Comments by "dixon pinfold" (@dixonpinfold2582) on "The Based Conservative"
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Slavery wasn't seen as criminal in our modern sense by almost any powerful force until the English-speaking countries made up their minds that it was. By philosophers or priests in certain times and places, certainly. By sensitive and visionary individuals in small numbers, everywhere and forever. But entire societies and civilizations? There have been brief or isolated exceptions here or there intermittently, but they were rare to say the least, and it's a little hazy whether history records any. (Ashok outlawed the slave trade, but not slavery itself. The Aztecs are more compelling. A constituent republic of Dubrovnik? That may be.)
For thousands of years (tens or hundreds of thousands of years, I'm assuming, but history doesn't go back that far) slavery was thought of as something that happened to unfortunate people, just as military invasions in which nations were conquered were viewed up until perhaps a century and a half ago. It was accepted almost totally that at the national level the weaker party got waxed.
The modern view, the view of today, is exactly that. Modern. Today's view. Actually, 'modern' is too small a word, since modernity supposedly kicked off in 1750. Let's say contemporary. The contemporary view.
What we call white people, too, were of course enslaved any time some other peoples managed to get the upper hand, to raid a European coastline and kidnap people onto boats. Many were taken away to the Arabic lands, for example.
In any country, both those who were captured and those who avoided such a fate and remained in the kingdoms they inhabited, hated it passionately, naturally to the maximum degree. But it wasn't seen the way it is today. It was seen as a miserable defeat, which is something quite different.
Look on slavery for a moment if you like as a concept something akin to living under a tyrant monarch. It went without saying that you wished for far better, but it was taken for granted that the way the world worked, it was an ugly fact of life, and permanently so. Not resembling a clear-cut crime as murder so much as the oppression of a king or warlord, or wartime conditions. In other words a harsh reality.
It was an ugly wrong in the category of "Yeah, but what're you gonna do?" Moreover — and this is the main thing I have to say — the same nation which burned with resentment and anger at the enslavement of its people would, when its own turn came, gladly enslave the people of some other nation or race.
This, I hope, gives an idea of how slavery in profound ways wasn't widely questioned for a really long time. It took that long to prepare the ground for the way we look on it today.
The failure of people to understand the values and meanings of things in previous lifetimes at its worst amounts to an intellectual disability, a mental blindness, a debilitating ignorance, a regrettable, sad and weak incapacity. In a person who has been fortunately educated it might be looked on as a childish refusal to recognize how lucky one is to be alive in an impossibly lucky time and place.
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