I read Vincent Flowers’ remarks in a recent edition of The Activist with some dismay. It is obvious that Mr. Flowers is tormented by the injustice of past wrongs, but his focus on the past is blurring his ability to clearly interpret present events, let alone glimpse a brighter future. Mr. Flowers’ visceral comments exhibits [sic] two disturbing and all too familiar themes in liberal politics: “apologism” and negativism. My impression was that Mr. Flowers had an agenda in mind well before Pres. Bush spoke but used the President’s remarks as a means of advancing that agenda, albeit in a rather disjointed manner, as his comments had more to do with his feelings than the President’s. Perhaps the column would have best been entitled “My opinion on the President’s view on race and several other things that have been bugging me.”
I am baffled by Mr. Flowers’ statement that “racial prejudice is a disease that still flourishes in America” as a means of refuting the President’s statement that “racial prejudice is a reality in America.” Aren’t the two phases [sic] practically identical?
The Bush bashing continues mindlessly, but how many African-Americans did former Pres. Clinton appoint to top-level cabinet positions? Mr. Flowers also attempts to link the Bush administration with the scandals at WorldCom and Enron, yet the thievery was perpetrated beneath the noses of monitoring officials appointed by the Clinton administration.
A self professed “patriot,” Mr. Flowers either has very few scruples, loving a country that murders as much as he purports, or has a deluded sense of patriotism. Like so many of his contemporaries, Mr. Flowers goes to great lengths to detail the wrongs perpetrated by the United States upon the rest of the world while attempting to distance himself from the responsibility for these acts.
As a former Marine, I take no pride in body counts, but I do take pride in my association with men and women who have fought, yes, and killed in freedom’s name. I shudder to think of the world in which we would live had they not. Mr. Flowers does a great injustice to the true patriots who have made the ultimate sacrifice and accomplished far more than Mr. Flowers’ hollow words.
The last hundred years are rife with atrocities far exceeding the estimated 18 million deaths attributed to slavery in America. Nazi Germany killed 6 millions Jews, but estimates of the total number to die at Nazi hands are greater than 20 million. Western researchers estimate that the Soviet regime killed as many as 80 million of its own citizens between 1917 and 1987, while former Soviet dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who witnessed the killing firsthand estimate the total to be slightly less. This staggering total is four times the number killed by slavery in the US in about 1/5 the time.
I am as appalled by the history of slavery in this great country as Mr. Flowers, but multiply the factor of Soviet dead over four hundred years and our history pales in comparison. Likewise, communist China is estimated to have killed nearly 40 million of its own citizens between 1949 and 1987. Need I mention Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, Bosnia, or Rwanda among too many others?
Finally, consider this; would a nation as blood thirsty and certainly less righteous as Mr. Flowers claims ours to be have hesitated for a moment to retaliate with all the weapons at its disposal had it been as ruthlessly attacked as the United States was on September 11, 2001?
(Note: Estimates of deaths attributed to the African slave trade do range into the 100 millions as Mr. Flowers asserts, but those estimates include slaves bound for South America, the Caribbean, and Europe. An often ignored fact is that the African slave trade between Islamic states alone is estimated to have resulted in between 11.5 and 14 million deaths.)
However, in the same time frame, America has twice helped liberate the very countries whose policies of appeasing dictators lead to their occupation yet who fail to see the same threat emanating today from Iraq.
As I have already demonstrated, I contest Mr. Flowers’ claim that “America has killed more people than any other country in the world through war, sanctions, chattel slavery,” etc., but I am proud to state that no other country has given more than the United States. Pres. Bush has recently pledged $15 billion to combat AIDS on the African continent. What better way to repay the debt owed to Africa than to use the great fortune that its ancestors helped create to heal their descendants? Perhaps this is too selfless an idea for Mr. Flowers, who barely held short of using the “R” word, “reparations.” Certainly, he would not contest the fact that those enduring famine, too much disease, and genocide on the African continent are suffering far more than the poorest Americans.
I will agree with Mr. Flowers on one point: if we are ever to break this cycle of mistrust, we must “take a hard look at ourselves,” though he seems more intent on focusing his “powers” of perception on others. If he is indeed worried about segregation, instead of mindlessly attacking the President, perhaps he might follow the President’s lead by surrounding himself by the best and brightest from all races.
William Barnett
Graduate student in Computer Science and proud American