No, former National Review columnist John Derbyshire hasn’t seen 12 Years a Slave, but he knows it is a bad movie because it is unfair to the poor, persecuted and maligned slave-owners of the antebellum South. In his latest racist column, Derbyshire calls 12 Years a Slave “Abolitionist Porn” and chides the film for not including what he sees as the happier instances of slavery, such as one slaveholder who only doled out beatings “once in a while.”

“Plainly there was more to American race slavery that white masters brutalizing resentful Negroes,” Derbyshire writes. “Slavery is more irksome to some than to others; and freedom can be irksome, too.”

Derbyshire compares slavery in the US to the communist system in China, saying that “while there was much grumbling, and some scattered seething rebelliousness, most Chinese got along with the system. A lot of people were very happy with it.”

“In the matter of slavery, though, I already feel sure that the shallow good North, bad South simplicities of Abolitionist Porn and popular perception bear little relation to the thorny tangles of reality,” he concludes.