On slavery

SolitaryRoad.com

Website owner:  James Miller

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Info ] [ Mail ]

On slavery

The minds of the people here in the United States, and not just here in the United States, but also in all of the countries of not only the English speaking world (Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) but the entire Western world have been deliberately and cunningly manipulated by some very powerful group of people with ulterior motives not only in regard to the subject of slavery but also in regard to a lot of other subjects (as, for example, the topic of homosexuality). The degree to which these people have been successful in deceiving populations is very impressive. Entire peoples come to believe falsehoods as truth even when the truth is available in libraries and elsewhere. Exactly who this group of people who are behind all this deception is, I am not sure, but it seems very coordinated and well done. I suspect that the ultimate source of much of this is the universities (and intellectuals) of Great Britain. Moreover, all of the deceptions could easily be prevented with a good school system with well informed teachers. The problem is a bad school system with very badly informed, incompetent teachers — or highly dishonest teachers. Bad school systems produce badly informed, foolish people. It does seem like a very large portion of the “facts” that most people in a society just assume as true are actually false. One reason this can happen is that most people just pick up the assertions, tacit assumptions and beliefs of others without question. Ideas pass from person to person without examination or scrutiny. People pick up their ideas and assumptions from things like fictional books and fictional TV programs like “Roots”. They are not so concerned about Truth as to read authoritative historical works. Another reason it happens is because people tend to listen to only others of their own ideological outlook, trust the source, believe everything they hear, never think or question.

Behind all this is an agenda — a political, ideological agenda. It is all about the Leftist agenda. And the Left is able to do it because it has so much power. It controls so many of the centers of power in the West — including the mass media, Hollywood, universities, and the elementary and secondary school system.

The Left plays the populations of the West like a fiddle and the people have no idea of what is going on. The sheep are kept within proper liberal bounds by “political correctness”. Anyone daring to cross the bounds is publicly excoriated and humiliated. And perhaps fired from their job.

The liberal Left is morally, spiritually, and intellectually depraved. Just its intellectual attempt to transform the age-old institution of slavery into some practice motivated by racial prejudice shows its intellectual falseness and dishonesty. Racial prejudice has never had anything to do with the buying and selling of slaves.

The following is from Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell, Chapter 3, The Real History of Slavery.

______________________________________________________________________________

Slavery was an evil of greater scope and magnitude than most people imagine and, as a result, its place in history is radically different from the way it is usually portrayed. Mention slavery and immediately the image that arises is that of Africans and their descendants enslaved by Europeans and their descendants in the Southern United States — or, at most, Africans enslaved by Europeans in the Western Hemisphere. No other historic horror is so narrowly construed. No one thinks of war, famine, or decimating epidemics in such localized terms. These are afflictions that have been suffered by the entire human race, all over the planet — and so was slavery. Had slavery been limited to one race in one country during three centuries, its tragedies would not have been one-tenth the magnitude that they were in fact.

Why this provincial view of a worldwide evil? Often it is those who are most critical of a “Eurocentric” view of the world who are most Eurocentric when it comes to the evils and failings of the human race. Why would anyone wish to arbitrarily understate an evil that plagued mankind for thousands of years, unless it was not this evil itself that was the real concern, but rather the present day uses of that historic evil? Clearly, the ability to score ideological points against American society or Western civilization, or to induce guilt and thereby extract benefits from the white population today, are greatly enhanced by making enslavement appear to be peculiarly American, or a peculiarly white, crime.

This explanation is also consistent with the otherwise inexplicable contrast between the fiery rhetoric about past slavery in the United States used by those who pass over in utter silence the traumas of slavery that still exist in Mauritania, the Sudan, and parts of Nigeria and Benin. Why so much more concern for dead people who are now beyond our help than for living human beings suffering the burdens and humiliations of slavery today? Why does a verbal picture of the abuses of slaves in centuries past arouse far more response than contemporary photographs of present-day slaves in Time magazine, the New York Times or the National Geographic?

It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college library to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on the even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some European slaves were still being sold on the auction block in Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in he United States. Indeed, an Anglo-Egyptian treaty of August 3, 1877 prohibited the continued sale of white slaves after August 3, 1885, as well as prohibiting the import and export of Sudanese and Abyssinian slaves.

During the Middle Ages, Slavs were so widely used as slaves in both Europe and the Islamic world that the very word “slave” derived from the word for Slav — not only in English, but also in other European languages, as well as in Arabic. Nor have Asians or Polynesians been exempt from either being enslaved or enslaving others. China in centuries past has been described as “one of the largest and most comprehensive markets for the exchange of human beings in the world.” Slavery was also common in India, where it has been estimated that there were more slaves than in the entire Western Hemisphere — and where the original Thugs kidnapped children for the purpose of enslavement. In some of the cities of Southeast Asia, slaves were a majority of the population. Slavery was also an established institution in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus’ ships ever appeared on the horizon. The Ottoman Empire enslaved a percentage of the young boys from the Balkans, converted them to Islam and assigned them to various duties in the civil or military establishment.

...........................

Eventually, such strong feelings were aroused among the British public that anti-slavery petitions with unprecedented numbers of signatures poured into Parliament from around the country, from people in all walks of life, until mounting political pressures forced not only a banning of the international slave trade in 1808, but eventually swept the anti-slavery forces on beyond their original goals toward the direct abolition of the institution of slavery itself.

Nor was this a transient phenomenon. For more than a century these political forces were so unremitting that no British government of any party could ignore them, not even British politicians and colonial officials with no personal sense of a need to ban slavery were nevertheless forced further in that direction by political pressures. Not only were Britons forbidden to trade or hold slaves, the British navy intercepted slave ships from other nations on the high seas, set the slaves free and confiscated the ships.

Only Britain’s overwhelming power made this possible — and even then not against a powerful nation like France — but only extraordinary pressures at home made it necessary. Moreover, this was a moral crusade continually fanned by reports from British missionaries in Africa and elsewhere, as well as by anti-slavery sentiments from other sources. Queen Victoria told Harriet Beecher Stowe that she had wept when she read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Yet one of the signs of our times is that intellectuals have made desperate but futile attempts to depict the worldwide British anti-slavery crusade as somehow motivated by economic self-interest, rather than by the kinds of moral imperatives activating the kinds of people that today’s intellectuals find hard to understand. At the time, however, John Stuart Mill said that the British “for the last half-century have spent annual sums equal to the revenue of a small kingdom in blockading the African coast, for a cause in which we have no interest, but which was contrary to our pecuniary interest.”

While Britain spearheaded the anti-slavery movement in the world, the nineteenth century saw anti-slavery feelings spread until they became common throughout Western civilization — and only in Western Civilization. By 1888, every country in the western Hemisphere had abolished slavery, as had all European and European-offshoot nations around the world. Yet attempts to abolish slavery in the non-Western world provoked armed uprisings within the Ottoman Empire, and elsewhere peoples unable to directly mount challenges on the battlefield nevertheless engaged in massive evasions and concealments of their continued trade in human beings. After the open slave market in Istanbul was shut down, slaves continued to be smuggled in, often at night and in small groups, from around the Caucasus and from around the Black Sea. Suppressing the slave trade across the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea was much harder and took much longer than suppressing the Atlantic slave trade. While slaves were transported across the Atlantic in large ships packed with their human cargoes, slaves were carried in smaller and more numerous vessels, along with rice, fish, and other merchandise, from East Africa to the Islamic world.

...........................

No non-Western nation or civilization shared this animosity toward slavery that began to develop in the late eighteenth century, reached its peak in the nineteenth century, and continued to fuel the anti-slavery efforts that were still necessary in much of Africa and the Middle East on into the first half of the twentieth century. This worldwide struggle went on for more than a century because the non-Western world in general resisted and evaded all efforts to get them to root out ths institution that was an integral part of their economies and societies. When the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire raised the issue of abolishing slavery with the sultan in 1840, he reported this response:

... I have been heard with extreme astonishment accompanied with a smile at a proposition for destroying an institution closely inter-woven with the frame of society in this country, and intimately connected with the law and with the habits and even the religion of all classes, from the Sultan himself on down to the lowest peasant.

Similarly, the Maoris of New Zealand responded o comments on their enslavement of some fellow Polynesians on other islands by saying:

We took possession .... in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people. Not one escaped. Some ran away from us, these we killed — and others we killed — but what of that? It was in accordance with our customs.

When British Foreign Secretary Palmerston sought in 1841 through his representative consul, Atkins Hamerton, to get the ruler of Zanibar to end the flourishing slave trade there, this was the response:

When Palmerston continued to press for an end to the slave trade, Said pleaded that if he acceded to British demands his subjects would withdraw their loyalty from him, and support another claimant to the throne. And was he not looked up to by all Arabs generally “as the person who should protect and guarantee for them their dearest interest — the right to carry on the slave trade?” He reminded Hamerton that Arabs were not ‘like the English and other European people who were always reading and writing’ and were unable to understand the anti-slavery viewpoint. The British obsession with it was quite inexplicable to them.”

In short, what was so patently wrong about slavery — in the eyes of Western civilization of the past two centuries — was almost incomprehensible to many non-Westerners.

...........................

Perhaps at no other period in history was the contrast between the Western and the non-Western world greater. Here was the scene when the Ottoman Empire announced the end of the slave trade:

In 1855, when the Sultan’s firman was read out in Mecca and Jedda, it caused a revolution. Turkish officials, including the kadi who read the firman, were murdered, the garrison shut, and Mecca was in a state of revolt until Porte repealed the obnoxious order ... And when the Governor-General of the Hedjaz issued orders on 25 February 1860, forbidding the slave trade in all Turkish ports in the Red Sea, there was great excitement and fear of a recurrence of the 1855 violence. There was no Ottoman cruiser in the Red Sea capable of giving effect to this order, and Turkish officials were too frightened to enforce it.

Although the slave trade was formally abolished in the Ottoman Empire, under pressure from the British government, slavery itself continued. As of 1891, the imperial palace purchased eleven slave girls for its harem, as others in the Ottoman Empire purchased women as concubines — typically white women from a region near the Caucasus and the Black Sea known as Circassia — even though every nation in the Western world had by then outlawed slavery. Not only the Turks accepted such slavery, so did the Circassians. Mothers often groomed their daughters for this role and sold them into what was considered to be a desirable position, at least by comparison with what was available in Circassia. British foreign secretary Palmerston said, “the only complaint we have ever heard from the Circassians has been against our attempts to stop the traffic.”

Contrary to the “myths to live by” created by Alex Haley and others, Africans were by no means the innocents portrayed in Roots, baffled as to why white men were coming in and taking their people away in chains. On the contrary, the region of West Africa from which Kunte Kinte supposedly came was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent — before, during, and after the white man arrived. It was Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere.

...........................

Arabs were the leading slave raiders in East Africa, ranging over an area greater than all Europe. The total number of slaves exported from East Africa during the nineteenth century has been estimated to be at least two million.

...........................

Although by 1860 the Atlantic slave trade had ben effectively stopped, the slave trade across the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf took longer to be reduced significantly. Off the east coast of Africa, smaller Arab vessels called dhows hugged the coastlines, in waters too shallow for British warships to enter. Nevertheless, during the period from 1866 to 1869, 129 vessels were captured and 3,380 slaves were freed. When the threat of being boarded seemed imminent, the Arabs would throw slaves overboard to drown, rather than have them be found on board, which could lead to British seizure of the vessel and punishment of those who manned it:

The worst that could befall the slaves was when the slaver was overhauled by a British cruiser, and they might then be flung overboard to dispose of all evidence. Devereaux mentions a case where the Arabs, when pursued by an English cruiser, cut the throats of 24 slaves and threw them overboard. Cololm also states that Arabs would not hesitate to knock slaves over the head and throw them overboard to avoid capture.

Because there were only a few naval ships available to cover a vast expense of water in this region, British warships would often launch smaller boats to engage the Arab slave dhows. In these cases, as one study put it, “the slave traffickers frequently did not hesitate to attack boat crews in defence of their profits.”

...........................

By a variety of accounts most of the slaves who were marched across the Sahara toward the Mediterranean died on the way. While these were mostly women and girls, the males faced a special danger — castration to produce eunuchs in demand as harem attendants in the Islamic world.

Because castration was forbidden by Islamic law, the operation tended to be performed — usually crudely — in the hinterlands before the caravans reached places within the effective control of the Ottoman Empire. The great majority of those operated on died as a result, but the price of eunuchs was so much higher than the price of other slaves that the practice was still profitable on net balance.

Race and slavery

The instrumental use of the history of slavery today also underlies the claim that slavery grew out of racism. For most of its long history, which includes most of the history of the human race, slavery was largely not the enslavement of racially different people, for the simple reason that only in recent centuries has either the technology or the wealth existed to go to another continent to get slaves and transport them en mass across an ocean. People were enslaved because they were vulnerable, not because of how they looked. The peoples of the Balkans were enslaved by fellow Europeans, as well as by the peoples of the middle East, for at least six centuries before the first African was brought to the Western Hemisphere.

Before the modern era, by and large Europeans enslaved other Europeans, Asians enslaved other Asians, Africans enslaved other Africans, and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere enslaved other indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Slavery was not based on race, much less on theories about race. Only relatively late in history did enslavement across racial lines occur on such as scale as to promote an ideology of racism that outlasted the institution of slavery itself.

Wherever a separate people were enslaved, they were disdained or despised, whether they were different by country, religion, caste, race, or tribe. The Europeans who were enslaved in North Africa were despised and abused because they were Christians in a Moslem region of the world, where they were called “Christian dogs.” Race became the most visible difference between slaves and slaveowners in the “Western Hemisphere. As distinguished historian Daniel J. Boorstin put it: “Now for the first time in Western history, the status of slave coincided with a difference of race.” To make racism the driving force behind slavery is to make a historically recent factor the cause of an institution which originated thousands of years earlier. The enshrinement of racism as an over-arching causal factor accords far more with current instrumental agendas than with history.

The form in which the story of slavery has reached most people today has been along the lines of the best-selling book and widely-watched television mini-series, Roots by Alex Halley. Challenged on the historical accuracy of Roots, Haley said: “I tried to give my people a myth to live by.” This instrumental use of history — or purported history — is open to the same objections as other instrumental myth-making. First is the objection to falsification itself, that the damage which this does to the general level of understanding and trust in a society is incalculable, and can easily outweigh, in its long-run consequences especially, any immediate good that might be expected from an expedient taking of liberties with the truth. Second, even the short-run benefits are by no means clear. Has a sense of special grievance helped advance any people — or has what happened in centuries past been a distraction and an incitement to counterproductive strife, much as territorial irredentism has been?

Rather than debate current ideological agendas, we can try to determine what we can about the actual history of slavery, including how it ended. No institution of comparable age and worldwide scope has ever disappeared, over almost the entire planet, leaving so little awareness of how and why it vanished or so little interest in that question. Volumes continue to be published about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire which, for all its greatness, did not encompass one-tenth as much of the world as the institution of slavery did. Archaeologists continue to excavate the ruins of ancient civilizations in Central America and the Middle East, while military historians pore through archives and examine ancient weapons to try to piece together the history of warfare. Yet remarkably little is written about one of the most momentous moral dramas in the history of the human species — the bitter worldwide struggle, which lasted for more than a century, to destroy the elaborate systems and institutions for the ownership and sale of human beings.

.......................

While slavery was common to all civilizations, as well as to peoples considered uncivilized, only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in its history — Western civilization. Today it seems so obvious that, as Abraham Lincoln said, “If slavery in not wrong, nothing is wrong.” But the hard fact is that, for thousands of years, slavery was simply not an issue, even among the great religious thinkers or moral philosophers of civilizations around the world.

We may wonder why it took eighteen centuries after the Sermon on the Mount for Christians to develop an anti-slavery movement, but a more profound question is why not even the leading moralists in other civilizations rejected slavery at all. “There is no evidence,” according to a scholarly study, “that slavery came under serious attack in any part of the world before the eighteenth century.” That is when it first came under attack in Europe.

Themselves the leading slave traders of the eighteenth century, Europeans nevertheless became, in the nineteenth century, the destroyers of slavery around the world — not just in European societies or European offshoot societies, but in non-European societies as well, over the bitter opposition of Africans, Arabs, Asians, and others. Moreover, within Western civilization, the principle impetus for the abolition of slavery came first from very conservative religious activists — people who would today be called “the religious right.” Clearly, this story is not “politically correct” in today’s terms. Hence it is ignored, as if it never happened.

______________________________________________________________________________

22 Dec 2023