Reparations from the beginning of the slave trade supply chain

September 21, 2022. Don Lemon makes a fool of himself, (and here) trying to virtue signal, only to find that -- per Pogo -- he "has met the enemy and he is us."

I've been saying this since the first reparations claims began. Follow the money. Don Le-moan gets schooled on slavery. Here is a good idea for where the Jesuits can look in their efforts to secure $100 million in reparations for slavery. And the commentator gets in a few good licks for those Brits who died trying to stop slavery.

Recently demoted CNN host Don Lemon was caught like a deer in the headlights Monday night when he asked British royal commentator Hillary Fordwich whether the British royal family should pay reparations, claiming that some in the United Kingdom “want to be paid back.”

Her response was epic. After initially giving the impression that she agreed with Lemon, she schooled him royally.

“Well, I think you’re right about reparations in terms of if people want it, though, what they need to do is you always need to go back to the beginning of a supply chain,” Fordwich replied. “Where was the beginning of the supply chain? That was in Africa, and when it crossed the entire world, when slavery was taking place, which was the first nation in the world that abolished slavery? The first nation world to abolish it, it was started by William Wilberforce, was the British. In Great Britain, they abolished slavery.”

She continued, “Two thousand naval men died on the high seas trying to stop slavery. Why? Because the African kings were rounding up their own people, they had them on cages waiting in the beaches. No one was running into Africa to get them. And I think you’re totally right.”

The look on Lemon’s face was priceless. Fordwich succeeded in agreeing with him, although for different reasons than he was obviously suggesting. And she wasn’t done with the lesson.

“If reparations need to be paid, we need to go right back to the beginning of that supply chain and say, ‘Who was rounding up their own people and having them handcuffed in cages?’ Absolutely. That’s where they should start. And maybe, I don’t know, the descendants of those families where they died at the, in the high seas trying to stop the slavery, that those families should receive something too, I think, at the same time.”

It only gets funnier, almost hysterical. Here is an alternative version, featuring the wonderful Monty Python skit on "What have the Romans ever done for us?"

People like Don Lemon, along with other grievance-mongers such as MSNBC’s Ali Velshi (“the British robbed other nations of their wealth and power, and exploited their people”) are ignorant of history. Perhaps, rather, they choose to ignore it. But name an ethnicity or culture that never, ever conquered other populations. Or sold other humans into slavery. I’ll wait.

History is often cruel, brutal, and ugly. Yet whether the grievance crowd likes it or not, the Brits did a lot of good. As Robert Tombs wrote:

“But for many violent and disturbed parts of the globe, the British Empire managed to stop endemic warfare, bring relative peace and order, and in some regions create substantial economic development.”

While the British Empire — just like many other empires throughout history — wasn’t perfect, she was a force for good.