What the history books don't tell you...


Jamie123
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(Well, not the ones you read at school, I'll bet!)

The US Government, in the 18th and 19th Centuries, paid about a fifth of its annual income in "tribute" to pirates.

These weren't your Jack Sparrow type pirates. None of your "yo ho ho" and "arrr Jim Lad". these were the Barbary Corsairs from Morocco, Algiers, Tunis etc. - the state-sponsored terrorists of their day - who had been robbing ships and taking slaves from the Europeans for centuries. They even got as far as Cornwall, sometimes nabbing whole fishing fleets, or even coming ashore and depopulating villages.

(That's right - white slaves captured and sold by black slavers to black slave-owners! Tell that to BLM!)

The British had been paying them tribute for years. Not that the Royal Navy - then at its peak - couldn't have wiped them all out, but it made greater economic sense to pay them off and have them re-direct their piracy against other nations. (Mostly France.)

Initially the American colonists were covered by the British tribute payments, but not so after the Revolutionary War. Once the US became independent, American ships became fair game to the pirates. Having dismantled the Continental Navy, and with the US Navy just a vision on the horizon, what could the Americans do but negotiate with (and bribe) the terrorists?

It was really only during Jefferson's presidency that the US began to fight instead of paying - though even he had to fork out his lunch money once or twice!

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Edited by Jamie123
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Yup. IIRC, the Federalists under Washington and Adams wanted to build a navy to fight back, whereas the anti-Federalists under Jefferson wanted to keep paying them off.  The federalists got funding for some frigates (the USS Constitution among them) rammed through Congress over the objection of the Jeffersonians; but President Jefferson ended up using the new navy against the pirates to great effect (earning a line in the Marine Corps’ hymn about “to the shores of Tripoli).  I believe that in their late correspondence, Jefferson even congratulated Adams in having been right all along about the need for a navy where Jefferson himself had been wrong.

Edited by Just_A_Guy
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History books tell us a lot.  Not only about the history that such speaks to and about but also written history purports the thinking during the times and philosophies of the era when the history was written.    One of the discoveries of history is that the so called Caucasian  race  is not really a race by the modern definition of terms but rather a multi race culture or peoples of many different nationalities, languages and genetics.  It is also a historical fact that the peoples of much of the history of Europe were themselves citizens of slavery and were owned by their king and their over lords.  History calls this type of citizenship - feudalism.  But there was another level within feudalism that was refereed to at the time as slavery - where people were openly traded for goods and services or even as punishments for crimes.   Such slavery also carried the term of indentured servant.  I have an ancestor  that was sent to the Americas from Scotland in the early 1600's as a slave as it was recorded at the time.

The reality of history and history books is that slavery is not a raciest institution.  But slavery does have raciest connections with specific nationalities and ethnic groups in various geological areas.   Sadly slavery has been historically difficult for the many dark skinned peoples of Africa that is still very much a problem even today.   History does indicate that there are social and ethnic structures that actually are systemically  raciest and that such is most prevalent (both in the past and even today) in some of the cultures of Africa.  Without a doubt the cultures and peoples of Africa have suffered long in history and continue to suffer currently.  

What we are currently seeing is a effort to gaslight the problems of today's slavery in an effort to blame those cultures that historically worked the hardest to end slavery as the origins and perpetrators of slavery.  One of the great efforts of this gaslighting is to re-write history based on today's thinking and political climate. I personally do not think this effort to change and rewrite history is divinely inspired but is at its heart and core an evil  intended to divide this once great nation and subject it's people to a modern form of slavery where the citizens are owned by the state which our not so distant past history was called socialism.

 

The Traveler

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