It's a point upon which every faddish attempt to vilify America out of all sensible proportion — like the attempt made in this article — beclowns itself irremediably.
It's flatly false to say what the quasi-writer of this article says early on: "very few Americans were anti-slavery before the Civil War" and "John Brown seems to be an anomaly." Forget the complete absence of source citation here. Forget the complete impossibility of his having any reliable method by which to prove this wild asseveration. Forget even the weaselly "seems to be" wording. Instead note that the heartbreaking truth about human enslavement is that it's existed across all races and all major cultures, and it has existed since the dawn of humankind: Egyptian, Roman, Greek, Jewish, African, Asian, European, Mayan, Aztec, and countless others.As long as there have been human beings, there have also been purveyors of force enslaving their fellow human beings. And make no mistake: slavery is purely a product of force and violence.
In the words of an erudite Carribean scholar named Orlando Patterson, who happens to be black and yet who has none of the present-day pusillanimous illusions about slavery's widespread history:
"Slavery is preeminently a relationship of power and dominion originating in and sustained by violence."
The barbaric practice of slavery is not, I do repeat and emphasize and will continue to repeat and emphasize, confined to a particular race, racial type, tribe, group, country, or biochemical pedigree. No major culture is exempt. The abomination of slavery is an immoral practice of which all races, at one time or another, are guilty, and slavery predates every single one of the world's major religions, including Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Not only has slavery existed on every inhabited continent of planet earth, but it was for thousands and thousands of years, up until only recently, thoroughly commonplace. Please note also that in what is now termed the United States of America, slavery existed "long before Christopher Columbus's ships appeared on the horizon," and "slavery and slave-trading prevailed among African peoples since prehistoric times" (ibid).
The word "slave" itself is a deriviative of the word "Slav" – as in Slavic people – and do you know why?
Because the Slavic people were enslaved on such a gigantic scale for so long – both by their fellow Europeans and also by the Ottomans – so gigantic a scale that the word "Slav" soon become synonymous with "slave." In the late 18th century, Adam Smith accurately chronicled and condemned these very acts of slavery, which still existed in Adam Smith's lifetime: specifically, in Poland, Hungary, and Russia.
Our current atrocity exhibition which is better known as postmodern multicultural revisionist history isn't quite foolish enough to deny that slavery existed in Africa -- where, I say again, it's ancient, as it's also ancient among every race and pedigree -- though this same current postmodern multicultural revisionist atrocity exhibition would now have you believe that slavery in Africa was "a less brutal form" of force and subjugation: "a less repugnant" slavery, as it were, a "more benign enactment and manifestation" of this abhorrence.
Please. This postmodern revisionism is absolute nonsense, utterly false.
"The paternalistic arrangments were at one of a spectrum which included brutal subjugation and even using slaves as human sacrifices" wrote Thomas Sowell. "Africans were for millennia used as plantation slaves in Egypt, Sudan, Zanzibar, and many other countries, and the number of people enslaved within Africa itself exceeded the numbers exported."
Powerful tribes, moreover, like the Bantu and the Yao, routinely enslaved members of weaker tribes, and the Ashanti and the Fanti tribes later became inland suppliers for the European slave-traders who, for fear of violence as well as disease, were loath to enter Africa's interior.
The following, too, is something else you will under no circumstances be taught or told today concerning the heartbreaking truth about the history of human enslavement:
Precisely because slavery in Africa was indigenous and entrenched, the African slaveholders found it very simple indeed to cooperate with (black) Islamic slave-traders and (white) European slave-traders. Why, specifically?
Because, in essence, these tribal African chiefs were merely relocating their fellow African sisters and brothers, whom they'd already enslaved.
So entrenched had this practice become on the continent of Africa that when -- please pay attention here -- when Western societies like Great Britain and the United States began, at last, legally abolishing slavery "tribal leaders in Gambia, Congo, Dahomey, and other African nations, which had prospered under the slave trade, sent delegations to London and Paris to vigorously protest the abolition of slavery" (Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death).
Remember that last paragraph and put it in your next article. And the following two paragraphs deserve a mention in your next condemnation of America and only America:
Furthermore, in the late 18th century, when, in Sierra Leone, certain British attempted the establishment of a safe African haven for freed slaves, these same British were frequently defeated by hostile indigenous African tribes who attacked, slaughtered, and enslaved the British settlers!
In Liberia, as well, later attempts by Americans for this same sort of safe haven resulted in the same violence and enslavement.
Why is there no mention of these historical facts in this faddish vilification of the United States of America? Why is there no mention either of the fact that America, second only to Britain, was one of the first two countries in all known history to legally abolish the abomination of slavery, and that America fought a bloody civil war over the issue, in which hundreds of thousands of human-beings -- all races and racial pedigrees, the preponderating number of whom, however, were what this quasi-writer would call "white" -- died?
Slavery -- and never underestimate the significance of this, reader -- originates in and is sustained by the initiation of force and violence.
Which is precisely why in order for slavery to persist on any sort of widespread scale, legal sanction is required.
I urge all readers to process that -- and so I'll say it again:
Slavery requires legal sanction in order to exist.
The injustice of slavery is the most blatant and sustained form of rights violation imaginable, and it cannot survive its legal repeal.
It's for precisely this reason an absolutely incredible phenomenon that the overwhelming statist element of slavery is almost never explicitly named or identified.
Why is it almost never named or identified?
Even more baffling: why is the one and only fullproof inoculation against slavery – historically and also philosophically – why is it completely ignored, even into the present-day by writers, commentators, and quasi-writers, such as the one responsible for this quasi-article?
Why in colleges and schools across the entire world is there universal condemnation of the 250 years of American slavery – which, like all slavery throughout all human history, should indeed be absolutely condemned and never forgotten – and yet no significant mention of the fact that the abolitionist movement which eventually won out was grounded in the Western Enlightenment of the 18th century, and that Great Britain and then America were the first to formally, legally abolish this monstrous injustice, America even going to war over it – a war in which hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans died?
Why no discussion of the fact that only in the Europe and North America of that era did advanced thinkers – all types, all racial pedigrees – begin to at last assail, philosophically, decisively, once and for all, the horrors and injustices underpinning the entire theory of slavery?
Why no talk of the fact that only in the Europe and North America of that era was there an express intellectual intention of expunging the horrific theory that undergirded the legal sanction of human bondage, which sanction and which theory had, up until the Western Enlightenment, existed for all human history, across all inhabited continents, among all racial groups?
Why no credit given to the fact that this express intellectual intention of pure determination and philosophical power is what ultimately won out and succeeded?
Why?
Montesquieu, in his brilliant The Spirit of Laws, was among the very first to voice uncompromising, articulate, and thorough opposition to the practice of human bondage – arguing, as he did, that slavery is "evil by its very nature ... as corrupting for the master quite as much as for the slave."
Of Montesquieu, the even more articulate and brilliant Voltaire said this:
"If anyone has ever battled to restore liberty, the right of nature, to slaves of all kinds, surely it was Montesquieu. He pitted reason and humanity against all kinds of slavery."
Also, no matter how trendy it is to hate America and no matter how eager any one person is to rush onto the bandwagon and join that particular club of groupthink, one should not ever, in the interest of truth and accuracy at the very least, neglect to mention the full context of facts -- as, for this same reason, one should not ever forget either all the Native American Indians who owned slaves -- whether Cherokee, Comanche, Muskogee, Apache, Osage, or any of the others. Nor of course should one forget to discuss the black people in America who also owned slaves, including but not limited to the curious case of John Castor and Anthony Johnson -- both black -- the first legal precedent in North America to give legal sanction to the abomination of slavery. (Source: How Did Slavery Become A Legal Institution In North America?)
Most important of all, why do writers and quasi-writers of these sort of articles prefer complaining only about America's fractional history of human enslavement -- fractional, that is, compared with all other cultures around the world -- and at the same time completely ignore the many races and governments who right now legally sanction, support, and still practice slavery, a small sampling of which looks like this:
There are 167 countries that still have slavery, affecting about 46 million people.
While over a hundred countries still have slavery, six countries have significantly higher numbers:
India (18.4 million)
China (3.4 million)
Pakistan (2.1 million)
Bangladesh (1.5 million)
Uzbekistan (1.2 million)
North Korea (1.1 million)
India has the highest number of slaves in the world at 18.4 million slaves. This number is higher than the population of the Netherlands and is approximately 1.4% of India’s entire population. All forms of modern slavery exist in India, including forced child labor, forced marriage, commercial sexual exploitation, bonded labor, and forced recruitment into non-state armed groups.
China has the second-highest number of slaves at 3.4 million, which is less than a quarter of India’s.
Other countries that have significantly high slave populations are Russia, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Egypt, Myanmar, Iran, Turkey, and Sudan.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-that-still-have-slavery
