Capability: The Secret Behind World HistoryThe white man’s sins in context.Thu Oct 28, 2021 Raymond IbrahimRaymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.In many ways, Columbus Day, which recently passed, has become emblematic not just of the accusation that Columbus was a racist who inaugurated a genocidal campaign against the natives, but a reminder that virtually all Europeans preceding the great era of woke were horrible people.
This conflation was especially on display during the summer of 2020, following the death of George Floyd, when not just Columbus’s statues but the statues of many traditional heroes of Western and American civilization were attacked on the accusation that the men they represent were all racists and somehow involved in or approved of the slave trade of Africans.
The problem with this otherwise entrenched view is that it completely ignores one simple fact: if Europeans were aggressive or exploitative of nonwhites, that is not because they were intrinsically violent (a racist point, incidentally) but simply because they were able to. And that’s the virtual bottom line of all history: capability.
Europeans did not defeat and uproot American Indians, enslave Africans, and colonize the rest because they lived according to some sort of unprecedented bellicose creed specific to whites and alien to nonwhites. Quite the contrary: they did so because they—as opposed to natives, blacks, etc.—were able to do so. That is the fundamental difference.
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https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/capability-secret-behind-world-history-raymond-ibrahim/