Imprisoned by History

I am sure we are all familiar with the thought experiment; if you were alive during slavery times in America, would you have been an abolitionist, or would you have been pro-slavery? Almost everybody living today would claim that they would have been an abolitionist because we know that is the right side of history. But the sad reality is that more people than we would care to admit would have supported slavery. Most of us are merely products of our time, and we assume the prevailing morality of the time. We saw that during Covid when the so-called freedom loving liberals in our country, supported lockdowns, forced vaccines, shutting down the economy, and firing or jailing people who didn’t comply with authoritarian orders. Most people easily give up their morals and principles based on circumstances. And what you find is to many people, morals and principles are not structures on which they base their life, but tools used to acquire power or promote their agenda.

We’re seeing this play itself out in South Africa, today. I can still remember back to the 1980s, when the ruling system in South Africa was apartheid, and the Western countries were called to divest from South Africa so as to not support this racist discriminatory political system. Nelson Mandela became a hero for fighting and overthrowing apartheid in that country. Of course, apartheid was wrong. Apartheid discriminated and oppressed black people. And back in the 80s, many people in the Democrat party led the charge against apartheid because it was racially discriminatory. The issue of apartheid in South Africa made it very clear to the world that discriminating or oppressing people based on race was an unequivocal evil.

Now, here we are 30 years later, and racist ideologies and discriminatory policies continue to rule the day in South Africa. It is not called apartheid anymore, but the country is still discriminating based on race. The only difference is the race of the parties involved. Under apartheid, it was the white ruling class discriminating against black citizens, and the world stood up against it and defeated it. Now, it is the black ruling class discriminating against white citizens, and many in the liberal mainstream media as well as Democrat politicians in our country, are falling all over themselves to justify this racial discrimination.

At the White House earlier this week, President Trump showed visiting South African President Cyril Ramaphosa video of prominent South African politician Julius Sollo Malema leading rally chants of “Kill the Boer!”, “Kill the farmer!”, “Shoot to kill!”, and other incendiary slogans against white South Africans. In response to Trump’s meeting with President Ramaphosa, Malema’s party did not shy away from those videos, in fact, they doubled down on those statements by declaring on social media, “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer! Victory is Certain!”

In response, CNN claimed that these chants about killing white people in South Africa need “historical context.” No context justifies the call for murder of the innocent. That’s the tricky thing about morality, we can always create a context to justify violating our morality, but when you do, those contexts become what defines our morality. And the morality in South Africa is that it is wrong to racially discriminate unless it is black people who are the ones racially discriminating. But what they do not realize is that creating this context only serves to justify the racial discrimination that they suffered under during apartheid.

So, the question is, was a racially discriminatory system like apartheid wrong because it was racially discriminatory or was it wrong because it was white people who were racially discriminating? We are seeing that in America today where the people who continually remind us the evils of racial discrimination by white people in our country’s past, have become the biggest supporters of racial discrimination against white people in our present. So, to them, racial discrimination is wrong only if the wrong people are the ones discriminating.

South African President Ramaphosa tried to distance himself from Malema’s racists words and chants, but he has made public similar claims of racial discriminatory policies against white citizens in South Africa recently. He said, “The land of our forefathers and foremothers must return to our people, without any fail, and without any payment or compensation.” The meaning was clear. The government should take land from white farmers without compensation by the mere fact that they are white. That’s it. CNN and others will try to justify this policy by placing land ownership in South Africa in a historical context.

This begs the question, who’s land, is it? Is it the black South Africans land? Why, because they inhabited this land hundreds of years ago, or thousands of years ago? Okay, then why is there a question of the State of Israel? They inhabited that land 1,500 years ago, and it was stolen from them by the Muslims. But the Jews are the ones painted as stealing that land from the Muslims. Christians inhabited most of the Middle East before it was stolen from them by the Muslims. Do Christians have the historical claim on the Middle East? We are constantly told to give land acknowledgements in the United States to the Native Americans, for whatever purpose that serves. But are Native American tribes required to give land acknowledgements to other Native American tribes because most of the hidden history of the Native Americans before Columbus arrived was one of war where land was taken by force over and over and over again.

The bottom line is that the history of human beings on this planet has been one of war. It is hard to find a piece of land or a country that has not been forged by conquest. And there is not a race of people who hasn’t taken land from others, and had others take land from them. Instead of looking backwards, we must look forward. As with every human action, it is impossible to go back in time and try to right every past wrong. There have been too many wrongs, and those wrongs are too intertwined to try to fix the past without creating new wrongs that need to be righted. The Middle East is the perfect example. There have been too many wars, too may acts of terror, too many bombs dropped, too many bullets fired, too many knives wielded, too many IED’s exploded, too many innocent lives lost to fix or to compensate or to amend all the past wrongs. Every act of vengeance creates a new victim desiring vengeance. At some point, we must move forward. The problem is that we are continually being pulled back into the past by the forces in the world who want to keep us imprisoned by guilt of past sins or claim to reparation.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.