An American Auschwitz?

The burning of a crime scene

They called it the “Nottoway Resort,” the “largest antebellum mansion in the South,” and even Jesus Christ said Jesus Christ.

It burned down. Good.

“Would you want Auschwitz to burn?” –Some dipshit on Facebook.

No, because Auschwitz is used to teach the history of what happened, to remind people that never again should we permit such horrors to take place. If Nottoway had been used in a similar fashion, people would not be celebrating its destruction. It wasn’t a museum for instructing people of a crime so monstrous as American chattel slavery, but rather a glorification of a racist and murderous past; a “resort,” a beautiful “mansion” where people can visit as a bed and breakfast and even celebrate their nuptials. No one is getting married at Auschwitz. Rather, they are taught it was a place where wives and children were separated from husbands, their matrimonial rings stolen from them before being sent to die, either quickly via gas or slowly by way of starvation and disease.

“Antebellum” derives from Latin, a compounding of “before” and “war.” It is most frequently used to reference the period prior to the U.S. Civil War, a sanitized way of describing that period in the South when slavery still existed! Chattel slavery, where people are treated as things, was an American institution the South valued so much that over half a million people had to die in a brutal war to bring it to an end.

Since bigoted assbags keep bringing up Auschwitz, I’d like to make some comparisons between slavery in the Americas and the Holocaust.

Judaism is an ethnoreligion; people were targeted for extermination and forced labor based on the group they were born into. Slavery in the Americas was likewise based on birth. Indigenous were enslaved, but their mass death from disease and genocide led to the “solution” of importing African enslaved people to work the lands and build nations. The slavery was perpetual and generational; any child born to an enslaved woman, regardless of who impregnated her, was likewise enslaved for life.

The racist dipshits like to bring up the lack of gas chambers in American forced labor camps such as Nottoway, so we can begin there. During the Holocaust, not all concentration camps were “death camps,” meaning they didn’t all have gas chambers where people were immediately separated based on if they were seen as useful to the war effort, with most headed toward immediate death and cremation, and others labored and starved to death more slowly. Despite some not having gas chambers, they were all death camps; some just took their time with the murder.

More people died from starvation and disease during in the Holocaust than from gas. That doesn’t make it any less a genocide.

Slavery existed since hunter-gatherer times, because humans have always wanted someone else to do the shit jobs. As society became better organized, so too did our ability to place others in bondage. But the transatlantic slavery trade was some next-level evil that didn’t just destroy the lives of the enslaved, it forcibly underdeveloped an entire continent so the exploiters could attain vast riches. Twelve million people were sent West, and two million of them died via the horrific conditions of the ocean crossing. But that represents only a portion of the horror inflicted.

The decision to enslave Africans and ship them to the Americas was purely fiscal. The continent presented the most incredible opportunity to make fortunes as had ever existed in history, and the lusting for cash set aside any moral compunctions about the human cost of amassing insane wealth. Africa was close, making for a shorter voyage, and there was already an existing slavery trade thanks to the centuries of Arab trafficking in humans on the continent, and Africans had some immunity to the diseases that Indigenous did not. So, it just made good business sense so long as you didn’t possess anything resembling a conscience. This was capitalism run amok, industry without the constraints of a government of the people reining in those whose sole ethical driver was creating wealth for shareholders. It was economics and avarice at its worst, seeking to extract every penny of profit from labor-intensive crops that could only be made affordable for mass consumption via the trade in human misery.

Back in Europe, people didn’t just purchase the sugar tainted by the wretched lives of those forced to produce it; their utter indifference to suffering saw many average citizens buy shares in slavery trading companies because of the high return on investment. Those who spoke against slavery were drowned out by its advocates who proclaimed it an economic necessity. Unrelenting acquisitiveness became so ingrained it created an exceedingly vile new kind of slavery operating on a scale not yet seen. And many pretended not to see it. Plantation owners were often removed from the horror, resting comfortably far away in mansions such as Nottoway upon stacks of cash. Enslaved people were things with no more rights than a piece of wood you would burn in a fire to keep you warm. They could legally be tortured, castrated, killed, raped, and savagely worked until they died, and death was often soon in coming. Life expectancy was horrifically short. Prior to the transatlantic trade being abolished in 1807, it was less expensive to work the enslaved to death rather than breed a new generation and feed those children until they grew old enough to be made to toil, because more could always be cheaply had with the next shipload arriving in port. It was only after the trade from Africa ended that the internal slavery trade arose, resulting in enslaved women being used as brood mares and even more families ripped apart as the stolen were frequently bought and sold within the Americas, sent to new owners with little care given to marriage or parentage. Husbands were torn from wives, children from their parents. Again, since any child birthed by a Black woman was automatically enslaved regardless of who impregnated her, many enslavers found they could profit from rape.

Yes, slavery existed in Africa prior to Europeans launching the transatlantic trade, but it was of a different sort. While no form of human bondage is praiseworthy, the scale was limited in sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to the transatlantic trade, most slavery was committed by Muslim conquerors in the north of the continent. Further south, people were enslaved as captives of war, but they and their offspring eventually became members of the societies that captured them. Slavery wasn’t perpetual, it wasn’t the dominant mode of production, and the enslaved were not chattel, they had rights.

European demand changed everything.

European products became so valued in Africa that the much less frequent and far less brutal enslavement of prisoners of war transformed into an economy of massive abduction. Wars became more prevalent, launched for the purpose of taking captives for sale to Europeans. One of the coveted imports was guns. African slavers traded human beings for advanced weapons they then used to capture and enslave more humans. And round and round we fucking go. Over twelve million were sent west, but several million more were slaughtered in battles to take the most hale and healthy captive. That twelve million began as twenty million captives, but forty per cent died on the forced march to the coast. The centuries of demand for the most vigorous Africans to enslave—it was the only product Europeans wanted from them—coupled with later European colonization and ongoing capitalistic exploitation made easier via the damage done by the trade, divided and underdeveloped the entire continent in a way that can only be described as a massive criminal enterprise.

The systematic depopulation of Africa by both Islamic and Christian slavers halted the continent’s development by stealing its most precious resource: its people. Centuries of theft of human beings allowed other continents to thrive as Africa was made to languish. Between 1650 and 1900, the African population rose by a mere twenty per cent. During that same time, the Asian population tripled, and Europeans quadrupled their numbers. The exploitation of Africa was not only a tool to grow Europe’s population, but as fuel for its industrial development and the foundation of its capitalistic system. The demand for people to enslave, purchased with weapons, alcohol, and trinkets, not only took Africa’s most energetic peoples to live short lives of misery and torment, but pitted those on the continent against each other to provide the supply, creating a legacy of animosity and fear that prevented solidarity, nation building, and technological advancement.

Despite what racists asserted, the people of the African continent possessed such ability, as evidenced by their sophisticated art and architecture. Yet with a sizeable portion of its most inventive and ambitious taken to faraway lands, a culture of fear was created so that those who remained became more preoccupied with not being enslaved than focusing on developing industry. Even farming was made fearful, as it made one a stationary target for enslavers. The continent’s purposeful underdevelopment was further exacerbated during the colonial period via divide and conquer where local elites were bought off as collaborators to oppress their own people. When the colonizers finally left, it was usually those amoral quislings who assumed control of their devasted and frequently artificially created nations, seeing national treasuries as personal bank accounts rather than something to be used for the benefit of the populace. There were African rulers who sought European skills and technology to help their peoples’ development, but these requests were ignored by enslavers and colonizers. In the aftermath of both world wars, the rest of Europe was adamant Germany would pay monetarily for its crimes yet saw no hypocrisy in failing to pay for their own atrocities committed against Africa. Rather, in the aftermath of the Second World War and the period of decolonization that followed, ascendant America shoved aside the European powers and moved in to continue the exploitation via unfettered capitalism. The Nigerian Civil War, fought between 1967 and 1970 and resulting in over two million deaths, was caused in significant degree by the nefarious practices of American oil companies.

All of this, and the centuries of ingrained institutional racism, segregation, lynching, and oppression that followed and continued, is what a building like Nottoway represented. It wasn’t a resort; it was a symbol of a horrific past that continues to influence the present. It should have been used as method to educate people regarding the past to prevent us from being condemned to repeat such terrors. Instead, it was a vacation destination for pasty people to dress up fancy and say, “I do.”

I saw a woman on social media lamenting Nottoway’s destruction because she was married there, and I wondered if her wedding veil was a white hood.

During the Second World War, in the Mauthausen concentration camp in northern Austria, a prisoner carved into the wall of Cell Block 20, “If there is a god, he will have to beg for my forgiveness.” The decision to use Nottoway as a resort rather than as an abject lesson made it a structure serving the opposite of atonement. Instead, it represented a celebration of the creation of America as a capitalistic enterprise that continues to promote white supremacy as its bestselling product.

Let it fucking burn.

Those who cannot remember the past … need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes ofOn This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.