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Your refusal to acknowledge the difference between prisoners of war and the institution of chattel slavery is a disgrace and a consequence of the American educa

by drekk 5y ago

Your refusal to acknowledge the difference between prisoners of war and the institution of chattel slavery is a disgrace and a consequence of the American education system that manufactures consent for imperialism and colonialism. Maybe to put it in techy terms, Europeans did slavery at scale. We live in the aftermath of that and the threads are still visible (former colonies are still captive markets that export raw resources, more often than not to their previous colonial master's). We don't live in the global hegemony of the Corsair pirates, so if you want to discuss bondage on the African continent maybe address the context that it didn't form the basis of the global order we live in today. Hitler is widely regarded as one of history's worst humans for just taking the colonialism European powers did at the time and applying it to Jews and other "undesirables" in Europe. While we're on the topic of America and how it didn't invent racism or slavery, might be worth noting how the Nazis got their idea for lebensraum and racial purity? I'm sure manifest destiny and one drop rules, or the fact that Long Island was the "eugenics capital of the world" played a part.

rsj_hn 5y ago
> Your refusal to acknowledge the difference between prisoners of war Prisoners of war? They were loot. We should understand the institution of slavery a little better. The economy of much of the ancient world was based on slavery. E.g. fighting wars to capture people who could then be used as slaves domestically and sold for trade. The objective of these wars was to capture this human bounty. Especially in Africa, this was why the wars were fought as slavery was one of the pillars on which the local economies rested, and this is true as far back as we have recorded history -- which is basically the chronicles of Arab slave traders buying slaves from Africa in the 7th Century on. The richest man in Africa - Mansa Musa - earned his great wealth via slavery, himself owning thousands of personal slaves but capturing many orders of magnitude more and then trading them for gold and other riches during the middle ages. And not only Mali, but all of Africa's great empires were slave societies based on the principles of fighting wars to capture both slaves and territory. To try to pretend that slavery was a modern invention only practiced in order to sell slaves to Europeans in the 18th Century and later is to ignore the entire (known) economic history of Africa.

by drekk 5y ago

rsj_hn 5y ago

> Your refusal to acknowledge the difference between prisoners of war Prisoners of war? They were loot. We should understand the institution of slavery a little better. The economy of much of the ancient world was based on slavery. E.g. fighting wars to capture people who could then be used as slaves domestically and sold for trade. The objective of these wars was to capture this human bounty. Especially in Africa, this was why the wars were fought as slavery was one of the pillars on which the local economies rested, and this is true as far back as we have recorded history -- which is basically the chronicles of Arab slave traders buying slaves from Africa in the 7th Century on. The richest man in Africa - Mansa Musa - earned his great wealth via slavery, himself owning thousands of personal slaves but capturing many orders of magnitude more and then trading them for gold and other riches during the middle ages. And not only Mali, but all of Africa's great empires were slave societies based on the principles of fighting wars to capture both slaves and territory. To try to pretend that slavery was a modern invention only practiced in order to sell slaves to Europeans in the 18th Century and later is to ignore the entire (known) economic history of Africa.