would you like some polemic with your caffe latte

Coffee with the Mammy in the Costa cafe.
"The papers are full of racial stuff about America," sez she. "You'd think America was the most racist place on the planet. What do you think? Do you agree with them?"
I let out a long low sigh.
There followed one of my extraordinary heartfelt outpourings, as mellifluous as it was inspired.
"No, I don't agree with them," quoth I with a firm set to my jaw. "America has done more to promote the partnership of nations, tribes and races than any other country. The rest of us talk about it a lot. But America is still the only country on earth where people from all backgrounds, cultures and classes, make a serious endeavour to accept and value each other. Europe doesn't come close. The Chinese and Russian dictatorships are to all intents and purposes monocultural. And Africa itself is the most bigoted place on the planet. Funny that the dictatorships are always the ones most likely to sneer about racism in America. America is still the land of the free. It's the only place where more than lip service is paid to the idea that we are all equal in the eyes of God. The present newspaper chatter about racism in America is substantially untrue and almost always unfair. As for the history of slavery. Many nations on earth were complicit in slavery. In Sudan the greatest ever Muslim uprising against colonial rule came in the late nineteenth century when the Brits attempted to outlaw slavery. The Sudanese themselves had built their whole economy around it. Who should be issuing the apologies there? Some countries continue to permit slavery even today. If we repudiate slavery in one place we should repudiate it everywhere. Slavery in Saudi Arabia was legal up until 1975. It continues there unofficially right this moment. In other Arab countries slavery is practiced behind household doors where serving staff, often imported like chattels from non Arab countries, find on arrival that they have no human rights and will be treated as serfs. In Lebanon, according to human rights activists, up to a hundred Asian serving maids are murdered each year by their Arab masters. A hundred. A hundred a year. Clearly it's a bit hypocritical when Arab governments suggest America is racist. It's even more hypocritical when Arab television stations such as the Nazi channel Al Jazeera pretend they are offended by the American slave history. Of course the Arabs aren't the only ones sitting in ivory towers, sniffily casting their sublime and superior judgements on the greatest democracy on earth. (By greatest democracy on earth, Heelers means the USA. - Ed note.) The anodyne fervourless stagnating socialists of Europe, those who have delivered the most inert democracies on the planet, they too rush to accuse America of racism. Listen. I'm just saying that the charge of institutionalised racism so often levelled against America would be more appropriately applied elsewhere. That's my opinion. If I thought otherwise I'd have been trying to get Barack elected myself. He's rode the wave of victim culture to the White House. But victim culture doesn't free anyone. Look at Africa. For sixty years the continent has been ruled by fascist dictators and Arab Islamists. For sixty years the dictators and the Islamists have been murdering their own people while crowing triumphantly about the evils of colonialism. This victim culture crap is past its sell by date. There's no longer any excuse for any African country to be ruled by any bigoted murderer. There shouldn't be a single Robert Mugabe, a single Colonel Gadaffy, or a single Jose Maria Dos Santos on the continent, never mind forty of the bast--ds. All the Mugabes, all the Gaddaffys, all the Dos Santos's, perpetually seek to blind their people in the midst of the most atrocious mayhem by reminding them of the oppressions committed by the white man way back when. It won't wash. It's not acceptable. It has to stop. Now that Barack has won the election, my honest advice to black people in America would be to disown those of their representatives who still want to mire them in victim culture. It will be hard to disown the victim culturists just when they've delivered power. But disown them they should. Because the power they deliver is a shibboleth. It does not exist. A man who thinks he's been born a victim can never truly take responsibility for who he is and what he does. Victim culture is slavery. We had the same problem in Ireland. The most mediocre, the most crassly invidious politicians among us, always sought to incite popular feeling around some alleged wrong doing or injustice from the past. The collossal Paddy Whack half wits are still obsessed by a famine which took place in 1840. Or else they're obsessed with the British colonial period prior to 1921. I'm telling you it's always the worst among us who want us to consider ourselves victims. In Africa, the dictators have used victim culture to oppress an entire continent. In America the liberal left have used it to elect a President. And good luck to him. He's entitled to his chance. That's the majesty of democracy. But victim culture is a lie. And no amount of flush faced drugged up teenagers thronging the streets and gushing about changing the world, will turn a lie into the truth."