MC’s latest essay concerns a topic relevant to the current media obsession with race and reparations.
Slavery
by MC
The story of civilization is the story of slavery, and the USA is a totally minor player in this story. It just happens to be rich, guilt-ridden and exploitable.
Humans have probably been a commodity from the very beginnings of human history, and young girls and boys particularly so. Young men are also prized for their strength and stamina, but are dangerous unless castrated — yes, castrated, just like an animal.
Slavery was usually a consequence of losing a skirmish, a battle or a war. The victors took their choice of loot — humans, animals and valuables. The humans were put to work, usually as laborers, servants or sex workers. They had no choice; the alternative was a hideous death.
Alternatively, one could be sold into slavery by relatives, or shanghaied by ‘friends’ and/or enemies.
Slavery is nuanced. There are those who are purposely worked to death as in Nazi death camps as a form of genocide, there are those whose needs are met and no more, and there are those who are not paid the true value of their labour, and there are those who are just bought and owned because of their own greed or laziness.
The mediaeval slavery (feudal) system collapsed mainly because the labor market was severely affected by the Black Death, and the runaway slave could consequently find remuneration for his labours elsewhere.
The wage slaves of England’s Industrial Revolution found that collective bargaining was a powerful weapon against underpayment and the ensuing slavery.
It is the Arab Islamic slave trade that changed world history, spiking the forward march of progress. Islam defines the Ummah and declares the rest of the world as ‘loot’ for the Ummah to take and enjoy. So from the middle 7th century these Islamic pirates, following their ‘religion’, shut down the vital trade of the Mediterranean Sea through their predations, and took hundreds of thousands, probably millions of Europeans into slavery, sailing as far as Iceland and Ireland on extended raiding parties. The historical blackout we call ‘the Dark Ages’ may well have been due to the cessation of normal trade and the lack of imported commodities such as papyrus.
The Vikings too may well have contributed to the Islamic demand for white slaves, trafficking people through Russia to the ’stans for onward shipment.
Enslavement has been a continuous process throughout history. We read of Joseph being sold by his brothers as an early example. It is still with us today, and may well be increasing, as Western Civilization is the only bastion against slavery. Communism and Nazism both involve the use of slaves.
The real revolution was the decision by Christian gentlemen as far back as the late 17th century that slavery was not desirable. We find the venerable burghers of Virginia pleading with King Charles II not to send any more slaves to their State.
Slavery was legal in the State of New Jersey until 1865, and one wonders how this could be tolerated by the Union (unless of course the Civil War was not about slavery after all) and just about everything to do with slavery and its perceived history is topsy-turvy (Afook in Hebrew)…
Britain enforced the suppression of the slave trade at the cost of the lives and treasure of its citizens from the early 1800s onwards. They were fighting an entrenched system where slaves were collected by African and Arab potentates and sold to the traders at the barracoons on the East and West coasts of Africa. The vast majority of slaves ended up in Muslim lands, South America, or on the Caribbean sugar plantations. The relatively ‘lucky’ ones ended up in the North American continent. But they were not alone: ‘criminals’ were also being sent to these places, and this became such a nice little earner that it led to the abuse of the British justice system to feed the demand. Of course the military, in particular the Royal Navy, needed slaves as well, and the notorious ‘press gangs’ set about the kidnapping of males of suitable age from coastal towns and villages. So we get the strange situation of the slave trade being suppressed by ‘pressed’ men.
Indentured servitude was also a vile form of slavery, seven-year men (and women) paid back their indemnity ten thousand times over, and those who survived the abuse for seven years were also vulnerable to having their servitude extended for trumped-up misdemeanors. A limited contract of slavery meant that the owner was only concerned about getting the seven years of maximum work value out of the slave. The long-term outcomes were of no concern, and many died towards the end of their contracts (and afterwards as a consequence) when they could be worked to death without mercy.
Globalism can also be looked upon as another inciter of slavery. To manufacture fashion sports shoes using the cheapest (unprotected) labour possible (including child labour) in places where one can pay a lower than life-sustaining wage is just another form of ‘justifiable’ slavery, to then sell those products as if they have been made in the West at Western prices is every bit as toxic as full-out slavery. Every day (in our ignorance) we buy the products of slavery and are thankful to do so.
For some of us, our great-great-grandparents were slaves, or maybe even part of that tiny minority who were slave owners, but that is history. That leftist groups are still trying to play the racist/slavery card against the very white Judaeo-Christian group that liberated slaves is bizarre. Most of the Africans who were enslaved were enslaved by their own kind, or by Muslim Arab slavers. Not all black people were slaves, and not all slaves were black people. So Black Lives Matter does have a point, but that point is about underachievement and criminality, not about police specifically targeting blacks. Other victim groups, notably the Irish, a major source of ‘indentured slaves’ quickly bounced back and became mainstream.
That violent black people get shot is the risk when indulging in antisocial behavior. Violent whites get shot too, and in similar proportion, the BLM problem is typified by the shooting of white policemen in Dallas, a gross and extremely violent act of so-called ‘revenge’ out of all proportion to the so-called ‘problem’, and which clearly identified an evil and malicious mindset only loosely related to historical enslavement.
What BLM really wants is preferment before the law, specifically aimed at destroying the idea of ‘equality before the law’, which is the Judaeo-Christian tradition and which uniquely led to Western Civilization and the abolition of slavery. BLM is working towards its own demise, following in the footsteps of Zimbabwe and South Africa.
The failure to indict the Clintons has declared open season on the idea of one law for all, and has further justified the BLM stance that they as a group are entitled to ‘guilt’ (Jizya) payments in money or in-kind for the wrongs of historical folklore.
Further, a lack of equality before the law is at the head of a slippery slope that leads straight back to the barracoons. A slave is not equal before the law. There is not one law for all if some are slaves, and BLM’s demand for special treatment for one kind of skin color is not going to lead us anywhere nice.
Islam still wants to enslave us too, it wants to make us work for Muslims, to pay a heavy tax to keep them in comfort. To leave one’s home to travel to Europe or the US with the intention of living on state welfare payments and the proceeds of petty crime is tantamount to becoming a slave owner, I have to pay half my income or more in various direct or indirect taxes; thus I am a slave to those who receive my money in the form of unearned payments. To those who, through no fault of their own, end up on welfare then there is a certain amount of sympathy, but to those who would enslave me by exploiting the welfare system, I have nothing but contempt.
Enforced redistribution of wealth has been a disastrous policy wherever it has been implemented. It places a serious blockage on the creation of wealth, and at the same time creates a huge pool of stagnant talent. Indeed, because it is the middle classes who have to pay, it polarizes society into ultra-rich (and ultra-powerful) and the rest. This system produces a new type of slavery which one might call ‘acolyte’ slavery, where there are those who hang around the tables of the ultra-rich hoping for crumbs and leftovers. In this way the ultra-rich can buy police and politicians and their ilk, as acolyte slaves to further their lusts for power.
Slavery is essentially a state of mind where the victim becomes property, a bought man/woman/child with no control over his life and destiny. One who sells his labors in a free and open market, and gets a fair price for them, is not a slave, but unfortunately it is the former which is becoming more and more common, and it is now possible to have a slave in the highest position in the land if he takes his orders/money from above/abroad
Unfortunately, we have a stereotypical slave, that depicted in 19th century US literature, an historical illusion. The reality is different; the black African slave presents a striking (and tragic) picture, but real slavery is still with us.
Islam keeps its women in slavery. Women are property and live or die at the whim of their menfolk. Communism, too, is just a form of slavery where a political elite enforces work upon the individual according to a planned economy. If the worker complies and co-operates, he gets enough to survive. If he deviates, he gets worked to death in a labor camp. Some slaves receive payment, and the lucky one receive enough to live on; others just receive only the basic necessities of life from their employers.
There is no monopoly on slavery, but the only civilization that has ever fought slavery has been the white Christian society of the West. Yet one wonders why that same society is so conflicted by guilt, a guilt ruthlessly exploited by those who would happily re-enslave us all. The only answerer I can come up with is stupid ignorance. An ignorance and a stupidity carefully nurtured by those who would bring down Judaeo-Christianity. ‘White privilege’ is the deserved reward for a job well done, irrespective of actual skin color, a remarkable job that had a high cost to the Judaeo-Christian body as a whole. That Marxism — that gross supporter and exploiter of slavery — hates Judaeo-Christianity with a demonic venom is unfortunate, but its useful idiots and enablers, secure in their touchy-feely emotional bubble, are too ignorant to see what their eyes actually show and hear what truth has to say.
Time to grow up people, and to stand firm and to fight back:
put on the whole armour of God, for your being able to stand against the wiles of the devil, because we have not the wrestling with blood and flesh, but with the principalities, with the authorities, with the world-rulers of the darkness of this age, with the spiritual things of the evil in the heavenly places; because of this take ye up the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to resist in the day of the evil, and all things having done — to stand.
— Ephesians 6 v 11-13 (Young’s literal)
MC lives in the southern Israeli city of Sderot. For his previous essays, see the MC Archives.
On a related note: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/08/islamic-state-if-muslims-ran-america-black-slave-trade-would-have-continued
If Khan had got to America’s in the 17 hundreds yep, slavery would still be a feature of life.
MC, very well spoken! As usual, of course. Thank you so much.
Great Bible citation and very apropos!
Keep up the God work!
BTW, my fore bears (not ursine golf players) landed on the shores of America in 1725 as Welsh indentured servants. We have a family legacy of laboring at the whim of our masters who barely keep us fed that is almost 200 years old. The story is the same, the words have been changed to protect the elite.
Just wait until Jesus returns, “As with the Mistress, so also with the maid.” Isaiah
Thanks. A thoughtful treatment.
I saw a documentary about 10 years ago about a Chinese factory that made ropes of worthless plastic beads that seemed to be used only (?) by Americans in Mardi Gras parades. The factory was bleak and the workers ill paid. No one could work in such a meaningless endeavor and not have their soul diminished. Workers were free to leave and return if they wished. But those who remained did so only because it was better than the drudgery back on the farm and they had no other prospects. I don’t know how many succeeded in using the factory as a stepping stone. One young girl left to try school in the big city but failed and returned to the factory.
The “satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution were similar, I’m sure. The outputs were not so frivolous but conditions were dangerous and unhealthy in some cases. One author noted, however, that whatever their drawbacks, those mills (and the cities) offered a better life than working on the farm.
Thus, compensated “work” can be uncomfortably similar to slavery and physical force or intimidation are not necessary to control workers.
Please let’s get past this idea that the Irish were only victims of slavery and not historically slavers themselves. In truth, they were as bad as anyone else. Dublin was a major slave trading centre from the 9th to the 12th century and this book: http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/irish-slave-traders-joe-oshea-murder-mutiny-mayhem-646357-Oct2012/ notes it was the Irish slaving clans of Nantes in France who effectively ran the slave trade for the French nobility. Even Ireland’s patron saint was a Briton taken as a slave!
“There is no monopoly on slavery, but the only civilization that has ever fought slavery has been the white Christian society of the West. Yet one wonders why that same society is so conflicted by guilt…”
Because it is precisely that guilt complex built into Christian ideology which drives the battle. It is not genuine altruism, but the fear of judgement in the hereafter.
Excellent article on slavery, not the most complete on details, but it’ll do.
Shame it glosses over some of the more salient points, namely: “For some of us, our great-great-grandparents were slaves, or maybe even part of that tiny minority who were slave owners, but that is history.”
Like the history that less than 1.5% of American settlers were slave owners, and that some of those were *black slave owners* of black slaves. Only 4% of African slaves ended up in North America, the other 96% were allocated to the Caribbean islands, Central and South America, explaining why blacks are so much more common there and interbred with the local population producing halfbreeds, mulattoes and the like.
The innate altruism of Whites, which was an adaptive survival strategy that served them well while they were struggling to establish communities in harsh northern climes, has been turned into pathological altruism and used against them by their enemies, who know which buttons to push in order to gain Whites’ reluctant compliance in their nefarious plans.
Oh, and where is the mention of the Jews who played a heavy role in the slave trade from the 1500s onwards, partly due to religious exclusion from other areas of industry?
12 Centuries a Serf…
and now Serf’s up.
Press gangs were an early form of conscription, which itself is a type of slavery, right?
“The story of civilization is the story of slavery, and the USA is a totally minor player in this story. It just happens to be rich, guilt-ridden and exploitable.”
What a brilliantly succinct statement.
The only reasons that MENA nations don’t have a very substantial Negroid or part Negroid demographic is because:
1) The males were castrated, the frank as well as the beans, before being shipped across the Sahara or the Red or Arabian Seas with a survival rate from such procedure of 10%; and
2) The female Negroid slaves who were made pregnant by their Arab masters had their babies murdered by their masters upon giving birth.
These above two historical truths are easily verified. Arab-Muslim scholars, apart from some modern renegades, simply don’t want to acknowledge this is why there are no “Blacks” in the MENA nations. They don’t deny it, they just prefer to avoid the subject.
Self-hating, guilt-ridden Westerners are simply unaware of the facts of the very long history of enslavement of “Blacks” by the Arab-Muslim world and instead of learning them, prefer to focus upon the relatively brief European involvement in the slave trade.
If the Americas had been colonized by Muslims there would have been plenty of enslavement of Sub-Saharan Africans there just wouldn’t been any living proof of it walking around today.
Full disclosure: none of my forebears owned any slaves. Except maybe the Viking ones when they invaded the south-east of Ireland (Arklow, Wicklow and Carlow are all Viking place-names) and enslaved another portion of my forebears and introduced lots of blue eyes and blonde or red hair into the blood line. Should I seek reparations from myself?
I am finishing up my course of study for my Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration. I have been studying business finance for the past three quarters. I have come away with an overview that while arrived at independently, completely agrees with what MC wrote. Though profit from business was to have been the business owner’s compensation for the work of managing the business as the owner was not paid until the employees were paid, the corporate system has now substituted shareholders for owners who have their managers making certain that the business continues to profit so that dividends from their shares continue to be paid. Thus, a second layer of profit needs has been added further reducing the return to those who do the work and create the wealth.
The shareholders do not care how the profit is obtained. They only care that their dividends are paid. Those who do the work are not regarded as human beings, but as commodities that are expendable and disposable. Proof of this paradigm shift is found in the employment division of the company. What was once the Personnel Office is now Human Resources, as though we who work for a living are something that occurs in nature and is available to me extracted and exploited like so much iron ore or lumber.
With this in mind it is easy to see why Islam (now shown to have been a completely fabricated myth) has not been put down like the rabid dog that it is, but rather imported and given center stage. As Islam demands complete submission as a religious duty, with death being the punishment for anything less than complete submission, the Elite now have the means to subjugate the population of the world to their will so that their interests are served and their needs are met, regardless of the condition of the population who serves them.
Of course our consciences rail against this as we know in our heart of hearts that this modus is, well, Haram (sinful). Humans should not exploit one another but should care for one another. This now begs the question as to how that sensibility is part of our underlying nature and guides our actions if we are honest enough to admit it and not so blinded with selfishness that we cannot see Jiminy Cricket wagging his finger at us when we treat others badly.
I know the answer and I can say that it is found in the opening chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans. So just as MC quoted Ephesians by way of exhorting us to stand strong in the armor that Yah has provided to us, Romans will tell us how and why we should. In that, those who wish to enslave us will find themselves enslaved and ultimately imprisoned by their selfishness that regards their fellow humans as chattel, fit only for exploitation and then disposal when no longer useful.
Was the Civil War really about slavery? That was the surface issue, the call to arms. The real issue was state vs. federal power. NJ kept their slaves because it kept them on the Union side. We are in the same situation today, with immigration the surface issue.
I’m still trying to decide if Obama was Pierce, Fillmore, AND Buchanan, or just Pierce and Fillmore. (He is actually more ineffective than either of those two worthless Presidents.) If Hillary is our Buchanan, then we don’t have much hope. It will require a revolution to change things. Once again history rhymes.
Many of the Union states didn’t remove legal chattel slavery from their state laws until well after passage of the 16th Amendment. Virtually all of those that outlawed slavery prior to the War required that former slaves leave the state immediately.
Not to forget–conscription/”the draft”!
Just ask any one of us retired old farts that you see these days.
Like so many of the “old” evils it seems, that as Christianity recedes, a return to universal slavery is inevitable.
Personally I would not include indentured servitude as slavery in that it was: 1) Voluntary, and 2) Non-inheritable. That aside, I believe, as ubiquitous as slavery has been across all cultures and history, that statistically there is probably not a human alive today who does not have both a slave and a slave owner somewhere in their blood line.
Mr Saunders is mistaken. By 1861 most Northern states had abolished slavery. And the 16th amendment has nothing to do with slavery: it authorized the income tax.
In regard to Bill’s point, initially the war was fought over saving the Union. But by later in the war, as the enormous casualties mounted and Union soldiers invading the South witnessed the horrific conditions of slavery (not least the light-skinned slaves who obviously were victims of rape), which deeply offended their Christian beliefs, the war also became a crusade to abolish slavery. Thus Lincoln’s call in the Gettysburg Address for a “New Birth of Freedom.”
Correct. Meant to say 13th Amendment; however, since the 16th Amendment effectively transferred all wealth and property to the national government it is arguable whether or not it has to do with slavery. Perhaps my mistake was Freudian.
Opinions differ as to the reasons for the War and Premisechecker lays out a good overview of the Official Winners version, shorthand: South Godless Badthink, North Christian Goodthink. It was a moral imperative that the Southerners be physically and fiscally destroyed, humiliated, disparaged and denigrated for a century and a half with no end in sight. Happily they had Grant and Sherman to invent total war, meaning war on the warriors families, so the world would be a safer place for everyone, except Godless Southerners of course. However, it was hardly as cut and dried as that, except for the slavering rapist running rampant through the quarters 24/7. We all know “Mandingo” was a documentary, after all.