The Redneck Manifesto How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats
November 11, 2004
Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto (Simon and Schuster, 1997)

Three years before the publication of The Redneck Manifesto, Jim Goad was self-releasing the magazine ANSWER Me! on his own press, Goad to Hell Publications (who also published Peter Sotos' first collection, one of the only books I know of that was actively suppressed before being challenged through official channels), and standing trial for obscenity for issue 4. Fast-forward to 1997, and he's getting a hardback first-printing for a book I wouldn't have thought a major publisher would touch with a ten-foot pole.

Maybe there IS some small hope for the world.

That, ultimately, is what The Redneck Manifesto is about-- hope. Most people probably won't figure that out from reading it, though.

The Redneck Manifesto is a two-hundred-fifty page rant, I grant you, but it is a savagely intelligent, well-researched, and downright laugh-out-loud funny rant, and like all the best rants throughout history, it has at its core both a simple truth, that the redneck is the last subsection of American society against which it's permissible to be prejudiced, and a solution to that truth, which in this case is that the rednecks, and the people who oppress the rednecks, have a common enemy who has manipulated them into being enemies.

This is nothing new, of course. The power elite have been manipulating segments of the great unwashed against each other throughout human history. They're still doing it. (The Israelis and the Palestinians, anyone? The Orange Irish and the Green Irish? Shiites and Sunnis? The Tutsi and the Hutu? We could keep going like this all day.)

Goad has a plan to get everyone clear-headed, but to say it's confrontational would be understating the case somewhat. His thrust in the first segment of the book is to make you aware that the word "redneck" is as much a slur as are many other words that we recognize as slurs now (and are thus unprintable in an Amazon review), and he does so by using them. A lot. For most people, there's going to be a shock factor, though it's surmountable-- especially if you're paying attention to what Goad is driving at.

From there, he launches into a very well-researched history of the redneck, which further clarifies a point he made in the beginning: that the modern redneck, contrary to popular wisdom, is not the architect of American race-hatred; quite the opposite. It's the book's most "scholarly" section, but it still reads like a rant, and that's a wonderful thing.

After that, three chapters on the culture of the redneck. It should be no surprise to those who know Goad's work that they come off kind of like a rapper telling N-word jokes; "it's okay, because I'm a member of the oppressed group." There's more to it than that, though; Goad is a misanthrope more than he is a redneck, and you can't just turn off the jaundiced-eye filter. This, ultimately, is what gives the book its highest street-cred marks; Goad doesn't make the same mistake other oppressed-minority writers do in confusing a desire for equality with a desire for revenge. He's not talking about the redneck rising supreme to put its boot on the neck of any other oppressed minority, he's talking about all of them, with all their many faults, rising up as one to overthrow The Man.

The book concludes with a strenuous, energetic dissection of those groups who really need to be brought down with extreme prejudice. If you don't get fired up after reading the chapter on the banking industry, pal, check your pulse.

This is an important piece of work, and it's especially relevant in the post-2004-election atmosphere of restless natives presently pervading the country. If you're breaking your back for The Man, be you white collar, blue collar, no collar, redneck, black neck, white neck, jobless, homeless, whatever, read this book. It is, potentially, a life-changing experience. ***** 2 Comments 82 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse

 

White Slavery Denial
QUOTE
The currently approved conceptual framework for American race relations dictates that whites—all of them, simply by dint of being white—are oppressors. Any deviation from this rigid script, no matter how deeply rooted in fact, must be immediately annihilated like a blood-engorged tick.

We are taught that black academic and financial underperformance—as well as black over-performance in crime—are the direct result of slavery’s horrid legacy. There are to be no other possible explanations. To note the hugely embarrassing fact that American blacks live far longer and under vastly superior economic conditions in America than they do in any majority-black nation on Earth may be factual, but it is RACIST because it undermines the ironclad Guilt Narrative that must never be questioned.

Here are some facts that The Script demands you ignore:

1) Even at the peak of American slavery, only a tiny percentage of American whites—about 1.5%—owned slaves.

2) Leading up to the Civil War, a vastly higher quotient of whites had worked as indentured servants and convict laborers than had ever owned slaves. Most historians, regardless of their political orientation, agree that anywhere from half to two-thirds of whites who came to the American colonies arrived in bondage. The fact that the vast majority of whites existed in a state closer to slavery than to slave ownership is something resolutely ignored in the modern retelling of history.

3) Documents from the era show that so-called white “indentured servants” were often referred to as “slaves” rather than “servants.”

4) These “servants” did not always enter into voluntary contracts. There is overwhelming evidence that many of them were kidnapped by organized criminal rings and sent to work on American plantations. It is possible that as many, if not more, whites than blacks were brought involuntarily to the colonies.

5) The middle-passage death rates for these “servants” were comparable to that of blacks on slave ships from Africa to the New World.

6) Indentured servants were whipped and beaten, sometimes to death. When they escaped, ads were placed for their capture.

7) They lived under conditions so brutal that an estimated half of them died before their seven-year term of indenture expired.

I covered many of these facts in my book The Redneck Manifesto. The chapter regarding white slavery is here. A simplified “kids” version is here. And recently Gavin McInnes and I covered much of the same ground in this video.

I’ve often discussed how guilt is one of the primary political weapons—in the long run, possibly more powerful than bullets. Since the currently accepted narrative is based far more on an attempt to quarantine historical guilt among whites than it is a sober assessment of the facts, the typical response to any discussion about white slavery is emotional rather than logical.

“To white slavery deniers such as Liam Hogan and the SPLC, these are all ‘false equivalencies’—possibly because they render the idea of universal white guilt as undeniably false.”

Ninety-nine percent of the time, “rebuttals” consist of nothing more than ad-hominem attacks, straw men, and appeals to motive. I often get accused of trying to “justify” slavery or of trying to argue that two wrongs make a right. When I counter that I’m arguing that two wrongs make two wrongs—and that I wonder why the sole focus is on one wrong rather than all of them—I am accused of being a racist liar.

Most frustratingly, I’m falsely accused of saying that white slaves had it worse than black slaves. No, actually, in The Redneck Manifesto, I was merely quoting people who alleged that:

Howard Zinn states that “white indentured servants were often treated as badly as black slaves.” Eugene Genovese claims that “In the South and in the Caribbean, the treatment meted out to white indentured servants had rivaled and often exceeded in brutality that meted out to black slaves….”

OK, well, obviously those were neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denying, minority-lynching, right-wing KKK lunatics saying that, right? No—both Zinn and Genovese were Marxists.

The book also quotes early observers saying much the same thing:

A colonial observer of Virginia convict laborers said, “I never see such pasels of pore Raches in my Life…they are used no Bater than so many negro Slaves.” A 1777 screed protesting the indenture racket claimed that a white servant’s body was “as absolutely subjected as the body or person of a Negro, man or woman, who is sold as a legal Slave.” In the 1820s, Karl Anton Postl commented that non-slaveowning whites “are not treated better than the slaves themselves….A 1641 law provided for all disobedient servants to have their skin branded, regardless of its color. A 1652 law in Providence and Warwicke (later Rhode Island) mentions “blacke mankind or white” servants. A 1683 Pennsylvania law contains the phrase “no Servant White or Black.

But rather than even attempting to dispute any of this, critics merely call me a white supremacist and think they’ve won. That’s truly how stupid they are. Or dishonest. Or stupidly dishonest and dishonestly stupid.

Last week I was alerted by about a half-dozen friends to a story circulating about the “Myth of the ‘Irish slaves’” and how it was based on “a purposeful lie” spread by “Neo-Nazis, White Nationalists, Neo-Confederates, and even Holocaust deniers.” If that sounds like the frothy, methinks-the-lady-doth-protest-too-much vituperations of a Southern Poverty Law Center press release, that’s exactly what it is. The article features an interview with a certain Liam Hogan—who is nothing more than an Irish librarian—in a frantic attempt to “debunk” this “myth.”

Hogan’s “refutation” consists of little more than character smears. When he wades shallowly into the factual realm, it’s only to prove that some dumb meme somewhere misidentified a picture of bedraggled white children as white Irish slaves. But by that reasoning, since rumors of human soap and human lampshades were proved to be false, that whole story falls apart…right? Otherwise, there is absolutely no refutation of the reams of documented evidence that not only did white slaves exist, they were often called slaves back then. Again, from The Redneck Manifesto:

During a 1659 Parliamentary debate on the white-servant trade to the colonies, legislators used the word “slaves” rather than “servants.” A Virginia law of 1705 mentions the “care of all Christian slaves,” Christian being a contemporary euphemism for European.

In my long and checkered life I’ve often found that people who make huge public displays of virtue-signaling and moralistic grandstanding are often engaging in projection. In an article called “‘Irish slaves’: the convenient myth,” Hogan writes:

The conflation of indentured servitude with chattel slavery in the ‘Irish slaves’ narrative whitewashes history in the service of Irish nationalist and white supremacist causes.

OK, two can play at that game. How’s this sound?

The media and academic blackout regarding white indentured servitude and convict labor—which were often referred to simply as “slavery” by contemporaries—whitewashes history in the service of a pro-black, pro-Jewish, anti-white cause.

Hogan also drags Ferguson into it:

Its resurgence in the wake of Ferguson reflects many Americans’ denial of the entrenched racism still prevalent in their society.

So I’ll drag Ferguson out of it:

The fact that white slavery deniers are using Ferguson to somehow dispel white slavery as a “myth” shows how desperate and intellectually bankrupt they’ve become in their attempt to quarantine historical guilt solely among non-Jewish whites.

But to white slavery deniers such as Liam Hogan and the SPLC, to even dare drawing analogies between black slavery and white indentured servitude is to peddle “false equivalencies”—possibly because to do so renders the idea of universal white guilt as undeniably false. So it’s not a case of me denying guilt—it’s a case of others falsely imputing it.

Since so much of leftist “argumentation” these days consists of guilt by association, the SPLC and Hogan ignore the Marxist and centrist historians who agree that white slavery was rampant and brutal. Instead, they go straight for the jugular of anyone they can dismiss as a white supremacist Nazi Holocaust-denier.

Enter one Michael A. Hoffman II, easily one of the most interesting alternative historians on Earth, even though Wikipedia’s dutiful social-justice termites have pegged him mainly as a “Holocaust denier and conspiracy theorist.” Along with over a hundred other sources, I cited Hoffman’s book They Were White and They Were Slaves several times in The Redneck Manifesto. Wikipedia mentions the book, but in true fashion it doesn’t bother to note its staggering reams of documentation from primary sources—instead, it heads straight into a critic’s description of Hoffman as a “racist.”

Although the “Irish slaves myth” story was spread far and wide on several sites last week, no one bothered to contact the alleged primary mythmaker.

The following Q&A was conducted with Michael A. Hoffman II via email. Tomorrow morning from 10:30-12AM I will interview Hoffman live via Skype on The Gavin McInnes Show. The program is subscription-only, but the video will eventually be uploaded to YouTube.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Taki’s Mag: Throughout his purported “debunking,” Hogan floats the idea that white indentured servitude and black slavery were so different as to be incomparable. Why is he wrong?

Michael A. Hoffman II: White enslavement has a long history in Britain and Scandinavia. Mr. Hogan, like so many writers on this subject who conform to the Establishment line, overlooks several points and has a naive faith in the white ruling class of Britain. 

The conforming authors don’t take into account that the study of white enslavement has been impeded over the centuries by two facts missing from their own studies and critiques. First, white enslavement carried with it a hereditary taint. As I demonstrate in my book, this extends back to the Vikings who looked on Scandinavian “thralls” and those born into “thralldom” as carrying a hereditary defect in part because their enslavement was hereditary. Something akin to this was operating in Anglo-Saxon England under the category of villeinage. The daughter of a villein could not be married without buying her way out of villeinage. The test of a young English woman’s status in early medieval England—whether she was slave or free—was decided by whether or not the local lord had control over her body, as all masters have over their slaves. Under English law, a villein woman was one who could not be married until she first offered the custom of the country as it was known, the “ransom of blood for merchet” (i.e., until she first submitted to sexual intercourse with the lord, prior to her marriage - That is wrong I think; it would be the non-existent(?) Droit du Seigneur - Editor).

Both in early Britain and Scandinavia and much later in the sugar plantations of the West Indies and the tobacco plantations of America (before cotton became king), British-American whites whose parents or relatives had been enslaved, or who themselves had escaped it, or bought their way out (as did some black people), were exceedingly reticent to identify as former white slaves or as their progeny. “Servant” was a far more attractive category, and we see identifications with this status and less so with outright enslavement due to the stigma.

Hogan has a pictorial display allegedly confuting my thesis in which he displays a photograph of what appear to be mixed-race people in the West Indies who are Barbados residents circa 1908, and he is incredulous that no Irish white “redlegs” are in the photo or named as such. We know from primary source materials that white slaves worked alongside blacks in the West Indies and that the word “redneck” was applied to them by their darker coworkers because of the tendency of the white slaves to sunburn. Whether or not their descendants stayed on the island to pose for a camera nearly 300 years later is a flimsy device for casting doubt on a historical epoch. Limiting oneself to the search for Irish surnames is an even more egregious error because it excludes the search for traces of the English Protestants who were transported as slaves to those islands in the 17th and early 18th century.

Hogan and company also support the notion that white bondage was mostly carried out within a framework of law. Here they are swallowing the propaganda of the white ruling class who were permitting the mass kidnapping of white children off the streets of port cities such as London and Glasgow for shipment to America under no indentures whatsoever, or under forged indentures, or as criminalized paupers and “rogues.” Upon arrival these youth were often put to work clearing forests and draining swamps. They were regularly assaulted, ill-fed, and worked to death. Britain had a surfeit of poor white youth who represented a potential for a French-Revolutionary type of insurrection in the cities. The aristocracy was only too glad to be rid of them, and I draw my evidence for this from state papers and contemporary letters and eyewitness accounts.

Hogan accepts the official tale of the slavers themselves, as they obscured their monstrous crime against their own people. So for him, there is no mass “kid-nabbing” (as it was first termed). He is blind to the fact that to facilitate white bondage under penal enslavement, the British ruling class contrived laws such as the Waltham Black Act [ Black Act 1723 ], which made simple misdemeanors (stealing lace, breaking down an aristocrat’s fish pond, poaching deer) into felonies punishable by “transportation for life into the colonies.” In the 17th century the tens of thousands of prisoners these laws netted were not sent to slavery in British America and the West Indies on indentures. They were sold at the ports on arrival. As prisoners they had no rights. Diaries, letters, and eyewitness accounts give testimony to their horrible mistreatment and slave labor. Mr. Hogan won’t call these wretches “slaves,” even though they were clearly handled like chattel (cattle).

It seems that a powerful lobby has decided that black folk have a proprietary relationship with the word slave. “You blacks are the slave race,” they are told by their liberal white alleged “allies.” If this designation is false, however, then it constitutes an act of psychological crippling. The history of the white race is in many respects synonymous with the long history of enslavement, and if blacks have a copyright on the word “slave,” someone should tell that to the Slavic people, who for generations were targets of Viking slave raids and from whom the word “slave” is derived.

The weakness of Mr. Hogan’s assertions can be found in his gullible acceptance of the party line of the white ruling class with regard to their whitewash of their role in white enslavement. The white ruling class is excoriated with contempt by the left when they minimize crimes of the British aristocracy and capitalists against people of color, but Mr. Hogan will believe them implicitly when they aver that white bondage was operated within a legal framework, and it only involved “servants.”

The kidnapping of poor whites has precedence in Britain. It does not have a legal basis per se, but it has color of law and we find it in the systematic mass kidnapping of British people for maritime slavery aboard ship for the Royal Navy. I can anticipate the objection: The bondage was for a determinate period of time. Officially, yes. An Englishmen was kidnapped off the streets and country lanes of Britain with the connivance of the judiciary and conscripted for a period of years, but in actuality these determinate number of years was not worth the ink that had been used to write the paper, when it so happened that the victim of abduction was returning home from a five- or seven-year compulsory voyage. He saw the blessed shore of England at long last, prayed that his wife had not run off and that his children and parents still lived, and then a few miles from shore, another man-of-war sailed up to his vessel, boarded it at sea with a press gang, and kidnapped him again for another multi-year abduction. This could happen two or three times. The kidnapped sailor could be gone from Britain ten, fifteen, or twenty years and killed or severely injured during that time. I doubt Mr. Hogan would confer upon this naval slave that title because if the slave survived his ordeal he eventually went home. He had been a slave for a time, and to quibble over it is to do a grave disservice to the memory of tens of thousands of Royal Navy slaves. Impressment was one of the rotten roots, along with villeinage, that created a precedent for an institutional framework for white slavery concealed under cover of “indenture” or some other deceptive and cosmetic rubric.
UNQUOTE
On the right lines? He certainly is.

 

Indentured Servitude In The Americas ex Wiki
Indentured servitude in the Americas was a means by which immigrants, typically young Europeans under 25,^[1] came to the Americas from the early 17th to the early 20th centuries. Immigrants would contract to work for an American employer for a time period, usually between one and seven years, in exchange for the employer paying for their passage to the Americas. The employer provided subsistence for his indentured servants, but no wages; he could restrict some of their activities such as marriage, could sell or transfer their contract to another employer, and could seek legal sanctions, such as prison, if they ran away. At the end of the agreed time period, the servant would become free to go his own way or demand wages for his work. In some cases, the newly freed person also received an item of value such as a small parcel of land or a new suit of clothes.^[2]

The consensus view among economic historians and economists is that indentured servitude became popular in the Thirteen Colonies in the seventeenth century because of a large demand for labor there, coupled with labor surpluses in Europe and high costs of transatlantic transportation beyond the means of European workers.^[3][4] Between the 1630s and the American Revolution, one-half to two-thirds of white immigrants to the Thirteen Colonies arrived under indentures.^[5] A half million Europeans, mostly young men, also went to the Caribbean under indenture to work on plantations. Most indentures were voluntary, although some people were tricked or coerced into them.^[6] A debt peonage system similar to indenture was also used in southern New England and Long Island to control and assimilate Native Americans from the 1600s through the American Revolution.^[7]

Indentured servitude continued to be used in North America into the early 20th century, but the number of indentured servants declined over time.^[8] Although experts do not agree on the causes of the decline, some possible factors for the American colonies include changes in the labor market and the legal system that made it cheaper and less risky for an employer to hire African slave labor or paid employees, or made indentures unlawful; increased affordability of travel to North America that made immigrants less likely to rely on indentures to pay travel costs; and effects of the American Revolution, particularly on immigration from Britain. In the Caribbean, the number of indentured servants from Europe began to decline in the 17th century as Europeans became aware of the cruelty of plantation masters and the high death rate of servants, largely due to tropical disease.^[9] After the British Empire ended slavery in 1833, plantation owners returned to indentured servitude for labor, with most servants coming from India,^[10] until the British government prohibited the practice in 1917.^[11]