"Amazing Grace" Movie Makes a Hero out of an Oppressor of White Slaves by Michael A. Hoffman II
Copyright ©2007 http://RevisionistHistory.org
This year marks the bicentennial of the eclipse of the Negro slave system that was designed and implemented by pirates in the pay of Bloody Bess, Tudor Queen Elizabeth I. The Cryptocracy would like us to believe that Britain's regency branch of the Occult Protestant regime, out of the goodness of its sweet heart, and the particular benevolence of the evangelical Parliamentarian William Wilberforce, "abolished" slavery in one of history's great gestures of noblesse oblige.
That's the fractured fairy tale as it is retailed to the unsuspecting kiddies, young and old, who frequent the new Hollywood film, "Amazing Grace."
Slavery was not abolished in Britain, however. The de facto enslavement of whites began with the Elizabethan enclosure acts (privatization of formerly public grazing lands known as commons), which made paupers of the English yeomanry and created an army of homeless and unemployed citizens demonized by official history as Britain's fabled "criminal underclass" (the criminal overclass escapes this withering scrutiny). The history of white slavery in Britain is found in the practice of "kid-nabbing" (kidnapping) and the laws and customs that permitted enslavement aboard ship of abducted farmers and laborers taken from such notorious white slave ports as Glasgow.
Malthusian scarcity paradigms were later invented out of fear of the insurrectionist potential of whites dubbed "surplus poor," who, in the seventeenth century, were shipped in chains to British America and the West Indies as slaves, to toil unto death (not seven years) on sugar and tobacco plantations as soon as colonies were established (Georgia was envisioned as a white slave dumping ground, while Virginia initially had more white slaves than black ones).
With the rise of the industrial revolution and the lethal machinery necessary to its success, white children as young as five were harnessed from before sunrise until after sunset to the machines of what William Blake called the "satanic mills." While Wilberforce and his psalm-singing "telescopic philanthropists" (as the former factory slave Charles Dickens styled them, due to their exclusive focus on the suffering of people in far-away lands, while neglecting the oppression of their own kind), rode to their abolitionist meetings, ragged white children were trudging past them in the dark, barefoot and hungry after 12 or 14 hours of slave labor in mines, beatings from overseers and the constant threat of mutilation by the dangerously unsafe machinery of the early factories.
These unlamented white factory slaves represented a vast source of new capital for the British plutocracy, permitting the latter to so "charitably" manumit the black slaves of the British commonwealth in 1807.
Furthermore, Wilberforce supported the enactment of the Combination Act, which forbade the workers of England from "combining" to form a union to reduce the hours of their toil and increase the token pittance they were infrequently paid. Wilberforce also helped pass laws making it a crime of sedition to criticize King George III and government officials.
"Amazing Grace" is far from expressing the truth about slavery in all its dimensions. It is a deceitful mockery, omitting crucial facts in order to extend the shelf life of the mythology that enshrines the Anglo-American ruling class, which is still robbing workers by means of NAFTA, GATT and the WTO. It is the subconscious anger over this modern American swindle which has been mined by right wing Churchianity in the U.S. and harnessed to the goals of the neocon Republican party, channeling white Americans' resentment at the seemingly invisible forces that have drastically diminished their future prospects and present quality of life. This Stockholm Syndrome-identification on the part of rural and blue collar whites with the very dynastic families like the Bush syndicate who offer poor whites as sacrificial lambs on the altar of "free trade," is on par with the celebration by liberals and Christians of Wilberforce and his canting crew of alleged angels in human form, imbued with "Amazing Grace."
Amazing disgrace is more like it.
For further reference
Hoffman's history of white bondage, They Were White and They Were Slaves, is for sale here.
Hoffman's article, "The Forgotten Slaves: Whites in Servitude in Early America and Industrial Britain" may be read here.
