Marching under the banner of “not in our name” confers public virtue on the marchers and expiates them from the widespread and widely accepted charges against white, Western culture. Being against apartheid in South Africa meant that a white person who sees white evil and stands against it immediately identifies that person as among “the good whites.”
It matters not that slavery in North Africa is 100 times worse than apartheid in South Africa. The
real problem is that blacks are enslaved by Arabs and Muslims. If what matters is the credit one’s white self gets by blasting bad whites, then stories about evil deeds done by non-Westerners distracts from the ultimate goal. Westerners who act this way think they are responding correctly and morally to the claim they have internalized that the West is guilty of the worst crimes in the history of man. They feel the need for expiation. Indeed, one could say that the entire project of AI and HRW is just a glorified apology tour.
There could be more slaves today in the world than at any time in human history — around
40.3 million. Most of these slaves serve people who are not from Western cultures (largely in India), and so campaigning against this — which is clearly much worse than most every other crime with the exception of murder — distracts from the average Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, or United Nations activist’s goal of gaining themselves “innocence” from Western sin. It was only when sexual slavery was found to abound in the West also that the human rights community began to freely use the word “
slavery.”
This is a sin. A double sin, in fact: firstly, it makes the West seem much worse than it is, because focusing on Western evil when non-Western evil — which often is so much worse — is ignored, demands an explanation of one’s agenda. The other sin is worse: the great Western human rights “apology tour” abandons those people — victims of non-Western horrors — who
need Western humanitarian power and compassion the most. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and their ilk should be renamed: “Societies for the Improvement of Western Behavior.”
