super sore right arm...
the first thing that jumps to mind is that i've been dealing with a lot of symptoms of ms lately, and it's more evidence. but i feel that's jumping to conclusions. it might be correct, but what else could it be?
sore arm = heart attack? it's on the right side, which doesn't *really* matter. but it feels like a muscle issue. i've had my blood pressure checked several times over the last few months, and it's actually very low. so, i'm going to write that off as obscure.
carpal tunnel syndrome? don't laugh. i do absurd amounts of typing, and noticed my left wrist was a little sore the other day. i think i'm going to want to monitor that. but it's a little too high up in the arm.
for right now, i'm actually going to merely assume that i pulled it a little doing groceries yesterday. i ended up with a bigger bag of fruit than i was expecting because the strawberries and bananas were both on sale. and i had a coffee in the other hand, along with a knapsack full of soy milk and oj, because it was also on sale. so, it was a big haul. i felt it as i was walking, but not when i got home; then again, you generally don't notice it until you wake up.
i do a lot of walking, but no muscle training, so i'm in very good health but weak as a twig. the solution is to fix my bicycle and start using it...
a sore arm probably won't slow me down tonight, but it might. we'll have to see if it prevents me from sitting up or if i'm going to have to spend the night in bed.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
the reason this is important is that the dominant crt race narrative largely upholds the idea of white supremacy. the idea of slavery as having to do with race is very recent, and came out of economic factors. for centuries, it was mostly about class. as class-based civilization collapsed in the dark ages, it became mostly about religion. and, as class-based civilization has been re-established, it's again become mostly about class.
i just think a global perspective is imperative to get to a real understanding of what slavery is, and this is in turn imperative in breaking down the hierarchical divisions. the way this is being approached currently isn't doing that, it's just enforcing the euro-centric perspective of white people as global hegemons - a narrative that is easily understood as largely false, if you're able to take that global perspective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BfYGsdv-OQ
i apologize for the source. yikes. but this is the value of youtube as a source, lol. this is easily verifiable.....take it as a starting point...
to rephrase this...
i've had this debate with white people. it goes something like this: if it's true that all races are equal (and that needs a statistical definition to be coherent due to individual variability, it's a blurry thing to try and even define), then why is it that white people have been dominant throughout history? if blacks and whites are equal, why have whites continually enslaved blacks for thousands of years?
and the answer is that the premise is false. slavery has historically usually not been about race. and when it is about race, there's no one skin colour that clearly dominates the other.
but by rooting itself in anti-empirical thinking on the topic. the dominant current leftist narrative on this (however wrong it is) is producing the empirical data that racists need to uphold their views.
i mean, it's a valid empirical question, right? if you want to know if there are superior races, you don't begin with an assumption (whatever the assumption is). rather, you look at the evidence and draw conclusions. that's how smart, modern people approach questions of the sort.
if you take this perspective that white people have been dominant throughout history, an empiricist is going to conclude that white people are, in fact, superior. and, to be blunt, i couldn't argue with the point; if it were a correct understanding of history, i'd have to agree with the deduction. so, it's important to collapse these false narratives and push the point that history does not provide this empirical argument at all.....
flipped around, consider the truth of the following statement: if it is really true that all races are equal, then history should show all races and skin colours and cultures enslaving each other at roughly equal proportions (relative to the social and technological abilities of the relative periods). and if you read it inclusively, history does in fact demonstrate this, where it is possible, throughout the old world.
i just think a global perspective is imperative to get to a real understanding of what slavery is, and this is in turn imperative in breaking down the hierarchical divisions. the way this is being approached currently isn't doing that, it's just enforcing the euro-centric perspective of white people as global hegemons - a narrative that is easily understood as largely false, if you're able to take that global perspective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BfYGsdv-OQ
i apologize for the source. yikes. but this is the value of youtube as a source, lol. this is easily verifiable.....take it as a starting point...
to rephrase this...
i've had this debate with white people. it goes something like this: if it's true that all races are equal (and that needs a statistical definition to be coherent due to individual variability, it's a blurry thing to try and even define), then why is it that white people have been dominant throughout history? if blacks and whites are equal, why have whites continually enslaved blacks for thousands of years?
and the answer is that the premise is false. slavery has historically usually not been about race. and when it is about race, there's no one skin colour that clearly dominates the other.
but by rooting itself in anti-empirical thinking on the topic. the dominant current leftist narrative on this (however wrong it is) is producing the empirical data that racists need to uphold their views.
i mean, it's a valid empirical question, right? if you want to know if there are superior races, you don't begin with an assumption (whatever the assumption is). rather, you look at the evidence and draw conclusions. that's how smart, modern people approach questions of the sort.
if you take this perspective that white people have been dominant throughout history, an empiricist is going to conclude that white people are, in fact, superior. and, to be blunt, i couldn't argue with the point; if it were a correct understanding of history, i'd have to agree with the deduction. so, it's important to collapse these false narratives and push the point that history does not provide this empirical argument at all.....
flipped around, consider the truth of the following statement: if it is really true that all races are equal, then history should show all races and skin colours and cultures enslaving each other at roughly equal proportions (relative to the social and technological abilities of the relative periods). and if you read it inclusively, history does in fact demonstrate this, where it is possible, throughout the old world.
at
22:13
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
you gotta check the genes, dude. and it adds up. sort of. there's a lot of white and a lot of native in there, too. but the dominant genes in african americans are the same as the dominant genes in western africa, and they're not found elsewhere. these are very different than the genetics connected to the austronesian migration across the pacific, or the native american genes. demonstrating a physical similarity to austronesians is not useful in suggesting a native american ancestry.
the similarity is the result of plasticity, which is very high when it comes to bone morphology. so, you'll notice that the indigenous people of brazil would also fit your test fairly well, as they look similar to polynesian peoples. yet, they are not genetically related. rather, this is the result of everybody living in a rainforest.
if you grabbed some people from sweden and made them live in the rainforest, it wouldn't take more than a few generations for the same traits to develop. you can already see this rather clearly with the skin tone of californians of scandinavian descent.
you're right about arabs invading malaysia, though.
wait, is this some kind of mormonism or something?
the similarity is the result of plasticity, which is very high when it comes to bone morphology. so, you'll notice that the indigenous people of brazil would also fit your test fairly well, as they look similar to polynesian peoples. yet, they are not genetically related. rather, this is the result of everybody living in a rainforest.
if you grabbed some people from sweden and made them live in the rainforest, it wouldn't take more than a few generations for the same traits to develop. you can already see this rather clearly with the skin tone of californians of scandinavian descent.
you're right about arabs invading malaysia, though.
wait, is this some kind of mormonism or something?
at
21:21
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
you know, i don't want to really disagree with her exactly, but i think she's taking a fairly narrow approach. but, i mean, she's what, 23? sometimes 23 year-olds sound like 23 year-olds.
she kind of picked a bad example with agriculture, because nobody's going to argue that agriculture originated in africa. excluding the nile valley, which is in africa but is geographically separated from the rest of africa, africa doesn't really have the right climate for this. it's generally understood that hunter-gatherer societies carried on in africa because it made more sense to continue that way of life in the region. agriculture developed for reasons that weren't applicable to most of africa, and didn't make sense in the terrain. now, it's hard to be sure about things that happened thousands of years before written history, but the widely held consensus is that agriculture developed in the near east about 10,000 years ago. there's some evidence that it may have developed independently in china. but, nobody argues against the idea that the agriculture that took root in the nile and moved south to ethiopia migrated into africa from the "fertile crescent".
that being said, there's some evidence that some of the earliest egyptian civilization may have been black. very contentious topic. you're arguing over the shapes of noses in carvings and wall paintings. but, i think the evidence actually does lean in that direction, indicating that one of the earliest advanced cultures was probably a black culture. the idea is that it probably developed around the modern sudan and moved north up the nile. over time, it would have converted itself into a white culture through migration and integration into a series of asian and european empires. now, here's the twist on this: the same evidence that suggests that the civilization was black in it's earliest stages suggests that they had white slaves. so, you've got to swallow a poison pill, there.
i don't want to trivialize the african slave trade, but the idea that it was about race is sort of a half-truth. it was actually mostly about religion. i can't write an essay here, so i'll do it in point form. this is the historical timeline...
1) arabs declared non-muslims slaves. arabs didn't invent slavery, and they probably weren't the first to racialize it, but racial based slavery was not common in the roman world that they took over, so this was a relatively novel development. but, it was really about religion, not race. the arabs enslaved africa thousands of years before westerners did. but, they also enslaved white slavs in eastern europe (slave and slav are, in fact, etymologically identical - the english word for slave is ethnic, but it refers to eastern europeans, rather than blacks), indians and anybody else that wouldn't convert. this was the result of the systemic slavery of eastern europeans in the muslim world.
2) the catholic church copied this with a papal bull in 1452 that declared anybody that wasn't a christian a slave. and, in fact, when catholic europeans sailed to ethiopia and found christians there, they could not legally enslave them and consequently did not. the ethiopian state survived as an independent african kingdom deep into the colonial period, before finally being conquered.
3) the reformation happened, which made northern europe independent from southern europe for the first time since charlemagne (how's that for an over-simplification?). this took countries like england outside of papal authority. but, the same basic idea of religion being the dominant reason for slavery continued to apply, and was often inverted. rather than catholics enslaving non-catholics, you had protestants enslaving catholics. hence the enslavement of ireland. meanwhile, countries like spain continued to follow the papal bull and enslave the non-christian cultures they could conquer.
4) the slave trade was commercialized, which is when it got really brutal. and plenty people in africa of multiple ethnicities - blacks, whites, arabs - made a lot of money from it. america was built on top of this slavery, but it still wasn't fully racialized. a plantation in the period would have had a mix of african, irish and native american slaves. many black americans have significant irish ancestry as the result of slave owners trying to "cross-breed" them for traits the way you'd cross-breed dogs.
5) there was always a contradiction in puritanical christians building a country on top of slavery based on non-conversion. the idea doesn't really jive well with utopian christian virtue, and the white american settlers were in many ways all about that. it wasn't until after slavery had become institutionalized in the united states (and this is relatively late - the early 1800s), and people started questioning the increasing brutality of it (partly due to their puritanical upbringing...) that religious justifications were converted into racial ones. all of a sudden, you had the church arguing for racialized slavery using biblical quotes. even as the civil war was happening and rights were being won, this hierarchical idea of race-based labour was institutionalized.
6) over the last few generations, the dominant enslaved group in the united states has actually shifted from purchased black slaves in the southeast to migrant workers in the southwest. black slavery didn't end so much as it took on the form of incarceration over trivial laws.
what i'm getting at with this is that the entire narrative revolves around casting the african out as the other - and the bulk of the justification came from religion first, and race second.
so, what is black culture, then? well, if you're going to tell me i shouldn't listen to hip-hop because i'm white, you're just enforcing the separation and upholding the hierarchy. the premise of music belonging to a culture at all strikes me as kind of ridiculous. i'm not going to tell a black guy he can't listen to rachmaninov (i'm skipping over beethoven for a specific reason) or play romantic piano music because he's black. i'd rather listen to the tunes than get weirded out by somebody's skin tone. and i don't understand why anybody would want to tell me i can't listen to or perform hip-hop because i'm white, or that it ought to be "pop" instead.
that kind of integration ought to be viewed positively. and, i get that the history here kind of sucks, given that blacks have largely lost the last few forms they pioneered. but, i think it's a complex question as to whether it was truly lost/stolen or if it was abandoned.
i just don't see how we're moving forwards with this separation of music and art into colours, when we live in such proximity with each other and share so many experiences....
she kind of picked a bad example with agriculture, because nobody's going to argue that agriculture originated in africa. excluding the nile valley, which is in africa but is geographically separated from the rest of africa, africa doesn't really have the right climate for this. it's generally understood that hunter-gatherer societies carried on in africa because it made more sense to continue that way of life in the region. agriculture developed for reasons that weren't applicable to most of africa, and didn't make sense in the terrain. now, it's hard to be sure about things that happened thousands of years before written history, but the widely held consensus is that agriculture developed in the near east about 10,000 years ago. there's some evidence that it may have developed independently in china. but, nobody argues against the idea that the agriculture that took root in the nile and moved south to ethiopia migrated into africa from the "fertile crescent".
that being said, there's some evidence that some of the earliest egyptian civilization may have been black. very contentious topic. you're arguing over the shapes of noses in carvings and wall paintings. but, i think the evidence actually does lean in that direction, indicating that one of the earliest advanced cultures was probably a black culture. the idea is that it probably developed around the modern sudan and moved north up the nile. over time, it would have converted itself into a white culture through migration and integration into a series of asian and european empires. now, here's the twist on this: the same evidence that suggests that the civilization was black in it's earliest stages suggests that they had white slaves. so, you've got to swallow a poison pill, there.
i don't want to trivialize the african slave trade, but the idea that it was about race is sort of a half-truth. it was actually mostly about religion. i can't write an essay here, so i'll do it in point form. this is the historical timeline...
1) arabs declared non-muslims slaves. arabs didn't invent slavery, and they probably weren't the first to racialize it, but racial based slavery was not common in the roman world that they took over, so this was a relatively novel development. but, it was really about religion, not race. the arabs enslaved africa thousands of years before westerners did. but, they also enslaved white slavs in eastern europe (slave and slav are, in fact, etymologically identical - the english word for slave is ethnic, but it refers to eastern europeans, rather than blacks), indians and anybody else that wouldn't convert. this was the result of the systemic slavery of eastern europeans in the muslim world.
2) the catholic church copied this with a papal bull in 1452 that declared anybody that wasn't a christian a slave. and, in fact, when catholic europeans sailed to ethiopia and found christians there, they could not legally enslave them and consequently did not. the ethiopian state survived as an independent african kingdom deep into the colonial period, before finally being conquered.
3) the reformation happened, which made northern europe independent from southern europe for the first time since charlemagne (how's that for an over-simplification?). this took countries like england outside of papal authority. but, the same basic idea of religion being the dominant reason for slavery continued to apply, and was often inverted. rather than catholics enslaving non-catholics, you had protestants enslaving catholics. hence the enslavement of ireland. meanwhile, countries like spain continued to follow the papal bull and enslave the non-christian cultures they could conquer.
4) the slave trade was commercialized, which is when it got really brutal. and plenty people in africa of multiple ethnicities - blacks, whites, arabs - made a lot of money from it. america was built on top of this slavery, but it still wasn't fully racialized. a plantation in the period would have had a mix of african, irish and native american slaves. many black americans have significant irish ancestry as the result of slave owners trying to "cross-breed" them for traits the way you'd cross-breed dogs.
5) there was always a contradiction in puritanical christians building a country on top of slavery based on non-conversion. the idea doesn't really jive well with utopian christian virtue, and the white american settlers were in many ways all about that. it wasn't until after slavery had become institutionalized in the united states (and this is relatively late - the early 1800s), and people started questioning the increasing brutality of it (partly due to their puritanical upbringing...) that religious justifications were converted into racial ones. all of a sudden, you had the church arguing for racialized slavery using biblical quotes. even as the civil war was happening and rights were being won, this hierarchical idea of race-based labour was institutionalized.
6) over the last few generations, the dominant enslaved group in the united states has actually shifted from purchased black slaves in the southeast to migrant workers in the southwest. black slavery didn't end so much as it took on the form of incarceration over trivial laws.
what i'm getting at with this is that the entire narrative revolves around casting the african out as the other - and the bulk of the justification came from religion first, and race second.
so, what is black culture, then? well, if you're going to tell me i shouldn't listen to hip-hop because i'm white, you're just enforcing the separation and upholding the hierarchy. the premise of music belonging to a culture at all strikes me as kind of ridiculous. i'm not going to tell a black guy he can't listen to rachmaninov (i'm skipping over beethoven for a specific reason) or play romantic piano music because he's black. i'd rather listen to the tunes than get weirded out by somebody's skin tone. and i don't understand why anybody would want to tell me i can't listen to or perform hip-hop because i'm white, or that it ought to be "pop" instead.
that kind of integration ought to be viewed positively. and, i get that the history here kind of sucks, given that blacks have largely lost the last few forms they pioneered. but, i think it's a complex question as to whether it was truly lost/stolen or if it was abandoned.
i just don't see how we're moving forwards with this separation of music and art into colours, when we live in such proximity with each other and share so many experiences....
at
20:41
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
it's incredibly pointless to try and argue whether white or black slavery was "worse".
firemedic30ca
It's not really an argument of which was worse as much higher as it is a demand for recognition. The fact of the matter is every race on the planet has been a victim of slavery. It's rich vs poor, and was never skin color vs skin color, like most are taught to believe. The sickening part of this is the refusal of any one to accept it, there by allowing another part of our dark history to be forgotten.
Now, slavery was horrible no matter what your color. However, there was a point in time in which African slaves were highly priced and sought after as they were considered harder workers, while white slaves were not. This lead to more deaths among the white slave population simply because they were a dime a dozen and less desirable. The torture and punishment was essentially the same, but whites suffered a higher mortality rate. One could argue that because the blacks lived longer and suffered more, that life for them was worse because they weren't afforded the mercy of dying and no longer being a victim.
Facts are facts. This happened, and the circumstances are what they are. Accepting it doesn't make you racist, doesn't down play black suffering or change it in anyway for the rest of the world. It only changes the perceived power of those that continuously attempt to use black slavery to their favor.
deathtokoalas
i was responding to the comments section, which is full of debates about which is "worse".
but it's equally important to take slavery out of the western colonial context you're pigeonholing it into. the largest slave trading civilization in history was not america but the islamic empire, which transported upwards of ten times as many slaves out of an area that included modern day africa, india and ukraine. it's quite instructive to look at the systemic system of slavery that the arabs set up. it's a little bit unique in it's "diversity of slavery" due to the fact that they were in the middle of the world. an arab slave harem would have had people of just about every colour in it. nor would their colour have had anything to do with their condition. the mongols also took white slaves.
from the racial perspective, the arabs did not treat ukrainians any differently than they treated africans. both were inferior peoples. and they lived roughly similar lifestyles based around small agricultural villages, pastoralism and hunting. arab slave traders would land in the crimea and go out and round them up out of their villages. it was really identical to anything you'd imagine a spanish slave raid of west africa would look like, except the skin colour was reversed.
what it actually had to do with in all of these circumstances was not race or wealth but religion. i mean, it's about economics, obviously. but the criteria for oppression was always "you're in the wrong religion". the muslims simply enslaved anyone who wasn't muslim. white, black, whatever - didn't matter. the basis of slavery in western colonies is actually based on a papal emulation of this muslim economic policy, starting from a papal bull in 1452 that gave the portugese king the right to enslave non-christians. the british enslavement of catholic ireland is also religious in justification.
and, they were consistent about this in weird ways, too. one of the oldest churches in the world is actually in ethiopia. it seems to have been christianized in the roman era, and then cut off from europe - and never islamized. when the portugese arrived in ethiopia and found christians, they did not enslave them - because they did not have papal authority to do so. in fact, they formed an alliance with them against the "saracens". the result was a war where white europeans and black africans fought against arabs based on religion rather than skin colour.
so, what you're saying is correct. but it needs broader context. slavery is not and never has been about one race's superiority over another. it's always been economic in justification, and centered around broad civilizational themes. skin colour was one civilizational theme, but very short-lived. things like religion and language have historically been far more important in determining who the elite subjugates.
cogli
you are absolutely correct. And that is continuously manipulated for and by what ever socioeconomic agenda is being foisted upon us at any given moment..at which time talking of Koala we could use the ReClaim Australia movement as a classic example of your theme...the main thing that stands out with all of this is the manipulation of ignorance, lack of historical knowledge and context. Interesting also that throughout these discussions when discussing the Americas nobody has thought to mention the Chinese..on a scale of who had it worse ..phew! that's like losing the number 10. .............. But the interesting thing with the Irish that I have found, is how profoundly the Ireland Irish were shocked and horrified by what racist bigots the American Irish had become by the early 1900s..this blog and others like it made me do a little digging and there are a massive number of comments by De Valera, Collins, The IRA right the way through to the 70s when discussing funding from The USA how they are happy to work with The American Black liberation movements and Islamic groups but were not in favour of accepting aid from Irish American groups they labelled " a bunch of racist bigots"..which was bit surprising compared to urban myth....... Interesting also is that the polling in the USA showed that The Jewish Americans were by far and wide the greatest supporters of the Black Liberation and Black equality movements throughout the 40s 50s 60s and 70s ..so some eye openers there...and if we go back to your premise and apply it to the current elite model, it is interesting to see that Ireland has deliberately and forcefully blocked all attempts for anti Islamic protests to get off the ground.. their anti Islamic march as a result, managed to get only 12 protestors..where as the Australian elite are using these protests as an asset/ blind/diversion...so the alignments are still following very very old trading paths at the same time as showing,... how cultures self colonise to fit the elite of their environment in order to survive and succeed...your comment reminds me of the statement by the ex head of IBM at a Multinational Corporations meeting in the 90s :::"we are now in the privileged position where we farm the entire world by the logic of profit..We decide what education a country gets or if it gets one. What toothpaste they use and what they eat for breakfast and Culture, Race, Religion and National Boundaries are just another marketable product."
deathtokoalas
i think that nativism is a natural and almost inevitable reaction to oppression, and a lesson we have a hard time learning. up in canada, protest movements tend to integrate themselves with indigenous groups. over time, it seems like we've lost the plot on this. the reality is that an indigenous protest has greater legal protection; so, a native group can blockade an oil company and not have the cops break it up the same way that they'd break up an environmental group's blockade. it makes a lot of sense to build alliances out of that to get to common ends, and it consequently makes sense for protest groups to push solidarity with indigenous sovereignty struggles.
but, nobody really looks into the society they're fighting for: one where gender roles are enforced through expulsion, women have very few rights, gays are banned from everything, positions of civil authority are limited by ethnic background...
i look at their proposals and say "this is israel.". and, yet it's the same friends organizing solidarity rallies for the native groups that are organizing solidarity rallies for palestine. ironically, the only answer i can come to with this is that it's a type of marginalization. that is, it seems to be rooted in some kind of weird stereotype of the "benevolent indian" - the "noble savage" - that couldn't possibly cause anybody any harm.
i think if you really take a look around at the world, this is a pattern that repeats itself through history. the more you tear down an identity, the more it breeds violent forms of nationalism and extremism.
in some cases, there's little choice. the black liberation movements into the 70s were necessary, and their work has been left unfinished. with the racial profiling, school-to-prison pipeline and massive racial inequality in the united states, it seems like there's no other way to go. that's going to produce these exclusivist strains. like, i'm not on the side of anybody that clams that white people shouldn't be allowed to rap - or black people can't like rachmaninov. but, when your culture is constantly being ripped apart, that exclusivity is an inevitable reaction by people trying to reconstruct an identity.
it's easy to say "these are the last people you'd expect this from, they should know better". but, maybe that's misunderstanding the issue. maybe, it's more reasonable to think "you'd expect people with a history of being repressed to lash out at others".
web
So very true. We were never there so we do not know. All we know i what is told to us. Those who truly knew what happened are sadly gone and with them the truth.
deathtokoalas
well, i'm obviously drawing from sources. i'm not consulting my crystal ball. this information was recorded. it does exist. and, not just in historical documents, either. the video suggests dickens, and he is certainly widely regarded as a valuable source of information on the topic in england - to the point that i read dickens in high school. there's the famous text by engels, of course. and modern scholarship (zinn, for example) is ensuring that the class basis of slavery is not forgotten.
i mean, even a cursory history of greece will point to the helots. as oscar wilde pointed out not that long ago, slavery and civilization are intrinsically related. this isn't likely to be forgotten, even if it's kept a little obscured.
firemedic30ca
It's not really an argument of which was worse as much higher as it is a demand for recognition. The fact of the matter is every race on the planet has been a victim of slavery. It's rich vs poor, and was never skin color vs skin color, like most are taught to believe. The sickening part of this is the refusal of any one to accept it, there by allowing another part of our dark history to be forgotten.
Now, slavery was horrible no matter what your color. However, there was a point in time in which African slaves were highly priced and sought after as they were considered harder workers, while white slaves were not. This lead to more deaths among the white slave population simply because they were a dime a dozen and less desirable. The torture and punishment was essentially the same, but whites suffered a higher mortality rate. One could argue that because the blacks lived longer and suffered more, that life for them was worse because they weren't afforded the mercy of dying and no longer being a victim.
Facts are facts. This happened, and the circumstances are what they are. Accepting it doesn't make you racist, doesn't down play black suffering or change it in anyway for the rest of the world. It only changes the perceived power of those that continuously attempt to use black slavery to their favor.
deathtokoalas
i was responding to the comments section, which is full of debates about which is "worse".
but it's equally important to take slavery out of the western colonial context you're pigeonholing it into. the largest slave trading civilization in history was not america but the islamic empire, which transported upwards of ten times as many slaves out of an area that included modern day africa, india and ukraine. it's quite instructive to look at the systemic system of slavery that the arabs set up. it's a little bit unique in it's "diversity of slavery" due to the fact that they were in the middle of the world. an arab slave harem would have had people of just about every colour in it. nor would their colour have had anything to do with their condition. the mongols also took white slaves.
from the racial perspective, the arabs did not treat ukrainians any differently than they treated africans. both were inferior peoples. and they lived roughly similar lifestyles based around small agricultural villages, pastoralism and hunting. arab slave traders would land in the crimea and go out and round them up out of their villages. it was really identical to anything you'd imagine a spanish slave raid of west africa would look like, except the skin colour was reversed.
what it actually had to do with in all of these circumstances was not race or wealth but religion. i mean, it's about economics, obviously. but the criteria for oppression was always "you're in the wrong religion". the muslims simply enslaved anyone who wasn't muslim. white, black, whatever - didn't matter. the basis of slavery in western colonies is actually based on a papal emulation of this muslim economic policy, starting from a papal bull in 1452 that gave the portugese king the right to enslave non-christians. the british enslavement of catholic ireland is also religious in justification.
and, they were consistent about this in weird ways, too. one of the oldest churches in the world is actually in ethiopia. it seems to have been christianized in the roman era, and then cut off from europe - and never islamized. when the portugese arrived in ethiopia and found christians, they did not enslave them - because they did not have papal authority to do so. in fact, they formed an alliance with them against the "saracens". the result was a war where white europeans and black africans fought against arabs based on religion rather than skin colour.
so, what you're saying is correct. but it needs broader context. slavery is not and never has been about one race's superiority over another. it's always been economic in justification, and centered around broad civilizational themes. skin colour was one civilizational theme, but very short-lived. things like religion and language have historically been far more important in determining who the elite subjugates.
cogli
you are absolutely correct. And that is continuously manipulated for and by what ever socioeconomic agenda is being foisted upon us at any given moment..at which time talking of Koala we could use the ReClaim Australia movement as a classic example of your theme...the main thing that stands out with all of this is the manipulation of ignorance, lack of historical knowledge and context. Interesting also that throughout these discussions when discussing the Americas nobody has thought to mention the Chinese..on a scale of who had it worse ..phew! that's like losing the number 10. .............. But the interesting thing with the Irish that I have found, is how profoundly the Ireland Irish were shocked and horrified by what racist bigots the American Irish had become by the early 1900s..this blog and others like it made me do a little digging and there are a massive number of comments by De Valera, Collins, The IRA right the way through to the 70s when discussing funding from The USA how they are happy to work with The American Black liberation movements and Islamic groups but were not in favour of accepting aid from Irish American groups they labelled " a bunch of racist bigots"..which was bit surprising compared to urban myth....... Interesting also is that the polling in the USA showed that The Jewish Americans were by far and wide the greatest supporters of the Black Liberation and Black equality movements throughout the 40s 50s 60s and 70s ..so some eye openers there...and if we go back to your premise and apply it to the current elite model, it is interesting to see that Ireland has deliberately and forcefully blocked all attempts for anti Islamic protests to get off the ground.. their anti Islamic march as a result, managed to get only 12 protestors..where as the Australian elite are using these protests as an asset/ blind/diversion...so the alignments are still following very very old trading paths at the same time as showing,... how cultures self colonise to fit the elite of their environment in order to survive and succeed...your comment reminds me of the statement by the ex head of IBM at a Multinational Corporations meeting in the 90s :::"we are now in the privileged position where we farm the entire world by the logic of profit..We decide what education a country gets or if it gets one. What toothpaste they use and what they eat for breakfast and Culture, Race, Religion and National Boundaries are just another marketable product."
deathtokoalas
i think that nativism is a natural and almost inevitable reaction to oppression, and a lesson we have a hard time learning. up in canada, protest movements tend to integrate themselves with indigenous groups. over time, it seems like we've lost the plot on this. the reality is that an indigenous protest has greater legal protection; so, a native group can blockade an oil company and not have the cops break it up the same way that they'd break up an environmental group's blockade. it makes a lot of sense to build alliances out of that to get to common ends, and it consequently makes sense for protest groups to push solidarity with indigenous sovereignty struggles.
but, nobody really looks into the society they're fighting for: one where gender roles are enforced through expulsion, women have very few rights, gays are banned from everything, positions of civil authority are limited by ethnic background...
i look at their proposals and say "this is israel.". and, yet it's the same friends organizing solidarity rallies for the native groups that are organizing solidarity rallies for palestine. ironically, the only answer i can come to with this is that it's a type of marginalization. that is, it seems to be rooted in some kind of weird stereotype of the "benevolent indian" - the "noble savage" - that couldn't possibly cause anybody any harm.
i think if you really take a look around at the world, this is a pattern that repeats itself through history. the more you tear down an identity, the more it breeds violent forms of nationalism and extremism.
in some cases, there's little choice. the black liberation movements into the 70s were necessary, and their work has been left unfinished. with the racial profiling, school-to-prison pipeline and massive racial inequality in the united states, it seems like there's no other way to go. that's going to produce these exclusivist strains. like, i'm not on the side of anybody that clams that white people shouldn't be allowed to rap - or black people can't like rachmaninov. but, when your culture is constantly being ripped apart, that exclusivity is an inevitable reaction by people trying to reconstruct an identity.
it's easy to say "these are the last people you'd expect this from, they should know better". but, maybe that's misunderstanding the issue. maybe, it's more reasonable to think "you'd expect people with a history of being repressed to lash out at others".
web
So very true. We were never there so we do not know. All we know i what is told to us. Those who truly knew what happened are sadly gone and with them the truth.
deathtokoalas
well, i'm obviously drawing from sources. i'm not consulting my crystal ball. this information was recorded. it does exist. and, not just in historical documents, either. the video suggests dickens, and he is certainly widely regarded as a valuable source of information on the topic in england - to the point that i read dickens in high school. there's the famous text by engels, of course. and modern scholarship (zinn, for example) is ensuring that the class basis of slavery is not forgotten.
i mean, even a cursory history of greece will point to the helots. as oscar wilde pointed out not that long ago, slavery and civilization are intrinsically related. this isn't likely to be forgotten, even if it's kept a little obscured.
at
19:57
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Windsor, ON, Canada
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