It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Excerpts from 'Intellectuals And Race' by Thomas Sowell
The history of slavery across the centuries and in many countries around the world is a painful history to read - not only in terms of how slaves have been treated, but because of what that says about the whole human species - because slaves and enslavers alike have been of every race, religion and nationality.
If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings - no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history.
But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and in the movies. The message pounded home again and again is that white people enslaved black people.
Just as Europeans enslaved Africans, North Africans enslaved Europeans; more Europeans than there were Africans enslaved in the United States and in the 13 colonies from which it was formed.
It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who go back to mine history, in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization, have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire or similar atrocities in other times and places.
Poisoning present by distorting slavery’s past
Pic
Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18th century. People of every race and color were enslaved – and enslaved others. White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed..
Incidentally, the September 2003 issue of National Geographic had an article about the millions of people still enslaved around the world right now. But where is the moral indignation about that?
"There are an estimated 27 million men, women, and children in the world who are enslaved — physically confined or restrained and forced to work, or controlled through violence, or in some way treated as property.
Therefore, there are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade [11 million total, and about 450,000, or about 4% of the total, who were brought to the United States]. The modern commerce in humans rivals illegal drug trafficking in its global reach—and in the destruction of lives".
There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries
Hey Classified, good post, too many forget that millions of Europeans were also enslaved and kidnapped from there homes, not including the age of Serfdom which was an abominable period in history which would put the numbers even higher but just taking into account Islamic raids into Europe and Barbary pirate and west African slave raids into Europe, these white European slaves were subjected to everything the African slaves later were (by the European powers they have always though been enslaved by one another and by the Islamic nations whom believe literally that they are FOR slavery, the movie Ashanti - made in 1979 - was based on a true story albeit dramatized) and even after the period of European expansionism began for a time the Ottomans still raided Europe for slaves until the battle of Lepanto - and then still continued on a smaller scale mostly Mediterranean island raids and massacre and enslavement of Greek's until the very start of the 20th century.
originally posted by: Mark08
I was pretending to be a democrat
a reply to: BlueJacket
The 1619 Project
In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. In the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.
Slavery had been practiced in Ireland for centuries before a Welsh slave in the 5th century got away, spent some years in France and then returned to achieve a mass conversion among the Irish to become Saint Patrick. Brocca, another slave of the Irish, was the father of Saint Brigit. Dublin was a major slave market, especially after the Vikings came and renovated the town into an efficient port. It must be added, however, that slavery was a looser system in those days, and servitude, whether to Irishman, Roman, Norseman or Norman, did not necessarily mean servitude for life.