z45\doc\web\2000\10\plaut.txt From: Steven Plaut PS. The most important slave owners and slave abusers in the AMericas were of course not the ANglo-Saxons but the Spanish. They owned more slaves, and - while such things are hard to compare - there is no reason to think their treatment of slaves was BETTER than that by North American Anglo-Saxons. Nevertheless, this has never prevented the PC cultists from demanding that affirmative action programs for HISPANICS be adopted under the rationale of compensating the victims of slavery. Got that? The Hispanics are the descendents of slave owners yet they get affirmative action preferences under the absurd AMerican apartheid system of affirmative action. The 100 million death claim is one of the more absurd claims by PC Afro-Fascists. It is needless to say completely imaginary. AT the time of the slave trade there were not 100 million black people in all of Africa. And there are reasons to believe the number of slave deaths was quite low - for the simple reason that it was in the "property interests" of slave-holders to prevent such deaths. A dead slave was a loss of property. We know, from the writings of Black economist at Stanford Thomas Sowell, that southern slave holders often refused to allow their slaves to perform particularly dangerous tasks to avoid risks of "property loss", and these were instead often assigned to free Irish laborers, whose injury or death would cause no loss in "property". No one knows the real number of slaves killed or who died, but it is probably quite low, and in most cases probably caused by disease and not violence. Jesse Jackson has often spoken about the mythical 100 million dead slaves, and Chicken Lou Farrakhan has upped it to 150 million. There is no reason to accept such numbers as any less absurd than, say, a claim of 150 billion or 150 trillion. The fact that such numbers are sometimes bandied about by Black Studies Professors is itself the most serious indictment of the academic standards of such departments.