austin-murphy-the-triumph-of-evil

46 THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL
profitable use of exploitative trade strategies, which involved selling
mas � produced luxury goods to the African rich (especially to the slave
tradmg puppets themselves) in return for slaves and other commodities
thereby reducing the demand for traditional African production for th�
?lack masses and �hu . s bankrupting local African producers. This system
IS actually very snrular to the methods utilized by the USA today to
destroy foreign economies and to economically enslave much of the
world, as will be explained later in Chapters 6 and 7.
Alt�?ugh t�e USA was not the only country involved in committing
atroc1t1es agamst slaves, the USA treatment of Africans was in many
respects worse than the other major players such as the Spanish. In
� articular there were less slaves brought to the USA than to the Span­
:
ISh colomes (at least partially because the USA had less people and
money than the Spanish colonies initially), and so the USA was not
able to murder, rape, and torture as many as the Spanish. However, the
USA slavery laws were much more atrocious insofar as they made the
blacks and their descendants slaves forever, whereas the Spanish did
not enslave the offspring and even allowed most of their existing slaves
to earn or buy their freedom eventually (Teepen, 1998). For instance, in
contrast to the early nineteenth century USA where blacks were almost
always slaves, the proportion of the African population that was free
had risen in 1808 (after only I 00 years of slavery) to over 75% in one
Spanish colony of the Western Hemisphere (Sharp, 1976).
In addition, many think slavery ended in the USA in the 1860s, after
the northern USA states executed a plan to free the slaves in the southem
states (formally announced in 1863) as part of a successful military/
�
litical effo rt to win (by 1865) a very bloody civil war, which began
(m 1861) when the northern states tried to impose a protectionist tariff
system on the country as a whole, and the southern states (which wanted
"free trade" in both goods and people) seceded from the union in protest
(Copeland, 2000). However, after the southern whites lost the civil
war, they created a form of neo-slavery by forcing blacks to sign work
contracts that essentially sold their freedom and lives to white owners in
return for being allowed to live (Lewis, 1998). Because the blacks had
no money, no food, and no land, they bad no other choice (Zinn, 1995).
This "efficient" system (which provided capitalists not only with the
advantage of cheap black labor and lowered the cost of agricultural raw
]NTRODUCTION 47
materials for industry but also drove down the cost of competing white
labor and thereby made USA industry even more competitive) lasted
into the 1900s (Finkin, 1997).
As documented by Patterson (1970), such explicit forms of slavery
have been replaced with more subtle forms of racism and wage slavery
in the twentieth century that are similar to those used by Nazi Germany
against the Jews before their extermination in World War II, and data
indicate that this system has resulted in the early death of over 30,000
blacks per year in the USA (cumulating to millions of deaths over time).
The significantly higher death rates for USA blacks have continued into
the twenty-first century, with USA blacks still having a life expectancy
over five years less than for USA whites (mostly because of poverty),
and with blacks therefore continuing to have to pay higher life insurance
premiums (Paltrow, 2000) that (among many other biases) further
impoverish them (and therefore actually contribute to the higher death
rates themselves in a typically circular capitalist process of making the
poor ever poorer). Perhaps fittingly, the USA continues to honor explicit
slaveowners on almost all of its paper money (including George Wash­
ington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, and Benja­
min Franklin), with even the exception of Abraham Lincoln (on the $5
bill) having once said, "I do not stand pledged for the prohibition ofthe
slave trade between the states. I, as much as any man, am in favor of
having the superior position assigned to the White race" (Cosby, 1998).
With many of these slaveowners (such as Andrew Jackson and George
Washington) also having been mass murderers of Indians (Churchill,
1994), it seems appropriate to honor them on the very money and wealth
which was derived in large part from the policies of black slavery and
Indian genocide.
The Table 1 count also does not include the many millions of other
people who died in the USA in the past as a result of the capitalist eco­
nomic system. Besides slavery, this system caused harsh working con­
ditions (as exemplified by many male and female children as young as
6 years old having to work 100 hours per week just to survive), unem­
ployment, poor living conditions, and general poverty (Zinn, 1995). The
resulting deaths do not appear to be deliberate, even though the only
crime for which these millions were killed was that they were born poor
in a capitalist society.