The Industry of Victimhood

 

The Model

The West deserves enormous credit for being the first civilization in human history to abolish slavery. Britain ended the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, paying compensation that bankrupted the imperial treasury for decades. The American Civil War, fought primarily over the preservation and extension of slavery, cost six hundred thousand lives, a higher proportion of the population than any war the United States has fought before or since. The Western abolitionist movement, drawing on Christian moral reasoning, made the argument and won the political fight that ended an institution every other civilization in human history had practiced and were still practicing as the West was abolishing it. Not only that, but if it weren’t for the West, slavery companies could be listed on NASDAQ today.

 Watch what the left has done with African Americans, one of its assigned constituencies. In every American classroom, every Hollywood film, every progressive news outlet, the West is framed as the unique villain in the story of slavery. America is read as the slave-owning nation, full stop, not as the nation that fought a brutal war to end it. The first Western civilization to abolish slavery is portrayed as the original and definitive sponsor of slavery, while the Muslim slave trade, which began in the seventh century, lasted into the twentieth, took an estimated seventeen million African captives, and routinely castrated the men so they would not reproduce, is barely mentioned in any American textbook.

 The new Marxists’ model needs African Americans as permanent victims. If they are allowed to register that the country in which they live abolished slavery at enormous cost, that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s succeeded, that black Americans now have legal equality, voting rights, and access to every institution of American life, that they have produced the wealthiest and most influential black community in human history, then the moral capital the model extracts from their suffering begins to dissipate. So, the suffering must be kept in continuous circulation: every police killing must be read as a lynching, every disparity must be read as the persistence of slavery. The left does not want African Americans to thrive in a way that would close the wound. It wants the wound to remain open, because the wound is the capital.

 Women is another example. The West has done more to advance the legal, economic, and social position of women than any civilization in human history. Equal access to education, equal employment law, the dismantling of the legal subordination that defined every pre-modern society and many of the post-modern ones, the emergence of women as full participants in every profession, these are Western achievements, accomplished within a century. Measured against any other civilization on earth, the West is the most pro-female civilization that has ever existed.

 The left’s framing of this record is, again, the opposite. Women in the West are presented in mainstream feminist discourse as still oppressed, still subjugated, still in a condition of structural patriarchy that requires continuous activist intervention. The genuinely oppressed women of the world, those in Gaza, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, are absent from the same discourse, because attention to their condition would require the left to acknowledge that the civilization it is attacking is the one that gave women the freedom they have.

 Immigrants too. In their framing immigrants come to wealthy Western countries as victims of those countries’ historical predations, that they are owed entry, that the host country owes them everything and they owe the host country nothing, that they should be encouraged to retain hostility toward the civilization that took them in. The actual record, again, is the opposite: immigrants from the developing world overwhelmingly come to the West because the West offers a higher standard of living, more freedom, and better institutions than the countries they leave...