by Daniel Flynn

Slavery haunts the 21st century world, not just as a dark relic of a crueler age but as a living nightmare for thousands of presently enslaved Africans.

According to the U.S. State Department's 2000 Report on Human Rights, "There continued to be credible reports that government or government-associated forces took children as slaves" in the Sudan. "Abductees are subjected to torture and rape, and at times, are killed. These practices have a pronounced racial aspect, as the victims are exclusively black southerners and members of indigenous tribes of the Nuba Mountains." Mauritania has abolished slavery three times, most recently in 1980, yet the slave trade continues in some parts of the country. In northern Cameroon, too, slavery persists.

One would think that this injustice might provide an outlet for campus activists in search of a cause. It hasn't. The tragic drama of present-day slavery is uninteresting to campus radicals. Its villains-slaveholding blacks and Saharan Muslims-aren't straight out of central casting as American whites are. Its African setting, too, doesn't fit the story they wish to tell. The script contradicts their notion of slavery as a uniquely American institution practiced by whites against blacks. In short, it's politically inconvenient.

As the existing slave trade is ignored, a small part of the slave trade that occurred many lifetimes ago in this country is the focus of moral indignation. Blame is assigned to people who had nothing to do with slavery. Victim status is conferred upon people who thankfully never had to endure the indignity of human bondage. A few members of the latter group are demanding payment from members of the former group.

Like many evils, the root of the divisive crusade for reparations for black Americans is money. Like recent "civil rights" shakedowns of Coca Cola, Texaco, and Denny's, the driving force behind reparations is that activists want to get paid. "Show me the money," not "We Shall Overcome," is the catchphrase of this movement. This past school year the question of reparations dominated debate on campus and spilled out into mainstream discourse, where it had previously been a non-issue. The reason for this spillover is that reparations advocates, who had previously operated in a vacuum, found a debating partner in David Horowitz.

"I fully support reparations for former slaves and their children," Horowitz writes in his new book, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery. "Unfortunately they are no longer with us." Payment to people who weren't slaves from people who weren't slaveholders, the author suggested in a series of controversial newspaper ads, makes no sense.

Critics labeled the ad's arguments incendiary. Opposition to reparations, however, is a position shared by more than four-fifths of Americans. Clearly, what was unusual about the whole episode was the hysterical response.

The ad, titled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Are a Bad Idea for Black People-and Racist Too," created a national firestorm on campus. It was sent to 71 college newspapers, 43 of which refused to run it. The ad, and its conspicuous absence from dozens of college newspapers, eventually spoke to the issue of free speech on campus more than it did to reparations itself.

Perhaps more indicative of the state of tolerance on campus than the instances when the ad was banned were the reactions from students, faculty, and administrators to newspapers that actually printed the ad. The Daily Cardinal, the University of Wisconsin student daily that printed the ad, endured threats and the thefts of stacks of its issues. A junior at the University of Wisconsin proclaimed, "Freedom of speech does not mean you can infringe on other people's freedom, right? We're dealing with hate speech, and that doesn't fall under freedom."

At Berkeley, the home of the 1960s free speech movement, a mob stormed the offices of The Daily Californian, destroying newspapers and demanding an apology. The paper's editor, Daniel Hernandez, looked on approvingly and gave them the apology they sought.

At Brown, Professor Lewis Gordon justified newspaper thefts by saying, "If something is free, you can take as many copies as you like. This is not a free speech issue. It is a hate speech issue." A teaching assistant in Gordon's Afro-American Studies Department even alleged, "I have talked to students who told me that they can't perform basic functions like walking or sleeping because of this ad." A group of more than 60 faculty members at the Ivy League school admonished the school's president for not condemning Horowitz's "Ten Reasons" against reparations: "Your refusal to condemn the advertisement as a form of harassment has-perhaps inadvertently-led to the silencing of many people of color on campus." The only ones being silenced, however, were the writers for the student newspaper which dared to run the ad. Thousands of copies were subsequently trashed after the offending ad had run.

David Horowitz labels the recalling of his ordeal "an act of literary masochism." Yet, Uncivil Wars is much more than a retelling of the ugly events of the 2000-2001 school year, when Horowitz was given death threats, shouted down, and called a "Nazi" and a "racist." The '60s-radical turned present-day-conservative mounts a convincing refutation of the reparations cause as well.

In his controversial ad, as well as in his new book, Horowitz outlines his opposition to reparations. Reparations divide the races and are therefore separatist. Welfare programs and racial preferences, he claims, are a form of reparations that have already been paid. Reparations paint a whole race of people as victims. And what about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died in a Civil War that ended with the emancipation of the slaves? Are their descendents owed something too? These are among the arguments against reparations.

Foremost among Horowitz's points is the oft-noted aphorism that slavery is universal; abolition is uniquely Western. "In the years between 650 and 1600, before any Western involvement, somewhere between 3 million and 10 million Africans were bought by Muslim slavers for use in Saharan societies and in the trade in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea," Horowitz notes. "By contrast, the enslavement of blacks in the United States lasted 89 years, from 1776 until 1865. The combined slave trade to the British colonies in North America and later to the United States accounted for less than 3 percent of the global trade in African slaves. The total number of slaves imported to North America was 800,000, less than the slave trade to the island of Cuba alone."

Perhaps Uncivil Wars' most controversial point is that if anyone benefited from slavery it is 21st century black Americans, whose incomes are 50 to 100 times greater than the average incomes of blacks living in Africa. Their rights, freedoms, and quality of life are immeasurably greater as well.

"The historical record shows that Choctaws, Chicasaws, Cherokees, Creeks and Seminoles owned black slaves until after the Civil War, when the United States government through a formal treaty forced the tribes to end the practice," Horowitz points out, also noting that a few American blacks owned slaves as well. Most whites, even at slavery's height in the U.S., did not own slaves. The ancestral derivations of the vast majority of people in this country today-from the wave of Irish that came in the 1850s to the Italians and Germans that emigrated during the turn of the last century to the late 20th century's flood of new Americans from south of the border-do not have contain any slaveholders. More significantly, there are no former slave-holders alive in the U.S. to punish, and no slaves to recompense.

The many attempts to censor David Horowitz's commentary was the ultimate tribute reparations advocates could have bestowed upon his ideas. Uncivil Wars demonstrates that these present-day Savronolas had good reason to fear Horowitz's arguments, which utterly demolish the intellectually bankrupt crusade of activists seeking money for nothing. Uncivil Wars ensures that those interested in what Horowitz has to say on reparations can do so. Fortunately, no newspaper thief, angry heckler, or censorious editor can do anything about it.