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The Heartbreaking Truth About The History Of Human Enslavement

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 please 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 unspeakably 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, 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.

All this is a matter of basic historical fact.

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” (Dr. Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities).

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 is also ancient, as it is 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.

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” (Ibid).

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.

Here, too, is something else you will under no circumstances be taught or told concerning the monstrous injustice and immoral institution of slavery:

Precisely because slavery in Africa was indigenous and entrenched, the African slaveholders found it very simple indeed to cooperate with Islamic slave-traders and European slave-traders. Why, specifically? Because, in essence, these tribal African chiefs were relocating their fellow African human beings, whom they’d already enslaved. So entrenched had this practice become on the continent of Africa that 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).

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 similar violence.

Slavery, never forget (and please never underestimate the significance of this), originates in and is sustained by the initiation of force and violence.

Which is precisely why in order for slavery to exist and 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 inexpressible injustice of slavery – which is the most blatant and sustained form of individual-rights violation imaginable – cannot survive its legal repeal.

It is precisely for this reason an absolutely incredible phenomena 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 true and fullproof inoculation against slavery – historically and also philosophically – why is it completely ignored, even into the present-day, while at the same time racism and authoritarian brutality are at the forefront of present-day society?

The one and only true and foolproof inoculation I speak of is a principle called individual rights, which entails a limited government that protects against the initiation of force – legally banning its instigation – and whose moral-philosophical base is rooted in the recognition of each and every individual’s right to her own life and property, and only that.

If you truly want, as I do, and as I have fought for all my adult life – losing many people in the process whom I thought were friends – if, I repeat, you truly want to rid the world of all slavery and racism and discrimination, there is only one way: the full recognition of and the total and legal implementation of individual rights – in every arena of human life, economic and political.

So I ask again: why is this principle, which is the only solution to all forms of slavery, racism, and discrimination, completely ignored?

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 (all races, all colors, all sexes) died?

Why no discussion of these facts?

Why no discussion, either, of the irrefutable fact that only in the Europe and North America of that era did advanced thinkers – all sexes, 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? I ask again.

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.”

Reason is the faculty for the integration of knowledge, which all individual human beings possess.

Wrote Spinoza.

This faculty, which all indivdual human beings indeed possess, is precisely the thing that today’s so-called racial theorists want you to reject.

They are emphatic that you reject it, in fact, because their entire theory crumbles into dust if individuality and the corollary faculty of reason exists – apart from race, sex, sexual-orientation, gender, biochemical pedigree – which it does.

This is precisely why you are now told that individuality is largely a myth, that humans have no significant idenity apart from the race, tribe, sex, gender, or group which begot them – that racism is something of which only white people are capable – and that to protest this undeniable fact is merely a sign of your “fragility” precisely because you are white and thus fragile perforce.

Do you know what this sort of obvious fallacy is called? It’s called a Kafka-trap – and it is a fallacy of the most puerile sort. Do you know what you do with Kafka-traps? You pitilessly crush them under your boot, and then you consign them to the only place they could conceivably belong: the dustbin of human knowledge.

I ask you to consider the following:

Even if you agree with #BlackLivesMatter, take one look at their proposed solutions to societal ills.

What will you see?

You will see garden-variety neo-marxism: a select bureau of supposed enlightened planners and leaders who alone are qualified to determine for the rest of us how we must conduct our lives.

This deadly doctrine can play out in no other way than it’s always played out.

Racial theory, Marxist to the hilt, loathes individualism. Racial theory therefore explicitly calls into question the entire notion of individuality.

“Setting aside your sense of uniqueness is a critical skill that will allow you to see the big picture of the society in which we live,” writes Robin DiAngelo, a total lightweight intellectually, an abomination who hates laissez-faire yet charges approximately $6000.00 per hour to lecture white people, many of whom own corporations and are quite wealthy, on their inescapable sins of whiteness. Robin DiAngelo further exhorts readers “to let go of your individual narrative and grapple with the collective messages we all receive as members of a larger shared culture.”

Uh, okay.

Reader, even if you think that’s good advice – and I hope to hell you don’t – it is crucial that you recognize the insurmountable fatal flaw in this (non) argument and all other arguments of this sort: if human knowledge is not shaped and conditioned by the structure of the human mind – regardless of race, sex, gender, pedigree, et cetera – but rather predetermined through “socialization,” as racial theory insists, this by necessity includes, as well, the assertions made by all racial theorists: their purported knowledge is not shaped and conditioned by the structure of the human mind, which operates by means of reason, but rather is determined and predetermined by so-called “socialization.”

Thus, there is and can be no standard or reason for us to think their assertions more accurate than the assertions of anyone else, including (for instance) Donald Trump. You see? You cannot use reason, even in faulty form, to prove that reason is impotent. It contradicts itself at the very outset.

One might also, of course, point out, purely for posterity sake, that “people of privilege” – and this must include, for example, black leaders in Africa, or Latin plutocrats in South America, and so on – are right, rather than wrong, in their authoritarianism, and thus that fragility is not a central concept in addressing racism, as Robin DiAngelo (et al) argues that it is. Or, in other words, by her own (postmodern) standards, there is no way here to determine accurate from inaccurate.

No matter how trendy it is to hate America, one should not ever, in the interest of truth and accuracy at the very least, neglect to mention the full context of the facts — as, for this same reason, you 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 you forget to discuss the black people in America who also owned slaves.

Most important of all, one shouldn’t ever (and I mean ever) neglect to categorically condemn the many races and governments who right now legally sanction, support, and still practice slavery.

One should, moreover, condemn these barbarous institutions unflinchingly, as one should equally condemn the regimes who enforce and uphold these institutions, irrespective of the color, class, creed, nationality, or race of those in power. Because humans are fundamentally defined not by race or blood or nationality, but by individuation and the rational faculty, and this is precisely why the enslavement of any other human being by any other human being, totally apart from race, is a moral crime.

I ask all progressives the wide-world over to condemn these current slave-practicing regimes now — I demand it, in fact — and I demand also, for the sake of justice and accuracy, that progressives the wide-world over condemn these regimes with an even greater fervor than the fervor exhibited in the hatred and fractional history given about America, which abolished slavery through a principle so powerful that this principle alone must always be returned to if full freedom is the goal, which it is.

I look forward to a loud and unapologetic denunciation and condemnation of (for instance) Libya, North Korea, China, India, Pakistan, all of which countries indeed still practice slavery on a widespread scale right now.

Here is a small sampling of what I mean:

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.

(Link)

Condemn these regimes now, I ask again, for precisely the same reasons you condemn America for her past — a past which America was among the first to correct, and which she did on philosophical grounds — but in addition I also ask this: condemn them with far greater passion since these regimes still continue to practice the heinous, immoral, barbaric institution of human enslavement, and since they still, in the present-day, continue to ignore individual human rights.

Condemn also these present-day slavers and their horrific regimes-of-power, so often Marxist or Neo-Marxist — and do so with the same or greater conviction that you condemn America and the west.

I will close with an open question to all progressives:

What do you regard as the more important issue: the mascot name of an American football team? Or the Marxist regimes in our present day enslaving over 25 million of our fellow human beings — and this includes forced marriage, forced child labor, commercial sexual exploitation, bonded labor, and forced recruitment into non-state armed groups?

Which?

Will you condemn as well, with equal passion, the Native American tribes and the Asians and Indians and all the other people and races who’ve fully sanctioned and practiced slavery since the dawn of humankind, as every major civilization in human history has?

Will you?

Or will you only condemn America?

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“Black Lives Matter Will Come Out And Start A Race War, But They Won’t Come Out And Deal With Our Race”

Today is the 90th birthday of the American economist Dr. Thomas Sowell — a true genius and independent-thinker, who’s been an inspiration to me for a long time, and from whom I’ve learned a great deal. I sincerely believe that it has never been more important to read and understand Thomas Sowell.

In his autobiography — A Personal Odyssey — Thomas Sowell writes that as a young student, while getting his economics degrees, he was, like most economists of that time, a devoted Marxist, but that in conducting deep and unflinching studies of the effects of bureaucracy and any number of government interventions, including minimum wage laws, Native American Indian Reservations and the disastrous housing projects, the data led him to an inescapable and overwhelming conclusion: freedom and voluntary exchange promotes prosperity among human beings; governments and their bureaus and their endless taxation schemes do nothing but hamper human prosperity.

As the economist Richard Eblieng put it:

“Thomas Sowell soon found that the people planning, guiding, and administrating the regulatory and welfare state had self-interested goals and purposes that often had little or nothing to do with actually improving the circumstances of those for whom such legislation supposedly had been passed. Usually very much to the contrary.”

In his book Knowledge and Decisions Thomas Sowell says it this way:

“Historically, freedom is a rare and fragile thing . . . Freedom has cost the blood of millions in obscure places and in historic sites ranging from Gettysburg to the Gulag Archipelago…. That something which costs so much in human lives should be surrendered piecemeal in exchange for rhetoric and vague visions of the future seems grotesque. Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. Above all, it is the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters’.”

On questions of race, racism, rights, justice, so-called social justice and so on, Thomas Sowell and his literature has stood monolithic, an irrefutable force, with reams of hard data which no academic professor of whom I’m aware has ever seriously attempted to refute in full. (Most timely now: Black Rednecks & White Liberals and Discrimination & Disparities.)

Thomas Sowell reminds us over and over how unique America was in its foundational principle — the principle of individual rights: the only country in the history of the world ever explicitly founded on this principle, and which, even when horrifyingly breached at different periods in American history, nevertheless remains the principle that must necessarily be returned to — a self-correcting sort of principle — if, that is, true political-economic freedom for each and every individual is the goal, which for him and for me it is.

In so much of his literature also, he reminds us how justice as that term was originally and constitutionally conceived meant the impartial enforcement of the rule of law, in which the rule of law referred to the protection of individual liberty, private property, and freedom of association and contract, as well as the freedom of each to pursue her or his own individual happiness. The law, in turn, was meant to represent the rules within which free people may voluntarily act and interact, without interference from the government or other criminals and agents of force.

Thomas Sowell disclosed as well, in devastating detail, that in the 20th century the quest for redistributive or “outcome” justice has sought to replace the true conception of justice — saying that most people are, in actuality, not overly concerned in their day-to-day lives with whether “Joe has earned more than Samuel,” as long as there is a general sense that their relative incomes have been acquired honestly and without favors, privileges, and political corruption. It is the self-appointed elites for whom this issue predominantly matters.

He is right: the administration involved in American healthcare, which has long been over 50 percent socialized, is one of the chief reasons medicine has become so shockingly expensive — because of the cost of bureaucratic administration.

Thomas Sowell also documents in detail the horrific consequences which have followed and must inevitably follow when intellectual elites seek to replace individual choice and voluntary exchange with their elitist social-engineering schemes: individual autonomy stripped, private lives transferred to government, voluntary exchange replaced by state coercion, even while more and more political schemes are continuously implemented in the futile attempt to mend the multitude of problems the original schemes created — and all “with little or no thought to the cost in terms of either material standards of living or their impact on the actual human beings who must serve as the manipulated ingredients for these redistributive recipes…. It is this freedom that is being threatened in America and the world in general by those who, like the Bolsheviks of a hundred years ago, continue to claim that everything is permitted to them in the pursuit of making us and our world over into their utopian image of how they think we all should be.”

In Thomas Sowell’s view, the primary problem with the social engineer can be found in the fact that the social engineer wishes to treat people as blank slates upon which the central-planner and her committee can imprint any desired behavioral qualities the said planner deems best. If individual human beings don’t conform to this planner’s preferred forms of behavior, it must mean that evil agents are at work against the government, and governmental force thereby justified.

Perhaps most controversially of all, Thomas Sowell showed in clear and cogent terms that what often passes for “black culture” in the United States, with its particular language, customs, behavioral characteristics, and attitudes toward work and leisure, is in fact a collection of traits adopted from earlier white southern culture.

[Sowell] traces this culture to several generations of mostly Scotsmen and northern Englishmen who migrated to many of the southern American colonies in the 18th century. The outstanding features of this redneck culture, or “cracker” culture as it was called in Great Britain at that time, included “an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and abeyant imagery.” It also included “touchy pride, vanity, and boastful self-dramatization….

In spite of racial prejudice and legal discrimination, especially in the southern states, by the middle decades of the 20th century a growing number of black Americans were slowly but surely catching up with white Americans in terms of education, skills, and income. One of the great perversities of the second part of the 20th century, Sowell showed, is that this advancement decelerated following the enactment of the civil-rights laws of the 1960s, with the accompanying affirmative action and emphasis on respecting the “diversity” of black culture. This has delayed the movement of more black Americans into the mainstream under the false belief that “black culture” is somehow distinct and unique, when in reality it is the residue of an earlier failed white culture that retarded the south for almost 200 years (Link).

And — brace yourself — this:

Sowell also says much about how the institution of human bondage is far older than the experience of black enslavement in colonial and then independent America. Indeed, slavery has burdened the human race during all of recorded history and everywhere around the globe. Its origins and practice have had nothing to do with race or racism. Ancient Greeks enslaved other Greeks; Romans enslaved other Europeans; Asians enslaved Asians; and Africans enslaved Africans, just as the Aztecs enslaved other native groups in what we now call Mexico and Central America. Among the most prominent slave traders and slave owners up to our own time have been Arabs, who enslaved Europeans, Africans, and Asians. In fact, while officially banned, it is an open secret that such slavery still exists in a number of Muslim countries in Africa and the Middle East.

Equally ignored, Sowell reminds us, is that it was only in the West that slavery was challenged on philosophical and political grounds, and that antislavery efforts became a mass movement in the 18th and 19th centuries. Slavery was first ended in the European countries, and then Western pressure in the 19th and 20th centuries brought about its demise in most of the rest of the world. But this fact has been downplayed because it does not fit into the politically correct fashions of our time. It is significant that in 1984, on the 150th anniversary of the ending of slavery in the British Empire, there was virtually no celebration of what was a profound historical turning point in bringing this terrible institution to a close around the world (Ibid).

For his lifelong heterodoxy and intransigent independence-of-thought, Thomas Sowell has been smeared by the left — the academics, in particular — as he’s also been vilified, antipathized, demonized, anathematized. Yet his theses have not been refuted or overcome — and for one simple reason above all the others: his ideas are largely right, and the ideas of his enemies are largely wrong.

Because the freedom of each individual — irrespective of race or skin color, sex or gender — is timeless.

On the merits of his arguments and for his articulateness in expressing these arguments — his power to bring complex ideas down to the level of complete comprehensibility — and his accumulation of hard factual data, Thomas Sowell is a total testament to the superiority of individual autonomy, liberty, and voluntary exchange.

On a separate but related note, a man by the name of Kash Lee Kelly — biracial — recently made a remarkable video in which he said the following:

“Black lives matter will come out and start a race war, but they won’t come out and deal with our race.”

Not long ago, The Longevity Project, which studied over 1000 people from youth to death, loosely confirmed, among many other things, what for many seems a fairly obvious truth — namely:

“The groups and people with whom you most closely associate determine the type of person you yourself become.”

I believe Kash Lee Kelly grasps the truth of this — whether explicitly or implicitly — which I also believe is the reason he’s able to articulate so perfectly why he himself does not care to associate with #BlackLivesMatter. This perhaps explains as well how he’s able to see past the tremendous amounts of pressure and hype, the emotional noise, and in spite of it all, spot the Neo-Marixst egalitarian-tribalism of today’s left, which categorically denies the primacy of the individual — specifically, I mean, in grasping how this ideology leads to mindlessness and groupthink.

Protest injustice, yes, protest authoritarianism and racism — protest it at the top of your lungs — any and all forms of it, and I will protest alongside you. But under no circumstances ally yourself with any organization or group which would replace injustice with more injustice — or with a mutated form of the injustice that the protests were initially protesting against.

Do not align yourself with any gang, group, clique, cult, tribe, party, et cetera, which in the name of reparations or anything else, would subordinate one group of individuals to another — and I’m referring here most specifically to the deep and disturbing anti-semitic strain which caused the Women’s March to implode, and the leaders of which, many of them, are now leaders and manifesto-writers for Black Lives Matter:

Know this as well:

Not wanting to be robbed or raped is not a “privilege.”

Indeed, the whole concept of “privilege” — and I implore you to consider this — has been twisted so tortuously by the postmodern intellectual elites that most people now using this term have replaced the (legitimate) word “rights” with it.

All humans, in other words, have the absolute right not to be raped and robbed — of this I assure you.

To call this a “privilege” is to invite psychological-epistemological chaos — which is to say: it is to confuse thought, since all humans, no matter the race, sex, gender, or any other non-essential, think by means of language. Proper definitions are therefore the first-line of defense against mental disintegration, because in identifying and denoting the essence of what is, proper definitions foster and facilitate understanding, comprehension, apprehension, which is how humans live and prosper.

I can absolutely assure you also that in conflating a “privilege” with a “right,” one is dealing with much more than mere semantics:

This is an epistemic error the ramifications of which are, in the larger context of what gives rise to it, a kind of indoctrination.

“First, confuse the vocabulary.”

Do you think I exaggerate or overstate?

Then don’t read the Seattle rioters’ list of demands — which explicitly call for yet another socialist utopia, believing, like countless socialists before them, that this alone will provide the exultant cure to the dark racist empire’s perilous ills by featuring a new 21st century era of censorship and segregation:

Or this:

Or this:

Or this:

Or this:

Or this:

That provides just a small glimpse into why this strain of today’s leftist ideology will, like the Women’s March (and for the exact same reasons), implode: because it’s philosophically bankrupt.

The collateral damage here will be all the well-meaning people appalled, like so many of us, by blatant brutality — brutality against any individual human being — and who, for lack of a better alternative, aligned themselves with this corrosive ideology, which, you may depend upon it, will not survive, thanks to the overtly racist, tribalistic, anti-individualistic (non)thought-leaders of today’s left.

Thomas Sowell, ninety years young today, is an antidote.