Hands around a white man’s throat

I suppose you’d have to be one of the more deliberately uninformed assholes on the planet — which is to say, you’d have to be Dan Riehl — to make this sort of argument:

The first “American” slaves weren’t black, they were white and usually from Europe. Shouldn’t we be given special credit for being first and all that?

Also, it was in large part a system of laws and government, otherwise known as Western Civilization, established in Europe that was most likely the primary reason why there weren’t even more European slaves brought to America. The societies there were somewhat able to protect their own. Logically, then, isn’t it ultimately the fault of an under-civilized tribal system which could not protect its own that is a key reason for why traders in men and women turned to another continent for more “product?” It was simply easier to be had, particularly, and often with the cooperation of competing tribes. In that sense, it would seem to me that the black descendants of slaves in America should really be thinking about apologizing to themselves.

Remarkable. I’m not sure what’s more obnoxious (or predictable) here: the overused cliche that Africans are to blame for the labor system that ensnared them; the ahistorical confusion of slavery with convict and orphan labor redemptioners and indentured servants; or the amnesia that allows one to forget that the first conscripted laborers in the Western Hemisphere were the people who happened to be living there when Europeans arrived. But I suppose that’s what makes Reihl such a special presence in the conservative blogosphere. Unlike your average wingnut, he’s not satisfied with merely one inane argument against the greatest act of white racial treachery since the Harper’s Ferry raid a meaningless Congressional apology for slavery and Jim Crow; instead, he offers a cornucopia of dumb.

That’s the sort of fortitude his kidnapped orphan great(x7)-grandfather must have needed to endure all those cold nights sleeping in a Pennsylvania hog pen.