, along with Dr. D. Holmes Morton, MD, authored a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine which described a mysterious seizure disorder that resulted in mental retardation and autistic behavior in nine Amish children. The study was published one year after Olmsted’s mythic voyage, so it would seem a story correction would be in order.

In an email exchange with AutismNewsBeat, Olmsted said he made several attempts to contact Dr. Morton, but Olmsted would not say if those attempts were made before or after his Age of Autism stories ran. Strauss said Olmsted never visited the clinic, and added “I don’t think he spent much time in Lancaster County.”

Strauss said the clinic treats “syndromic autism”, where autism as part of a more complicated clinical spectrum that can include mental retardation, chromosomal abnormalities, unusual facial features, and short stature, as well as Fragile X syndrome. “We see quite a few Amish children with Fragile X,” he said….

Again, we see that the anecdotal evidence does not stand under even a minimal checking of the facts. Let us continue to dig into some other evidences that undermine the mercury connection.

Japan

In an article entitled “Autism rises despite MMR ban in Japan,” we find that countries that have completely removed the “mercury” from its vaccines, as well as offer much less mandatory vaccines to boot.

For instance, The United States requires infants to receive 26 vaccines, whereas Sweden and Japan administer 12 vaccines to infants, the least amount (Mercola). Yet, autism is on the rise in these least vaccinated countries. Continuing with Japan:

In the New Scientist article where the above graphic is from, the author ends with this:

…They found the cases continued to multiply after the vaccine withdrawal, ranging from 48 to 86 cases per 10,000 children before withdrawal to 97 to 161 per 10,000 afterwards. The same pattern was seen with a particular form of autism in which children appear to develop normally and then suddenly regress – the form linked to MMR by Wakefield.

The study cannot rule out the possibility that MMR triggers autism in a tiny number of children, as some claim, but it does show there is no large-scale effect. The vaccine “cannot have caused autism in the many children with autism spectrum disorders in Japan who were born and grew up in the era when MMR was not available”, Honda concludes.

So if the vaccine is not responsible for the rising rates of autism, what is? “Clearly some environmental factors are causing the increases,” says Irva Hertz-Picciotto of the University of California at Davis, US. Other experts disagree, saying the apparent rise could be the result of changing diagnostic criteria and the rising profile of the disorder (New Scientist print edition, 17 February 2001).

The end is important, because Sharyl Attkisson links to another article by Dr. Frank DeStefano, Director of the CDC Immunization Safety Office, saying,

…But he acknowledged the prospect that vaccines might rarely trigger autism.

  • “I guess, that, that is a possibility,” said DeStefano. “It’s hard to predict who those children might be, but certainly, individual cases can be studied to look at those possibilities.”

(Attkisson)

This is what science is… leaving open possibilities. However, we KNOW “mercury” [thimerosal] is not connected. But all the variables involved with vaccinations leaves open the possibility of future evidence. This same scientific approach is not in the eco-fascist response to anthropogenic global warming skeptics. Scientism is in the later example. Science ~ proper ~ is in the possibility left open in cause-effects of vaccines.

In another exchange, I was challenged with the Vaccine Court awarding settlements to people as an evidence of the issue herein discussed.

Vaccine Court

Here is the challenge:

a) In accordance with section 312(b) of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, title III of Pub.L. 99–660, 100 Stat. 3779 (42 U.S.C. 300aa–1 note) and section 2114(c) of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 300aa–14(c)), the following is a table of vaccines, the injuries, disabilities, illnesses, conditions, and deaths resulting from the administration of such vaccines, and the time period in which the first symptom or manifestation of onset or of the significant aggravation of such injuries, disabilities, illnesses, conditions, and deaths is to occur after vaccine administration for purposes of receiving compensation under the Program.

As of December 1, 2011, the program had awarded $2.35 billion in 2,810 separate claims, including compensation for 390 deaths.

Firstly, there is flawed logic to this, and I will explain with a recent case.

Freddie Gray was taken into custody and died a week after his arrest, in jail. People blame the officers and six of them have been charged and the court proceeding are a long way off. However, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s decided to pay Freddie Gray’s family a $6.4 million civil settlement even before the officers were found guilty/innocent in the legal proceedings, which again, are a long way off.

So payment has no correlation to guilt, or innocence. Likewise paying off someone in the Vaccine Court doesn’t necessarily correlate to proving that vaccines cause particular illnesses.

I respond:

But autism, and “heavy metal” “poisoning” are myths. And awarding money the cases must first go to the Vaccine Court. Which uses a much lower standard of evidence Daubert standard for scientific testimony and evidence (Judge is gatekeeper; Relevance and reliability; Scientific knowledge = scientific method/methodology; Factors relevant; Testimony by Experts). And so, many people are awarded that shouldn’t have been.

For instance. At first, shaking baby syndrome was blamed on vaccines, now however, it is known that head trauma is involved. And out of all the vaccine related claims only 3% of those are found to be connected ~ loosely. And of those far less than 1% are serious illness resulting from them. Often times these injuries are from bacteria in the vaccine (in other words, they were not prepared and/or kept hygienic).

The 5,000 cases of parents saying vaccines caused their child’s autism lost their case because there is no evidence to support them.

Concluding Thoughts

So with these few examples I have encountered, we see that there is A LOT of bad thinking surrounding the issue. And it is by-and-large by well-meaning persons who are looking for behavior in their children they rightly or wrongly attribute to vaccinations. Us not being able to explain things is a digging issue for the human race. We think we can find answers — immediately — to issues that perplex us. But sometimes we need calmer heads in the matter… like Dr. Carson in the video near the beginning of the post.

Ways to think through tough issues:

Dr. Ken Samples Discusses Conspiracies on Issues Etc. from Papa Giorgio on Vimeo.

Issues Etc. radio show interviews Dr. Kenneth Samples — of Reason to Believe — about the proclivity of Christians to believe in conspiracy theories. He explains and gives a model on how the Christian can test these theories.

Post-Script

In a continuing conversation I was challenged with this:

  • Find a great deal of unvaccinated autistic children yet? Or still searching? Yea, me too. smile emoticon

So I provided one example to get this person to think critically:

In the United Kingdom, researchers evaluated 498 autistic children born from 1979 through 1992 who were identified by computerized health records from 8 health districts [5]. Although a trend toward increasing autism diagnoses by year of birth was confirmed, no change in the rates of autism diagnoses after the 1987 introduction of MMR vaccine was observed. Further, MMR vaccination rates of autistic children were similar to those of the entire study population. Also, investigators did not observe a clustering of autism diagnoses relative to the time that children received MMR vaccine, nor did they observe a difference in age at autism diagnosis between those vaccinated and not vaccinated or between those vaccinated before or after 18 months of age. These authors also found no differences in autism rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated children when they extended their analysis to include a longer time after MMR exposure or a second dose of MMR.

I got a response. And mind you… this is from a person who is a believer and deals with the confounded logic of atheists and evolutionists. And so here is his response. And his response was merely a cut-n-paste:

  • Vaccinated boys were 155% more likely to have a neurological disorder (RR 2.55)
  • Vaccinated boys were 224% more likely to have ADHD (RR 3.24)
  • Vaccinated boys were 61% more likely to have autism (RR 1.61)

I merely mentioned that this was a s-u-r-v-e-y… by phone. There were not control groups, much of a criteria to test the claims made by these persons called, etc. Here is a bit more:

…Generation Rescue has finally released its long-promised “study” comparing vaccinated versus non-vaccinated children. Not surprisingly, the same day, Dan “Quixote” Olmsted, who’s never met a scientific windmill that he didn’t like to tilt at when it comes to pseudoscientific claims that vaccines or thimerosal in vaccines cause autism and certainly never met a dubious claim that he wouldn’t trumpet as science “proving” a link between vaccines and autism, popped up like the good lapdog he is with a story trumpeting the release of GR’s “study.”

Not surprisingly, given the source, the “study” turns out to be totally underwhelming, nothing more than a phone poll really. (Amusingly, David Kirby has said that he doesn’t consider phone surveys to be “data.”) Even so, expect to see it trumpeted all over antivaccination websites and blogs as “proof” that vaccines cause autism or, at the very least, as “evidence” that compels a study. It might be, if it weren’t so poorly designed and analyzed and if it actually showed what GR claims that it shows…

I linked to an article with this comment: That was a phone-call survey Dan. Here is a more reliable study noted in this science blog:

…Of late, the anti-vaccine movement has hit upon a new strategy. Specifically, they are demanding what they like to call a “vaxed versus unvaxed” study. Basically, their claim is that unvaccinated children are so much healthier than vaccinated children, and they think that such a study would prove it. Of course, they only hit on this message after making some rather embarrassing missteps. In particular, they didn’t seem to realize that a randomized, double blind study of vaccination according to the currently recommended schedule versus unvaccinated children was totally unethical. So, they figured out another angle. They acknowledge that a randomized trial of unvaccinated versus vaccinated children would not be feasible (although they appear not to be able to admit just how unethical it would be), and blithely suggest instead an epidemiological study of the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated without realizing just how horrendously difficult it would be to overcome the confounders that would plague such a study or that ethical considerations still require sound scientific justification for such a study. That’s why it’s so cute to see anti-vaccine loons trying to justify such a study.

All of which is why it’s pretty amusing that just such a study was recently reported in Germany. Can you guess what it found? Let’s just say that, to those of us who accept the science showing that vaccines do not cause autism, autoimmune diseases, asthma, and the like, the results were utterly unsurprising:

In their study, the authors compare the occurrence of infections and allergies in vaccinated and unvaccinated children and adolescents. These include bronchitis, eczema, colds, and gastrointestinal infections.

The evaluation showed that unvaccinated children and adolescents differ from their vaccinated peers merely in terms of the frequency of vaccine preventable diseases. These include pertussis, mumps, or measles. As expected, the risk of contracting these diseases is substantially lower in vaccinated children and adolescents.

Surprise, surprise! Unvaccinated kids differ from vaccinated kids only in having a much higher risk of vaccine-preventable disease! Who’da thunk it? But, as is my wont, I need to see the actual study, rather than a news report…

A couple other blog posts I recommend from Respectful Insolence:

“Under the Axe of Fascism” ~ Gaetano Salvemini

Published by Papa Giorgio

Firstly, I have scanned and am posting this because I read a quote from a chapter via Thomas DiLorenzo’s “The Problem with Socialism.”gaetano_salvemini

I chose to post the entire chapter because I found some great connection to our governing principles and the direction of them decade-after-decade. I do admonish the serious reader to read Gaetano Salvemini’s bio over at WIKI. Salvemini became a socialist and a political activist. Although he later abandoned the Italian Socialist Party for independent humanitarian socialism, he maintained a commitment to radical reform throughout his life (source). One person wrote of their own belief something similar to what Salvemini believed:

  • As such I now refer to my beliefs as that of a humanitarian socialist because I have little care for the dogma of Marx, and yet I cannot abide with the current system. I do not believe we need a revolution to change things, any steps forward in a socialist direction through democratic means are perfectly acceptable to me no matter how small the changes. I use humanitarian because I want to see things get better for all, no matter their social status, even by the smallest of margins, all progress is a step forward no matter how small. Equality is the most pressing issue in society at the moment.

That is the typical Democrat line today  that is emboldening government to legislate and get involved in persons lives at an extremely fast rate. Here is the quote from DiLorenzo’s book:

…Mussolini promised that centralized government planning would “introduce order in the economic field,” as opposed to the supposed “chaos” of capitalism. Consequently, the Mussolini regime established government regulatory agencies that dictated orders to every business, every industry, and every labor union, all in the name of governmental “coordination.” It achieved the basic aims of socialism—government control of the means of production—while leaving corporate managers in place. Government control, of course, means taxpayers foot the bill. As Italian writer Gaetano Salvemini explained in his book, Under the Axe of Fascism: “In December 1932 a fascist financial expert… estimated that more than 8.5 billion Lira had been paid out by the government from 1923 to 1932 in order to help depressed industries. From December 1932 to 1935 the outlay must have doubled.” Massive government regulation and taxpayer bailouts of failing favored industries meant that Italian fascism, like every other form of socialism, was an economic failure.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Problem with Socialism (New Jersey, NJ: Regnery, 2016), 71.

I will highlight the quote from the text below. But if you read all of the below, please watch this respected Democrat legal scholar’s warning about the recent switch of power to the executive:

Here is the chapter entitled “The End of Laissez-Faire”

  • Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism (New York, NY: Viking Press, 1936), 377-382.

[p. 377>] Those  who believe that Mussolini is leading Italy towards the left, cite the fact that the Fascist “corporative state” has done away with the doctrine and practices of laissez-faire. The Fascist corporative state not only cuts wages—although this fact is seldom mentioned—but it grants tariff protection to many industrial and agricultural products, gives subsidies to banks on the verge of failure and to industries about to collapse, obliges capitalistic concerns desirous of governmental aid to merge with other similar concerns, forbids the opening of new fac­tories, etc. Mussolini and his followers in Italy, as well as his admirers abroad, never touch upon economic topics without proclaiming that the policy of laissez-faire is dead forever. And, since the abolition of eco­nomic laissez-faire has been associated in Italy with the abolition of per­sonal rights, political liberties, and representative institutions, whoever rejects the doctrine and practices of laissez-faire is termed a Fascist, and state intervention in economic life is called Fascism. Therefore, Presi­dent Roosevelt becomes a disciple of Mussolini—though not so big as his master.1

This is a gross misconception. The sun rises daily in both Italy and the United States. This does not make Italy and the United States one and the same country. Mussolini and Roosevelt both intervene in the eco­nomic life of their respective nations. This does not put Mussolini and. Roosevelt in the same category as statesmen. While they have in com­mon the policy of economic intervention, they differ in this: that Mus­solini has repudiated not only economic laissez-faire, but has also sup­pressed personal rights, political liberties, and representative institutions. Roosevelt leaves those rights, liberties, and institutions intact. Fascism is political dictatorship. Economic intervention is not Fascism.

The Colbertists and Mercantilists who opposed the Physiocrats in the eighteenth century, and the “utopian” Socialists, [p. 388>] “scientific” Socialists, State Socialists, Christian Socialists, Protectionists, and Nationalists who attacked laissez-faire in the nineteenth century, would have been much surprised to learn that in the twentieth century a Mussolini would be born who would claim to have discovered, for the first time, a way of killing the doctrine of laissez-faire.

As for the practice of laissez-faire, no government has ever confined itself to playing the policeman of private initiative, as the laissez-faire school recommended. Free trade, which is the application of laissez-faire to international commercial relations, was the exception and not the rule in the nineteenth century. The English government, while it practised free trade in the nineteenth century, gave at the same time the earliest examples of social legislation; i. e., it intervened in economic life to protect the workers against the abuse of private initiative. During the World War the economic life of all countries was controlled by their governments, although the “Homo corporativus” of the Fascist “thinkers” was as yet unborn.

Under the pre-Fascist regime in Italy, the Government intervened so often in the economic life of the country that, when it rained, the people amused themselves by throwing the blame upon the “robber government.” The government built the railroads, not as revenue-bearing investments, but as an instrument of political unification. Marsh reclamation at the expense of the government was half a century old in Italy when Mussolini discovered it in 1928. Education in all its grades was either directly imparted or supervised by the government. Italian tariff policy from 1878 onwards became ever more intensely protec­tionist. The shipping companies were always obtaining subsidies of all kinds from the government for building, equipping, and sending out their vessels. Interventions multiplied during the World War. They diminished during the period between the end of the war and 1926, i. e., during the last four years of the pre-Fascist regime and the first four years of the Fascist regime. They began to multiply again during the crisis provoked by the revaluation of the lira; and during the world depression have assumed proportions reminiscent of the state capitalism of the war years.

The policy of intervention in economic life is characteristic neither of free, nor of despotic, nor of oligarchical, nor of democratic govern­ments. All governments in all periods have intervened, more or less thoroughly, in the economic life of their countries, if by no other fact [p. 379>] than that they have built roads, imposed taxes, and issued currency. Whether capitalists or proletarians, men are not favourable in an ab­solute sense either to laissez-faire or state intervention. They invoke such intervention when they expect to profit by it, and they repulse it when they foresee no advantage or fear a positive injury from its action. Signor De Stefani has judiciously remarked that the price of goods is always and everywhere the result of two factors: the private initiative of the producer and the environment which the politics of the government have created for production. Private initiative always is planned after taking into account pre-existing legislation. Private initiative independent of the government does not exist. And if “cor­porative” initiative is that which is developed by adapting oneself to rules imposed by law, it is clear that all private initiatives are “corporative,” and all states are “corporative” (Corriere della Sera, July 14, 1935). From these affirmations the conclusion can be deduced that Mussolini could have saved himself the trouble of inventing the corporative state.

The world nowadays teems with people who have fits of enthusiasm whenever they hear of state intervention, planned economy, five-year plans, and the end of laissez-faire. They do not care to ask who are the social groups in whose interests the state, i. e., bureaucracy and the party in power, is to intervene and plan. It is for them a matter of in­difference whether the laissez-faire of big business is limited in order to protect the little fellow and the worker, or whether the laissez-faire of the little fellow and the worker is sacrificed to the interests of big business. What matters is that private initiative should be shackled by some one and in some way. Yet the first question which should be asked when invoking the end of laissez-faire is precisely this: in the interests of whom should such abolition take place?

If one wants to answer this question in connexion with the Italian Fascist regime, one must take into account the following facts:

1. Italy has never seen anything similar to the type of planning ex­hibited by the government of Soviet Russia.2 When an important branch of the banking system, or a large-scale industry which could [p. 380>] be confused with the “higher interests of the nation,” has threatened to collapse, the government has stepped into the breach and prevented the breakdown by emergency measures. If there is a field in which planning is necessary and can be done without notable obstacles, it is that of pub­lic works; but even a Fascist expert is obliged to recognize that “they are begun as required without a general plan in the region where the depression is most severe.”3 The policy of the Italian dictatorship dur­ing these years of world crisis has been no different in its aims, methods, and results from the policy of all the governments of the capitalistic countries. The Charter of Labour says that private enterprise is re­sponsible to the state. In actual fact, it is the state, i. e., the taxpayer, who has become responsible to private enterprise. In Fascist Italy the state pays for the blunders of private enterprise. As long as business was good, profit remained to private initiative. When the depression came, the government added the loss to the taxpayer’s burden. Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social. In December 1932 a Fascist financial expert, Signor Mazuchelli, estimated that more than 8.5 billion lire had been paid out by the government from 1923 to 1932 in order to help depressed industries (Rivista Bancaria, December 15, 1932, p. 1007). From December 1932 to 1935 the outlay must have doubled.

2. The intervention of the government has invariably favoured big business. As writes a correspondent of the Economist, July 27, 1935:

So far, the new Corporative State only amounts to the establishment of a new and costly bureaucracy from which those industrialists who can spend the necessary amount, can obtain almost anything they want, and put into practice the worst kind of monopolistic practices at the expense of the little fellow who is squeezed out in the process.

The small and medium-sized firms have been left to take care of themselves and have had to sink or swim without external assistance. On March 26, 1934, Mussolini stated that “three-quarters of the Italian economic system, both industrial and agricultural,” had been in need and had been helped by the government. This was an exaggeration. He should have said three-quarters of the big firms engaged in banking, industry, shipping, etc.4

[p. 281>] 3. In order to avert the bankruptcy of the big concerns that were on the verge of ruin, the government created certain public institutes to take over the shares of the rescued companies and to supervise the companies in question until they were again in a healthy condition. Mussolini described these institutes as “convalescent homes, where or­gans which have more or less deteriorated come under observation and receive appropriate treatment” (January 13, 1934). These institutes have been hailed as instruments of a managed economy. As a matter of fact, in none of the firms for whose rescue the government has imposed heavy sacrifices upon the taxpayers has the government introduced di­rect management. The governmental institutes merely keep in their coffers the shares of the firms which they have saved, and await the day when the market shows signs of recovery; when this occurs, the shares will again become private capital. To the big business men the govern­ment is what the Moor is in Schiller’s tragedy, Fiesco: when the Moor has committed the assassination, he has to disappear. After rendering the services asked by big business, the government must retire into the background and leave a free field to private initiative. The Charter of Labour says that state intervention in economic life, when private initia­tive proves insufficient, may assume the form of encouragement, supervi­sion, or direct management. But it also says clearly that private initiative is the most useful and efficient instrument for furthering the interest of the nation. Private initiative must be respected. Therefore, direct man­agement remains embalmed in the Charter of Labour together with the principle that labour is a social duty.5

The act of May 15, 1933, which empowered the Central Corporative Committee to forbid the creation of new factories or the development of existing plants, may be regarded as the ne plus ultra of government [p. 382>] intervention in business. Official communiqués announce from time to time that a certain number of permits have been granted or refused. But they never explain which kind of factories has been allowed or forbidden to be created or developed. Neither do they give the reasons why permits have been granted or refused. The great industrial magnates can be assured that a permit will never be granted to a company which wishes to build a new type of motor-car, to new sugar, hydro-electrical, or rayon concerns, or to new chemical plants, unless they give their consent. As a well-informed contributor remarked in the Economist, January 5, 1935, each time that the corporative system has functioned, “it has turned out to be nothing more than the most ordinary protec­tionism.”

But if one takes seriously Signor Bottai’s statements, in Corporate State and N.R.A., p. 623, one is led to believe that in the United States the result of the labour codes “seems to be the triumph of the inter­est of the individual industrial group rather than the triumph of the interest of the community,” whereas in Italy the corporations “are in a much better position than is any one isolated industrial group to regu­late not only particular group interest but also the interests of the com­munity as a whole.” In the United States “a corporate regulation of production in the Italian sense could only be achieved if, in the present codes substantial changes were made by permitting a much broader participation of labour.”

1. Mussolini, interviewed in the New York Times of Sept. 16, 1934, said: “America appropriated one of the Fascist principles when the new regime delegated more power to the executive head of the government.”

2. Resto del Carlino, Nov. 7, 1933: “If Fascism does not believe in economic liberty, it has always favoured and assisted the most powerful spring, the most creative force, of human activity: individual initiative. It is evident, therefore, that Fascist economic policy will not allow the corporations of category to become organs of a planned economy.”

3. Marcelletti, Aspects of Planned Economy, p. 334.

4. Signor Pirelli, in his address of Oct. 15, 1934, said: “Beyond the frontiers there has been a misunderstanding of the meaning of one of Mussolini’s phrases to the effect that three-quarters of the Italian economic system, both industrial and agricultural, is under the supervision of the state. Almost all the medium-sized and little firms and the great majority of slightly larger firms, with the exception of a few categories, are completely outside the sphere of the state’s healing activity.”

5. Excellent surveys of the economic policies of the Fascist dictatorship since 1926 have been made by Perroud, in the Revue d’Economie Politique, Sept.-Oct. 1933, and by Rosenstock-Franck, L’Economie Corporative, pp. 331 ff. This phase of Fascist action has developed completely outside the so-called syndical institutions created by the dictatorship, and also outside the National Council of Corporations and the corpora­tions themselves. The history of the relations between capital and labour under the Fascist dictatorship is only one chapter in the history of the intervention of the dictator­ship in the economic life of the country; it is not the whole history. It has been our purpose to write that one chapter alone.

Nurse That Found One of Bill Clinton’s Victims Speaks Out

Published by Papa Giorgio

From BREITBART via YOUNG CONSERVATIVES:

In her first extensive interview in over a decade, the nurse who found Juanita Broaddrick in her hotel room immediately after Bill Clinton allegedly raped Broaddrick recounted what she says she witnessed in that room 38 years ago.

“She was crying,” recalled Norma Rogers, a nurse who worked for Broaddrick, who at the time was a nursing home administrator volunteering for then-Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton’s 1978 gubernatorial bid.

“And the thing I think I remember most is that her mouth was all swollen up. It was cut. … Her pantyhose were all ripped,” Rogers stated in dramatic, lengthy new testimony.

In our radio interview, Rogers recounted what she says she saw upon entering the room.

I went back to the room and I can’t remember if it was because she didn’t come down to the meeting because I expected her to have a short meeting and then come to the meeting. And so I went back up to the room and when I went back into the room and she was just very, very upset. She was crying.

And the thing I think I remember most is that her mouth was all swollen up. It was cut. And she just told me. She started then telling me the story of how he had just basically overtaken her and bit her lip in order to keep her quiet and to keep her from trying to leave or get away from him. And then she proceeded to tell me that he had pushed her onto the bed, and had raped her.

Her pantyhose were all ripped. And she was just in a terrible state. Crying and just, she began telling me, you know, what had happened.

But in the meantime she was starting to get her things together and she said we are leaving now. And you know we just started getting our stuff together and I drove her home.

Asked whether Broaddrick’s lip was bleeding, Rogers replied, “There were obviously open spots where he had bitten her. It was open but not openly bleeding. You know it was just open spots on her lip.”

The Planned Parenthood 3% Lie (UPDATED)

Published by Papa Giorgio

LIVE ACTION provides us with this update to this mantra:

The following is via Godfather Politics:

…Let’s get back to the 3%-defense. The following is from National Review Online:

“Practically every defender of the organization, fighting to preserve its federal funding, reverts to the 3 percent figure. How could you possibly, they ask, defund a group that devotes itself overwhelmingly to uncontroversial procedures and services for women?

“The 3 percent figure is an artifice and a dodge, but even taking it on its own terms, it’s not much of a defense. Only Planned Parenthood would think saying that they only kill babies 3 percent of the time is something to brag about. How much credit would we give someone for saying he only drives drunk 3 percent of the time, or only cheats on business trips 3 percent of the time, or only hits his wife during 3 percent of domestic disputes?

[….]

“The 3 percent figure is derived by counting abortion as just another service like much less consequential services. So abortion is considered a service no different than a pregnancy test (1.1 million), even though a box with two pregnancy tests can be procured from the local drugstore for less than $10.”

Here’s the important math analogy:

“By Planned Parenthood’s math, a woman who gets an abortion but also a pregnancy test, an STD test, and some contraceptives has received four services, and only 25 percent of them are abortion [related]. This is a little like performing an abortion and giving a woman an aspirin, and saying only half of what you do is abortion.”…

See video of exchange between Rep. Cynthia Lummins (R, WY) and the president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, here.

Even the WASHINGTON POST gives it 3-pinochios:

The 3 percent figure that Planned Parenthood uses is misleading, comparing abortion services to every other service that it provides. The organization treats each service — pregnancy test, STD test, abortion, birth control — equally. Yet there are obvious difference between a surgical (or even medical) abortion, and offering a urine (or even blood) pregnancy test. These services are not all comparable in how much they cost or how extensive the service or procedure is.

[….]

While Planned Parenthood has no legal obligation to make its data more public, it is unfortunate that the public has limited access to data about the organization. Planned Parenthood could end the speculation–and Pinocchios–by providing a more transparent breakdown of its clients, referrals and sources of revenues.

Again, the WASHINGTON POST gives the 3% position three Pinocchios. Here is a website commenting on this:

Earlier this week, I read a terrific post with this spot-on headline, “There’s no cover for Planned Parenthood anymore.” The reference was to the deeply disturbing truths unveiled by a series of six undercover videos filmed by the Center for Medical Progress, which has caused “cracks” in the “edifice.”

But it could have included a myriad of other examples of how Planned Parenthood is in deep, deep trouble. On Monday, for example, NRL News Today wrote about the hit PPFA’s public image has taken. All of a sudden PPFA doesn’t seem so invincible.

And then, lo and behold, in today’s Washington Post, the newspaper’s Fact Checker dissected one of PPFA’s most egregiously misleading claims. The headline? “For Planned Parenthood abortion stats, ‘3 percent’ and ’94 percent’ are both misleading.”

[….]

The nub of the problem is that Planned Parenthood has a convoluted way of making it seem that its abortion “services” represent only a miniscule percentage of the “health services” it provides–the aforementioned 3%. That and its unwillingness to provide a detailed breakdown of its “clients, referrals and sources of revenues.”

Lee goes through a series of steps to reach this conclusion (which Dr. O’Bannon has documented in even greater detail):

The 3 percent figure that Planned Parenthood uses is misleading, comparing abortion services to every other service that it provides. The organization treats each service — pregnancy test, STD test, abortion, birth control — equally. Yet there are obvious difference between a surgical (or even medical) abortion, and offering a urine (or even blood) pregnancy test. These services are not all comparable in how much they cost or how extensive the service or procedure is….

(NATIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE)

This next portion comes from a debate I am having [had] on FaceBook, in which I pointed out the very false idea that PPH offers only 3% abortive procedures to women out of their entire health services. Planned Parent “Hood” would like you to believe this three-percent stat… but in reality they are using smoke-and-mirrors:

Underneath this veil of media and show-business gossamer is an organization that, contrary to the impression it works hard to create, focuses obsessively on abortion, providing ever more abortions every year, reaching out to an ever-younger clientele. The 3 percent pie slice in the 2005-06 financial report, representing 264,943 abortion customers served, can only be described as deliberately misleading.

One way Planned Parenthood massages the numbers to make its abortion business look trivial is to unbundle its services for purposes of counting. Those 10.1 million different medical procedures in the last fiscal year, for instance, were administered to only 3 million clients. An abortion is invariably preceded by a pregnancy test–a separate service in Planned Parenthood’s reckoning–and is almost always followed at the organization’s clinics by a “going home” packet of contraceptives, which counts as another separate service. Throw in a pelvic exam and a lab test for STDs–you get the picture. In terms of absolute numbers of clients, one in three visited Planned Parenthood for a pregnancy test, and of those, a little under one in three had a Planned Parenthood abortion.

(THE ATLANTIC)

Here is a graphic showing that CVS almost does all the “health-care” Planned Parenthood does (click to enlarge):

For those reasons, I think this graphic, taken from Planned Parenthood’s data, better illustrates Planned Parenthood’s activities:

This is how PPHF “cooks the book” if you will (like Enron) in order to look more legit. Take note that a third to [some say] just over half of their income is made from abortions alone. It is a big business… killing infants.

Pre-Natal Care & Mammograms

(Updated – original was posted Oct 2012)

And from CNS News, via Conservative Women Rock!

President Barack Obama went on NBC’s “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” on Wednesday and incorrectly claimed that the abortion-provider Planned Parenthood does mammograms, a false assertion he has made before, notably during the second presidential debate on Oct. 16.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as CNSNews.com has reported, has confirmed that no Planned Parenthood facility in the United States is licensed to do mammograms.

…read more…

Though Planned Parenthood claims that women depend on them for prenatal care, Live Action investigators had an incredibly hard time finding facilities that offered it—though they found plenty offering abortions. Live Action contacted all 41 Planned Parenthood affiliates where undercover recording is permitted by state law, and only 5 facilities out of 97 said they provided prenatal care.

HOTAIR has more:

This is a long-awaited follow-up to a similar investigation about claims from Planned Parenthood about breast-cancer screening and diagnostics. In an earlier round of debate over barring federal funds from flowing to Planned Parenthood, Barack Obama argued that cutting off funds would endanger their ability to provide mammograms, but that claim turned out to be false. PP’s executives also claim that “one in five women depend on Planned Parenthood for health care,” which FactCheck.org demonstrated was way, way off; it’s closer to one in 30, and they offer no unique services that women can’t find at other clinics — except abortions.

Still, the sourcing on the start of the video looks a little thin, so it behooves people to check the Planned Parenthood website. Sure enough, they have a portal for pre-natal care, and a big button to click labeled “Find A Health Center & Book An Appointment.” However, the next page is their standard clinic search page, and it might be tough to spot that the term “pre-natal care” does not appear on the list of services provided by their clinics. It does list “Pregnancy Testing & Services,” but what exactly does that comprise? It’s not pre-natal care at most of these clinics:

  • pregnancy testing
  • abortion services
  • abortion referrals
  • adoption referrals
  • fertility awareness education
  • pregnancy planning services
  • trained staff to discuss your options with you if you are pregnant
  • trained staff to talk with you about early pregnancy loss (miscarriage)

The only mention of pre-natal care on the Tempe, AZ website (where the first call is placed) is this: “If you choose to continue a pregnancy, we will provide you with a list of resources to help you obtain prenatal care.”…

CHICKS ON THE RIGHT join the chorus as well:

The next time you hear some feminist in a pink hat screaming about how Planned Parenthood is the ONLY place for women to get care, just remember that Care=Abortion. And pretty much nothing else.

We already know that Planned Parenthood doesn’t actually do mammograms (that tidbit came from Cecile Richards’s own mouth, no less). And for all their talk of providing “women’s healthcare” – the more evidence that actually comes out, the more we see that they don’t do much of that either. Providing abortions is where their bread is buttered and that’s what they focus on. Even to the point where they push pregnant women who simply come in for counseling to get the abortion, whether they want to or not (that was shown quite plainly in several of the Center for Medical Progress videos from a couple years ago).

But if Planned Parenthood is so obsessed with providing medical care for women, how do they feel about providing care for pregnant women. And I mean pregnant women who want to keep their babies, rather than let Planned Parenthood chop them up and sell them to the highest bidder?

Well… about that –

A new video has just been released from Live Action. Women with the group went to 97 Planned Parenthood clinics seeking prenatal care. And of those 97 clinics, only five provided prenatal care –

The below information comes from two articles:

  • For Planned Parenthood Abortion Stats, ‘3 Percent’ And ’94 Percent’ Are Both Misleading. (WASHINGTON POST)
  • The Most Meaningless Abortion Statistic Ever (SLATE)

“There Is No Such Thing As Racism” ~ Lil’ Wayne

Published by Papa Giorgio

Via THE BLAZE!

SKIP: “Where are we in the United Sates of America in race relations — in what you see from day to day in your life?”

LIL’ WAYNE: “Skip, they wouldn’t want to ask me that… they wouldn’t want my answer to represent them because God knows I have been nothing but blessed. These 33 years have been nothing but a blessing. I have never — and never is a strong word — never dealt with racism.”

SKIP: “So you’ve never experienced any offensive behavior from any other color?”

LIL’ WAYNE: “Never”

Percentages Of Slaves Brought To America (UPDATED)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(The above video is a bit off in it’s numbers in the graph)

Here is a quote to fill in the reference by MICHAEL MEDVED in a previous post:

In the mid to late 1500s the Portuguese gradually transferred the system of sugar plantations worked by slaves from their Atlantic islands such as Madeira, Sao Tome, and Principe to northeastern Brazil. The plantation system involved everything from long-term capital investment and the African slave trade to the technology and economic organization for cultivating and harvesting sugarcane and then manufacturing sugar and eventually molasses and rum. It was largely because of the expanding international market for sugar, molasses, syrup, and rum that regions south of what became the United States imported some 95 percent of the African slaves brought to the New World.

During the first decades of the sixteenth century the small Portuguese settlements in Brazil exported little more than brazilwood, parrots, and monkeys, at a time when the Portuguese islands of São Tomé and Madeira produced much of Europe’s sugar, which was still a rare luxury and traditional medication.  But Portugal became increasingly alarmed by French and British gestures toward founding settlements in Brazil, and in the 1530s and 1540s Portuguese expeditions attempted to chase off foreign ships and then succeeded in establishing sugar plantations or engenhos in northeastern Brazil. By the late 1500s sugar mills had multiplied, African slaves were replacing forced Indian labor, and Brazil was producing more sugar than the Atlantic islands combined with regions like the Algarve, in southern Portugal. These developments represented the first stage of the unforeseen and unprecedented expansion of economic and cultural boundaries initiated by New World slavery.

[p. 104>] The sugar mill and surrounding plantation land came to epitomize New World slavery and “inhuman bondage” in its most extreme form. Sugar plan­tations also gave rise to the central problem of reconciling traditional Euro­pean and African cultures with a highly modern, systematized, and profitable form of labor exploitation. In many ways it was sugar that shaped the desti­nation of slave ships and the very nature of the Atlantic Slave System. In the long era from 1500 to 1870, according to a recent estimate, it was sugar-producing Brazil that absorbed over 45 percent of all African slaves and the sugar-producing British, French, Dutch, Danish, and Spanish Caribbean that imported nearly 46 percent more. The Spanish mainland in South America took just over 5 percent of the Africans brought into the Americas, and the British mainland in North America less than 4 percent—despite the later millions of African Americans who appeared as a result of unprecedented natural population growth.

David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 103-105. (Emphasis added.)

[APA] Davis, D. (2006). Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

[MLA] Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.

[Chicago] Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Here is a good synopsis of the costs in blood and GDP to stop slavery in the Atlantic and beyond:

[p. 122>] Slavery was destroyed within the United States at staggering costs in blood and treasure, but the struggle was over within a few ghastly years of warfare. Nevertheless, the Civil War was the blood­iest war ever fought in the Western Hemisphere, and more Americans were killed in that war than in any other war in the country’s history. But this was a highly atypical—indeed, unique—way to end slavery. In most of the rest of the world, unremitting efforts to destroy the institution of slavery went on for more than a century, on a thousand shifting fronts, and in the face of deter­mined and ingenious efforts to continue the trade in human beings.

Within the British Empire, the abolition of slavery was accompanied by the payment of compensation to slave owners for what was legally the confiscation of their property. This cost the British government £20 million—a huge sum in the nine­teenth century, about 5 percent of the nation’s annual output. A similar plan to have the federal government of the United States buy up the slaves and then set them free was proposed in Con­gress, but was never implemented. The costs of emancipating the millions of slaves in the United States would have been more than half the annual national output—but still less than the economic costs of the Civil War, quite aside from the cost in blood and lives, and a legacy of lasting bitterness in the South, growing out of its defeat and the widespread destruction it suffered during that conflict.

While the British could simply abolish slavery in their West­ern Hemisphere colonies, they faced a more daunting and longer-lasting task of patrolling the Atlantic off the coast of Africa, in order to prevent slave ships of various nationalities from con- [p. 123>] tinuing to supply slaves illegally. Even during the Napoleonic wars, Britain continued to keep some of its warships on patrol off West Africa. Moreover, such patrols likewise tried to interdict the ship­ments of slaves from East Africa through the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf. Brazil capitulated to British demands that it end its slave trade, after being publicly humiliated by British war­ships that seized and destroyed slave ships within Brazil’s own waters. In 1873, two British cruisers appeared off the coast of Zanzibar and threatened to blockade the island unless the slave market there shut down. It was shut down.

It would be hard to think of any other crusade pursued so relentlessly for so long by any nation, at such mounting costs, with­out any economic or other tangible benefit to itself. These costs included bribes paid to Spain and Portugal to get their cooperation with the effort to stop the international slave trade and the costs of maintaining naval patrols and of resettling freed slaves, not to mention dangerous frictions with France and the United States, among other countries. Captains of British warships who detained vessels suspected of carrying slaves were legally liable if those vessels turned out to have no slaves on board. The human costs were also large:

The heavy drain, physical and mental, in keeping squadrons on the East African coast was reflected in the loss of 282 officers and men in the ten years 1875-85; and this did not include these invalidated home. Naval personnel, wracked by fever, sunstroke and dysentery, were forced to retire prematurely and live on a small pittance. The cost of upkeep of the squadron over the twenty years prior to 1890 was estimated at four millions ster­ling, and this did not take into account the large amount of work imposed on consular and judicial staff at Zanzibar in trying cases and dealing with reports, etc.

Even so, the results were slow in coming. More streamlined slave ships were designed, in hopes of being able to outrun the ships of the Royal Navy in the Atlantic. Nevertheless, the dogged persistence of the British eventually reduced the shipment of slaves across the Atlantic and across the waters of the Islamic world. Although the French flag was for many years widely used as protection from the boarding of ships on the high seas by the [p. 124>] British navy, even by slave traders who were neither French nor authorized to fly the French flag, eventually France itself turned against slavery, outlawed the institution and sent some of its own warships to patrol the Atlantic off the coast of Africa to intercept and deter the shipment of slaves to the Western Hemisphere. The American flag was likewise so used and the United States, like France, eventually turned against the slave trade and sent warships to join the Atlantic patrols to interdict slave shipments.

Although by 1860 the Atlantic slave trade had been effec­tively stopped, the slave trade from East Africa across the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf took longer to be reduced significantly. Off the east coast of Africa, smaller Arab vessels called dhows hugged the coastlines, in waters too shallow for the British warships to enter. One British commodore estimated that he cap­tured one dhow for every eight that escaped. Nevertheless, during the period from 1866 to 1869, 129 slave vessels were cap­tured and 3,380 slaves were freed. When the threat of being boarded seemed imminent, the Arabs would throw slaves over­board to drown, rather than have them be found on board, which could lead to British seizure of the vessel and punishment of those who manned it:

The worst that could befall the slaves was when the slaver was overhauled by a British cruiser, and they might then be flung overboard to dispose of all evidence. Devereaux mentions a case where the Arabs, when pursued by an English cruiser, cut the throats of 24 slaves and threw them overboard. Cololm also states that Arabs would not hesitate to knock slaves on the head and throw them overboard to avoid capture.

Because there were only a few naval ships available to cover a vast expanse of water in this region, British warships would often launch smaller boats to engage the Arab slave dhows. In these cases, as one study put it, “the slave traffickers frequently did not hesitate to attack boat crews in defence of their profits.” Battles between the Arabs’ vessels and the smaller British craft were especially likely when the larger ships that launched them were too far away to reach the scene in time to join the battle. In other cases, the Arabs fled even from the smaller British vessels. An episode in 1866 was typical:

[p. 125>] On 26 April 1866, the Penguin set out after a dhow and fired several shots in an effort to make the crew come to. When the dhow failed to lower its sail, Gartorth felt certain that she was a slaver and ceased firing for the sake of the slaves onboard. How­ever, he managed to close with the dhow which then made for the rocks through a heavy surf. By the time the ship’s boats could be lowered to follow, the Arab crew had fled but the pounding surf made any attempt by the slavers to salvage the human cargo too dangerous. To their horror, the boat crew found that they, too, could not reach the dhow which was rap­idly filling with water drowning the slaves. The boat officer decided that he could not risk coming in close to the dhow but several of the crewmen of the cutter recklessly dived in and swam through the surf to the dhow. In a remarkable display of courage, the sailors managed to bring 28 of the slaves back to the boat. But the dhow appeared to have had more [than] 200 slaves on board and most died in the pounding waves.

In another episode, the Arabs’ ruthlessness toward the slaves was further revealed:

When the Daphne’s cutter captured a dhow with 156 slaves on board many were found to be in the final stages of starvation and dysentery. One woman was brought out of the dhow with a month-old infant in her arms. The baby’s forehead was crushed and when she was asked how the injury had happened she explained to the ship’s interpreter that as the boat came along­side the baby began to cry. One of the dhowmen, fearing that the sailors would hear the cries, picked up a stone and crushed the child’s head.

This was not a unique act. British missionary and explorer David Livingstone related a similar incident on land: “One woman, who was unable to carry both her load and young child, had the child taken from her and saw its brains dashed out on a stone.” Dr. Livingstone also reported having nightmares for weeks after encountering Arab slave traders and their victims. Not only was this Christian missionary shocked by the brutality of the Arab slave traders, so was Mohammed Ali, the ruler of Egypt, who was a bat­tle-hardened military commander.

None of this means that the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade should be ignored, downplayed, or excused. Nor have they [p. 126>] been. A vast literature has detailed the vile conditions under which slaves from Africa lived—and died—during their voyages to the Western Hemisphere. But the much less publicized slave trade to the Islamic countries had even higher mortality rates en route, as well as involving larger numbers of people over the centuries, even though the Atlantic slave trade had higher peaks while it lasted. By a variety of accounts, most of the slaves who were marched across the Sahara toward the Mediterranean died on the way. While these were mostly women and girls, the males faced a special danger—castration to produce the eunuchs in demand as harem attendants in the Islamic world.

Because castration was forbidden by Islamic law, the opera­tion tended to be performed—usually crudely—in the hinterlands, before the slave caravans reached places within the effective con­trol of the Ottoman Empire. The great majority of those operated on died as a result, but the price of eunuchs was so much higher than the prices of other slaves that the practice was still profitable on net balance.

The British governor-general of the Sudan, C.G. Gordon, esti­mated that, between 1875 and 1879, from 80,000 to 100,000 slaves were exported through his region. General Gordon imposed the death penalty on those convicted of castrating slave men to market them as eunuchs. His attempt to stamp out slave trading in the Sudan cost him his own life as an opposing army, raised and led by Mohammad Mahad, defeated his troops at Khartoum in 1885 and killed Gordon—after which the slave trade flourished again. British control in the region was firmly re-established in 1898 by the crushing victory of troops led by Lord Kitchener at Omdur­man and including a young officer named Winston Churchill.

On the issue of slavery, it was essentially Western civilization against the world. At the time, Western civilization had the power to prevail against all other civilizations. That is how and why slav­ery was destroyed as an institution in almost the whole world. But it did not happen all at once or even within a few decades. When the British finally stamped out slavery in Tanganyika in 1922 it was more than half a century after the Emancipation Proclama­tion in the United States, and vestiges of slavery still survived in parts of Africa into the twenty-first century.

[p. 127>] The unique position of the Western world in the history—and especially the destruction—of slavery need not imply that there was unanimity within the West on this institution. In addition to whites who defended the enslavement of Africans on racial grounds, or who opposed general emancipation on social grounds, there were many whites—and even blacks—who defended slavery as a matter of self-interest as slaveowners. Although most black owners of slaves in the United States were only nominal owners of members of their own families, there were thousands of other blacks in the antebellum South who were commercial slaveowners, just like their white counterparts. An estimated one-third of the “free persons of color” in New Orleans were slaveowners and thousands of these slaveowners volunteered to fight for the Con­federacy during the Civil War. Black slaveowners were even more common in the Caribbean. In short, there were many defenders of slavery in the West, even in the nineteenth century—and, out­side the West, slavery was too widely accepted to require defense.

Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2005), 122-127.

[APA] Sowell, T. (2005). Black Rednecks and White Liberals. San Francisco, CA: Basic Books.

[MLA] Sowell, Thomas. Black Rednecks and White Liberals. San Francisco: Basic Books, 2005. Print.

[Chicago] Sowell, Thomas. Black Rednecks and White Liberals. San Francisco: Basic Books, 2005.