Counter-Currents
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Slave Market, 1866
1,500 words
By now, we should all know about the Muslim grooming gang scandal which has been rocking England for decades. Peter McLoughlin wrote about it extensively in his invaluable volume Easy Meat, which should be required reading for anyone on the Alt Right. After exposing not only the Muslim sex offenders and their complicit communities but also the white Britons who let it all happen, McLoughlin then sets upon a novel tack in his book.
He describes how the European folk wisdom of Muslim atrocities and barbarism has slowly faded from memory. McLoughlin calls it “deliberate forgetting” and explains how the multiculturalists and other members of our leftist elite funnel pleasant fantasies about Islam into white minds made empty by this recently-acquired ignorance. Islam being a “religion of peace” is perhaps the most famous example. At the same time, these elites make sure that whites never forget the bad things their ancestors have committed in the past, especially against non-whites (e.g., African slavery in the New World, the Holocaust, etc.). Between ignorance and guilt, these elites have the lever and fulcrum with which to move the minds of millions into accepting their globalist plans to bring down the West.
But this wasn’t always so, and anyone who has studied the matter knows it to be true. Even up to the mid-twentieth century, most whites knew — or, really, remembered through their communal folk wisdom — the existential threat of Islam and the barbaric behavior of Muslims. It was common knowledge in fact. In English we have the expression “the coast is clear.” Why are we so concerned about coasts being clear? Because for centuries Muslim slave-raiders in their speedy corsairs would abduct white Christians along the coasts of Southern and Western Europe. According to Robert Davis in his indispensable Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, they took between 1 and 1.25 million white slaves from 1500 to 1800. That’s around 9 to 12 slaves per day.
In Spanish there’s an even more direct expression: “No hay Moros en la costa,” literally meaning “there are no Moors on the coast.” Given Spain’s proximity to the Muslim world and that Islam had controlled the Iberian peninsula for something like 700 years, I think the Spanish would know a thing or two about Moors showing up on the coast.
Another example is the word “turk.” My 1984 Webster’s II New Riverside University Dictionary defines “turk” thusly:
1. A native or inhabitant of Turkey. 2. A speaker of a Turkic language. 3. A Moslem. 4. A brutal or tyrannical person.
Note the fourth definition makes “turk” synonymous with brutality and tyranny. A great example which survived into 20th century popular culture can be found in the folk song “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” In it, a verse goes like this:
. . . where they hung the turk
who invented work
in the big rock candy mountain
If you search the lyrics on the internet you will find that they replaced “turk” with the shamelessly anachronistic “jerk.” But listen to an old recording, for example, Harry McClintock’s from 1928, and you’ll see that “turk” was the original lyric. Regardless, millions of English-speakers did not have to know anything about the Turkish attempts to conquer Europe or their involvement in the white slave trade to know that a turk is a bad person.
This didn’t come out of nowhere; rather out of direct European experiences with Muslims, either through war, trade, or piracy. Charles Martel knocked them out France in the eighth century. A bickering coalition of European navies defeated a Muslim armada in 1571 at Lepanto. King Jan Sobieski of Poland led the charge to break their siege of Vienna in 1683. And, of course, there were the Crusades. So, the Europeans knew quite well what the Muslims were capable of and were not shy in disseminating this knowledge to future generations.
The most famous example of this perhaps is the anonymous epic, The Song of Roland. According to M.S. Merwin who translated the work into English in the 1960s:
The poem apparently was already well known in 1096 when, at the Council of Clermont, Pop Urban II made use of it in his appeal to the chivalry of France to follow in the steps of Charlemagne and send an army against Islam.
The poem itself, despite at times ascribing honor to braver members of enemy, make it clear who the bad guys are. In stanza 170, a dying Roland catches a “Saracen” attempting to steal his sword and bashes him on the head with his ivory horn, killing him grotesquely. Roland then says:
Base pagan, what made you so rash as to seize me, whether by fair means or foul? Whoever hears the story will take you for a fool.
Popular folklore also contained stories of famous Europeans fighting against Islam. McLoughlin brings up perhaps the most famous: General “Chinese” Gordon who fought and subdued Muslim slave-traders in the Sudan in the late 19th century. Gordon was revered as a hero and nearly all British schoolchildren for a time were aware of his exploits. This means, by extension, that these schoolchildren were aware also of the widespread Muslim penchant for slavery.
By the 18th and 19th centuries, white slavery, especially that of white women, became a topic of fiction and literature in the English-speaking world. Raymond Raife’s, The Sheik’s White Slave (1895) is a prime example. The Algerine Captive (1797) by Royall Tyler also deals with the subject and is considered one of the earliest American novels. Volume three of Samuel Pepys’ Diary (1661) records his meeting of British slaves returning from Algiers. Further, there were scholarly efforts reporting the phenomenon. McLoughlin lists Charles Sumner’s White Slavery in the Barbary States (1853) but also mentions how Sean O’Callaghan’s The White Slave Trade (1965) documented the white slave trade as still going on in Muslim countries as late as the 1960s. Fortunately, there has also been a decent amount of scholarly attention on the subject in the 21st century (notably, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters from 2003).
The enslavement of whites also made a great impression on white abolitionists in the 17th and 18th centuries. Knowing that they or their own countrymen could be made into slaves at any point granted them a sympathy and affinity for the black Africans victimized by the Atlantic Slave Trade. In 1680, Morgan Godwyn of Oxford wrote:
[If] some one of this island going for England should chance to be snapt up by an Algerine, or Corsaire of Barbary, and there to be set on Shore and Sold; Doth he thereupon become a Brute? If not, why should an African, (suppose of that or any other remote part) suffer a greater alteration than one of us?
In fact, as late as a century ago, the white slave trade in the Muslim world was so common that there were international treaties signed in 1904 and 1910 calling for its suppression. Naturally, almost no Muslim nations signed.
McLoughlin’s most compelling proof of this Great Forgetting however comes as an art history lesson. He writes:
Yet the history of art shows us that across Europe in the 19th century, there were many painters who were depicting this trade in white slaves, particularly with white women as the sex slaves of Muslims. These paintings are now often characterised as being of the “Orientalist” genre (an implication these days that they were racist fantasies, falsely imposed on the Muslim world. Examples of such paintings dating from 1838 to 1925 can be found, and the nationalities of the artists included British, French, Swiss, Austrian, Polish, Greek, Russian, Italian, Czech. For 100 years there were artists across the continent of Europe who were memorialising the Islamic slave trade, particularly the trade in White European women for sexual slavery.
Here are a few of paintings selected in Easy Meat so you can see for yourselves:
- Sir William Allan, Slave Market, Constantinople (1838) https://ameralwarea.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/market-6269.jpg
- Jean-Léon Gérôme, Slave Market (1866) https://www.wikiart.org/en/jean-leon-gerome/slave-market
- Luigi Crosio, The Beautiful Slave http://www.artnet.com/artists/luigi-crosio/the-beautiful-slave-ZruNXCnIB8zU5QmQJCuTHA2
- Nikolaos Gyzis, The Slave Market (1875) https://www.wikiart.org/en/nikolaos/gyzis/the-slave-market-1875
- Vasily Vereshchagin, The Sale of the Child Slave (1872) https://www.wikiart.org/en/vasily-vereshchagin/the-sale-of-the-child-slave-1872?utm_source=returned&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=referral
- John William Waterhouse, The Slave (1872) http://www.johnwilliamwaterhouse.net/The-Slave–1872.html
- Maurycy Gottlieb, Cairo Slave Market (1877) https://www.wikiart.org/en/maurycy-gottlieb/cairo-slave-market-1877
- Giulio Rosati, Inspection of New Arrivals http://www.orientalism-in-art.org/Inspection-Of-The-New-Arrivals-large.html
- Ernest Normand, Bitter Draught of Slavery (1885) http://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-bitter-draught-of-slavery-ernest-normand.html
- Otto Pilny, Slave Market Presentation (1910) http://www.jansantiques.com/Images/Products/Ref_A1669xl.jpg
It is clear that what once occupied a significant portion of European mind no longer does. We have indeed forgotten much of our thousand-year struggle with Islam. McLoughlin ascribes much of this to our multiculturalist elites who have been brainwashing young white minds with leftist cant for decades. Whites distracting themselves for nearly a century by the world wars and the Cold War had something to do with it as well, I’m sure. In either case, with Muslims by the millions now invading our homelands, both in Europe and in America, whites are becoming reacquainted with our old Islamic enemies. And, if the grooming gang scandal in England is any indication, they haven’t changed one bit.
Hopefully groundbreaking works like Easy Meat will help us un-forget what had been tragically forgotten during the 20th century. This will have to happen if we ever hope to reclaim our homelands for ourselves.
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Here’s what happens to someone who dares mention Muslim rapes of white women.
On numerous occasions I have seen the following question put to liberals: “You say you are against ‘sexism,’ ‘patriarchy,’ ‘homophobia,’ ‘rape culture,’ ‘religious domination of government’ and assorted human rights abuses. Yet all these things are routinely practiced in Islamic countries and, for that matter, by many Muslims residing in the Western world. Why then do you, our highminded liberal, not protest against Islam?”
I’ve yet to see any liberal give a straight answer.
The closest came from one liberal to whom I posed the above question. His response was to the effect that if one stirs up animosity towards Muslims, it might lead to lynchings in places like Rotherham. (I will not comment on whether or not that would be a good idea!)
You could understand the liberal blindness towards Islam were Islamic states leftist in their politics, this under the doctrine of pas d’ennemis a gauche. Yet Islam has a character that would be deemed reactionary were it practiced by anyone else. Nor can Muslims inherit the Magical Mantle of the Oppressed since they do more than their share of oppressing and have had a history of practicing aggressive warfare, slavery, forced religious conversions, autocratic governance, and all the other things which, were they to be conducted by White Europeans, would cause the self-flagellation of many a liberal breast.
Today, as Islam becomes decidedly more illiberal, as secular leaders such as Saddam Hussein are swept away and others such as President Assad are under siege, as the Islamic State sets up branch offices from Mesopotamia to the Maghreb, liberals amp up their protection racket for Islam to the point of criminalizing dissent on the matter of Muslim refugees.
(Of course, a liberal might respond by saying that Muslims today are still trying to overcome the terrible-legacy-of-European-colonialism(tm). But that is an ideological response. Pre-colonialism, Islamic realms such as the Ottoman Empire and Barbary States were not exactly known for their Enlightenment values.)
Compare this situation with the jihad that liberals waged against White ruled South Africa: the UN resolutions over apartheid, the international sanctions against the SA economy, the often violent protest demonstrations, the demands for the handover of power to blacks (even though “majority rule” had failed miserably in the rest of Africa), the open support for assorted Marxist insurgent organizations, and the beatification of a convicted ANC terrorist as leader of a new Rainbow Nation to rise as if from Cadmean teeth on the veldt.
Yet White South Africa was no threat to the Western world. South African armies never besieged Vienna, nor did South African corsairs raid for slaves on the littoral of Europe. South Africans actually served alongside the British Empire in two world wars, while the government tried to ally itself with NATO against the Communist bloc. The South African armed forces even fought against the Cubans in Angola. But liberal ideology deemed “racism” to be the ultimate thoughtcrime in Oceania, so White rule had to be brought down.
This process has been inverted with Islam, even with Islam’s history of aggression, slave raiding, terrorism and general bad manners shown by its refugees. Liberals have added “Islamophobia” to the list of thoughtcrimes and one can envision the Party Faithful marching through Victory Square with banners proclaiming: “Islam is our Ally in Eurasia, Islam has always been our Ally in Eurasia!”
Come to think of it, this is already happening. To oppose the Islamic factor involved in situations like Rotherham is a greater offense than the actual sexual enslavement of children (a pretty mean feat even for an ideology, isn’t this?). And “Islamophobia” is an interesting neologism as it implies that being anti-Islamic is a form of insanity (phobia being an irrational fear). Further, “Islamophobia” is arguably a stronger term than “Anti-Semitism” since one can presumably oppose Semites without being a candidate for the padded cell.
The one distinct difference between Islam and, say, White South Africa was that the former has been an enemy of Europe for some 1500 years while the latter has been (or was under apartheid) a part of the West. So guess which one liberals designated as the enemy?
Again, we might conclude pace Burnham, Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.
And given current events, that suicide is playing out in the streets, public squares and private homes of Calais, Malmo, Brussels, Cologne and Rotherham.
R_Moreland, Thanks for this. Everything you’ve said is correct. And tragic.
Pathological altruism is the term that describes the west’s suicidal surrender to multiculturalism.
I believe it is the baby boomers who embraced feminism, which destroyed demographic sustainability, that shoulder much of the blame.
Great article.
I had no idea where the expression ‘the coast is clear’ came from.
That fact alone is powerful in conveying the issue of this invasion of the WEst.
Use it people!!!
Thank you, Cecilhenry. I worked very hard on this one. There’s a also a book from 2008 called Islamic Jihad by M.A. Khan. He describes how, among other atrocities, the Muslims abducted another 2 or so million white slaves from Eastern Europe and Russia from 1500-1800. The Crimean Tatars were the primary perps. I’ll get around to reviewing the book one of these days.
I come from an Island in the Med. where coves and inlets along the coast are named or referred to as; ‘harbour for the galleys……’ ‘ pass me another’ (pass me another slave or captured,) Shows the long history of the place subjected to the Barbary coast slavery , though it all came to an end when the Ottoman stranglehold of the sea was broken in a deadly siege in the 16th century. Following with the participation, with the Christian fleet in the great Battle of Lepanto, in October 1572.
I’ve read La Chanson de Roland! A lot of bloody violence. Other books perhaps more enjoyable books include ‘L’Ami du Grand Mogol’ (perhaps loosely based on a true story – a guy gets kidnapped at sea by Muslims and ends up a slave. He has to fight the Christians but I don’t want to spoil any more). There’s also Joseph Fadelle’s book ‘Le Prix A Payer’ – this is a true story about an Iraqi Shiite Muslim who converts to Catholicism after being conscripted by Saddam Hussein and living with a Catholic in the barracks (you can find the English translation ‘The Price to Pay’). Although I haven’t read it myself (not even the first page), I’ve come across a fictional book called ‘Gentle Infidel’ which I don’t know but maybe looks good.
Thing is, I think Islam has changed over the centuries. I’m no expert and I am certainly not about to become Muslim, but I get the impression it’s perhaps not as bad as it used to be. You’ve got to admire people like King Louis IX of France who made impressive personal sacrifices for the preservation and safety of people in the Christendom. I guess he did it because he realised that Jesus was the real/true king, even if Jesus did have a crown of thorns on His head. In any case, whether Islam has changed much or not, I don’t know, but I know that one of my friends is Europe is a Muslim. So if we can get along, what makes the other Muslims different? Or is the fear rooted in the belief that things would change if they outnumber us? Well I don’t know the solution to immigration to Europe, but I guess the family members of Joseph Fadelle should not be allowed in without surveillance considering they even went across the Iraqi border to find him and almost killed him.
Waz, Thanks for the book recommendations. Will check them out!
Islam, (or more precisely, Sunni Islam) does not change: the atrocities inflicted upon Yezidi women by Daesh are all-too-similar to that which European (and other non-Muslim) women suffered at the hands of jihadists in ages past. This is to be expected, since the scriptures that not only justify, but encourage such crimes, do not change over time. (It is a point of pride for Muslims that the Koran has remained as it was since the days of the first caliphs). Even the scope for new interpretations has been stifled with the closing of the gates of ijtihad about a thousand years ago.
Muslims, though, have changed over time – and such changes are due to non-Muslim influences, be they Western influences, lingering pre-Islamic influences, Soviet/communist influences, etc… However, the changes we see now are, for the most part, the diminution of such influences. The implications are obvious.
Mr. Quinn has brought to light a very interesting and important matter. What strikes me as most surprising, is how swiftly this forgetting has taken place: less than a century. (I recently read a tome on Zoroastrianism – ‘The Treasure of the Magi’ that was published about a century ago by a British author, and it was clear that they had no illusions about Islam in those days.)
That a society can forget the lessons of its history so quickly, is disturbing.
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