Trial of Affection, an illustration from Richard Hildreth, The White Slave; or, Memoirs of a Fugitive (1852).
1,869 words
One of the trump cards the Left has over the Right is how it asserts the absolute equivalence of slavery and evil. This is an axiom for the Left, and a holy axiom at that. Leftists will not allow this axiom to be questioned because it is one of their prime sources of power. Like the Ark of the Covenant, it represents Man’s intersection with his egalitarian god. It also gives the Left sanction to uproot one of the main bulwarks of the Right: tradition.
Much of tradition is the wisdom accumulated from trial and error over the course of centuries. Healthy societies for the most part identify with and follow their traditions. The Left, however, can use slavery to pry a people away from their traditions in order to make them weaker and more easily conquered. After all, why would someone blindly follow a tradition when slavery — which is inherently evil — can also be called a tradition?
This is how using the memory of slavery as a weapon increases the Left’s power. Anyone who dares question the inherent evil of slavery — and in particular, white-on-black slavery as practiced in the New World during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries — becomes an existential threat to the Left. In a world which refuses to condemn this kind of slavery, the Left, as the coalition of anti-white ideologues we know today, could not exist. Thus, anyone who challenges the link between slavery and evil becomes a thought criminal and must be silenced at all costs.
This vociferous reaction, however, is polemical rather than factual. This becomes evident when we realize that the Left will brand a person a thought criminal on these grounds even when they make pious pains to condemn slavery. All a person would have to do is speak admiringly about — or pointedly not condemn — a society which countenanced slavery, such as the antebellum South. The Left, being more cunning than intelligent, will assume the rest. For example, attending the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017 merely to defend a statue of Robert E. Lee was no defense against the Left when being branded a thought criminal along with everyone else who was there.
Thus, if the slavery-is-evil trope is the source of the Left’s power, then challenge it we must. I would go so far as to say that no one can unilaterally condemn slavery as evil and still be on the Right without also condemning other forms of historical exploitation which were just as bad, if not sometimes worse than slavery. As far slavery itself goes, the Right must always be prepared to argue that other forms of slavery such as black-on-black, Muslim-on-black, and Muslim-on-white were often worse than what went on in the antebellum South. Once this is established, then white people cannot be singled out as particularly evil or oppressive, which could only be a boon for the Right. If a person continues to name slavery in the American South as the greatest evil despite all evidence to the contrary, then we must tell him that he’s not thinking for himself; he is paying homage to the Left, whether he realizes it or not.
As for the evidence, it is not terribly hard to accumulate as long as we adhere to what I call the Weak Claim Paradox. I initially employed this concept when debunking another primary source of the Left’s power: the Jewish Holocaust and anti-Semitism narrative pushed by Leftist Jews (whom I refer to as Liberal Diaspora Jews, or LDJs). As I wrote for The Occidental Observer:
Combating an aspect of the LDJ narrative with a strong opposing narrative succeeds inversely to the time the narrative in question has had to metastasize across gentile populations. The more time a narrative has had, the more difficult it is to argue against it with a strong opposite claim. Paradoxically, weaker claims would serve better against deeply entrenched LDJ narratives. I call this the Weak Claim Paradox.
You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s Solzhenitsyn and the Right here.
Essentially, strong claims such as the idea that the Nazis were a net force for good or that the Jewish Holocaust has been wildly exaggerated threaten the Left’s power less than weak — yet equally true — claims that the Nazis and the Jewish Holocaust weren’t quite as bad as the Bolsheviks, the terror famines, and the Gulag Archipelago. The former tries to rip a deep-rooted sapling out of the ground all at once, and the other tries to wriggle it free over time — which is the more sensible approach.
The same approach should be taken toward slavery. Never should people on the Right attest that slavery is good or call for its return in the civilized world. Never should people on the Right invoke race realism or the right of conquest to justify slavery — especially of blacks. Instead, they should employ the weaker claim that slavery in the American South was no worse than indentured servitude or the capitalistic exploitation of workers, or the many contemporaneous forms of slavery around the world. Since many today derive their thinking from the Left’s holy tabernacle of equality, strong claims about the white race’s superiority or the black race’s incapacity for self-government will fall on deaf ears. The Left has inoculated its base against such claims. But it has not inoculated its base against perceiving the cruelty and horror of these other systems — of which most educated Westerners are completely unaware.
This is the first step in loosening the Left’s deep-rooted power.
One excellent source which bolsters such weak, yet effective claims is Michael Hoffman’s 1991 book They Were White and They Were Slaves, which covers not only the often bestial treatment of whites as indentured servants in the New World, but also the miserable lot of white urban workers in England and the United States, especially children. Below he quotes Brian Inglis from his 1971 book Poverty and the Industrial Revolution:
British children comprised a majority of the factory work force, “from two-thirds to three-quarters of the workers in the early factories . . . they were lucky if they earned a half-penny an hour. For this they were made to work as children had never been made to work before.”
Later, Hoffman writes:
This was labor without any breaks, “unceasing labor.” When the children fell asleep at the machines, they were lashed into wakefulness with a whip alternately known as a thong or strap. If they arrived late to the factory, talked to another child or committed some other infraction they were beaten with an iron bar known as a billy-roller.
While Hoffman wisely does not downplay black slavery, he does demonstrate how indentured servants were often kidnapped and thrust into servitude — with the full approval of the British government. Because they were never properly bought and paid for, these servants were thus valued less and often treated worse by their masters than black slaves. He also reveals a great deal of scholarship which compares white indentured servitude to black slavery, and finds them equivalent:
Ships carrying White [sic] slaves to America often lost half their slaves to death. According to historian Sharon V. Salinger, “Scattered data reveal that the mortality for servants at certain times equaled that for slaves in the ‘middle passage,’ and during other periods actually exceeded the death rate for slaves.” Salinger reports a death rate of ten to twenty percent over the entire 18th century for Black [sic] slaves on board ships enroute to America compared with a death rate of 25% for White [sic] slaves enroute to America.
And the number of white indentured servants was not trivial either:
Hundreds of thousands of Whites [sic] in colonial America were owned outright by their masters and died in slavery. They had no control over their own lives and were auctioned on the block and examined like livestock, exactly like Black slaves, with the exception that these Whites [sic] were enslaved by their own race.
You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s young adult novel The No College Club here.
Simon Webb, in his 2020 book The Forgotten Slave Trade, dives into the centuries-long exploitation of Europe’s white population by Muslim slave raiders, who were acting more or less in the service of the Ottoman Empire. He repeats historian Robert Davis’ claim that over a million European whites had been abducted in the Barbary slave trade from 1500 to 1800. He portrays the treatment of these slaves as every bit as brutal and cruel as white-on-black slavery, but like Hoffman, never minimizes black suffering. He doesn’t need to. Passages such as the following regarding the Muslim need for white eunuch slaves demonstrate quite clearly that white-on-black slavery was not a singular evil:
The solution to the difficulties, both practical and religious, which prevented Muslims from making their own eunuchs was to engage slave traders in Europe to provide a ready-made product which could then be purchased, already castrated and in good health. These eunuchs were manufactured in Europe, from pre-pubescent European boys and the history of this vile trade had almost been forgotten today.
Whatever other horrors the Atlantic slave trade entailed, routine castration was never one of them. It is true that black slaves in America and the Caribbean were from time to time castrated, but this was never a common occurrence and was usually inflicted due to exceptional circumstances, such as an accusation of rape. With the act of castration so likely to result in death, it would have made no sense to hazard the lives of slaves in this way too frequently. In Europe, by contrast, the castration of white slaves was carried out on an industrial scale.
Webb also agree with Hoffman about the comparable numbers of white and black slaves, although in Webb’s case, these were slaves who never left the Old World:
The idea that the Atlantic slave trade might not have been the greatest or worst trafficking in slaves of which we know is a novel one for most people. Certainly, for a generation which has been raised on horror stories of what has come to be known as the slave trade, it will come as a shock to discover that there was nothing to distinguish that slave trade from any other. Neither the numbers involved nor the treatment of the slaves is remarkable when considered in a wider historical context.
If anything, the numbers of those involved in the Atlantic slave trade were remarkably low compared to the death counts wrought by Arab-on-black slavery from around the same time. According to Webb:
It has been estimated that between 80,000 and 100,000 Africans died each year as a direct result of the Arab slave trade. David Livingstone thought that ten times as many people died in this way. If so, then in the nineteenth century alone, well over 10 to 20 million people might have lost their lives in this way.
If the anti-white Left wishes to deplore slavery, that’s fine. But when Leftists use white-on-black slavery as a political weapon in order to enrich their own power over whites, the Right should employ the Weak Claim Paradox and remind them that they should condemn all slavery, which was just as bad for whites as it was for anyone else — thus unraveling the legitimacy of one of the Left’s primary power sources.
28 comments
One interesting if a bit off-topic consequence to the Muslim practice of castrating male slaves is that nearly all the black admixture in the Middle East has been passed down through the maternal line. Male slaves rarely or never impregnated Arab women, but Arab men often impregnated their female slaves, and I believe the children were freeborn and accepted into society so long as the Arab father claimed the child as his. I think close to 20 percent of maternal DNA in the Middle East is of black African origin, on average. Populations like Christians and Jews that didn’t participate in the Muslim slave trade missed out on most of the admixture. Kurds, Turks and Iranians also show very little if any black African admixture, suggesting they weren’t too involved in the trade either.
The weak claim works very well reference White-on-Black slavery. May I say less so for the official narrative of WWII. The difference being that White-on-Black slavery actually happened.
Where lies aren’t conceded, I affirm the weak argument method. Maybe we can be a little more explicit.
We should never fear conceding the truth. We should rather always have counter-examples, including extreme instances, true but extreme, to instruct those accustomed to being on the offensive on the masochistic pleasures of being on defense. We’ve been niggardly in this regard. It’s our turn to give.
Perhaps modern people are more slaves than people who lived 200 or a thousand years ago. It’s just that this slavery is carried out in a different form, and people get it into their heads that their situation is “normal.”
But does the Left actually deplore slavery?
Consider how in the 20th century the Left in its various forms of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism-Maoism instituted their own slave systems via the gulag, the Cultural Revolution, the killing fields of Pol Pot, and the general totalitarianism of communist states.
For the Left, “slavery” is a an agitprop tactic, a form of psychological warfare. Whether this or that type of slavery was objectively good or evil, better or worse, is really irrelevant to the party line. Rather, it is the constant drumbeat of Leftist agitprop vilifying white people over slavery which counts.
To put it differently, if white people had never practiced slavery the Left would have to invent something else as an excuse to beat the agitprop drum. Look at how the Left vilifies white people for “colonialism” even though the ancestors of many of their client groups conquered and exploited other peoples (Muslims, Bantus, Amerindians, assorted aboriginals) not to mention the communist USSR occupying Eastern Europe for decades.
The critical thing in psychological warfare is to throw the other side onto the defensive. This means attacking the Left, non-stop. This was why McCarthyism worked. Whether or not there were “X” number of card carrying communists in the State Department, who cares? What did count was the McCarthyites had seized the info war initiative. Which is what made them so dangerous to the Left.
Something to think about in the continuing chaos…
This is how these tactics got started:
Demoralization: What Yuri Bezmenov Didn’t Tell You – YouTube
Was there any access to the Bezmanov interviews back in the 80’s when they were recorded? Were they only available through the John Birch Society?
I wrote about him here a while back, I believe that I linked to a complete collection of extant recordings. This was a compilation of the Griffin interview, a presentation he did about the stages of subversion, and about half an hour of material at the end that I hadn’t seen before. He wrote four books that I know of (maybe self-published), though there are hints of one or two more. I saw that there were some cassette recordings for sale at one time, but hell if I know who might have any.
By any chance can you send a link to your article?
Vide infra:
https://counter-currents.com/2020/06/our-boy-bezmenov-soviet-subversion-strategies-in-america/
Linky linky is under the heading “recorded works”
Excellent presentation on the Frankfurt School by Academic Agent. Thanks for pointing it out.
Perhaps some Leftist arguments could be answered with Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England.
It’s good idea. I’ve felt that what the left means by slavery today is actually massive unease about whites with the upper hand over a distant primitive group, not so much the slavery itself.
Finger pointing whites over slavery acts as a stand in for awkwardness about the useless state of blacks today. You could see this same kind of unease and awkwardness at work with George Floyd. A black being physically controlled by a white cop is just obviously beyond the pale. I think a large amount of that unease is artificially created by our Fellow Whites.
So normie whites uphold excuses for blacks. If the topic of blacks comes up in white normie/lib conversation it automatically has to be annotated with ‘slavery’,’oppression’,’racism’ and so on.
But then if blacks talk about slavery they just want gibs.
The slavery guilt trip is easy to topple:
All races practiced slavery since the beginning of time
Whites were the first to question it, and then to abolish it
Since Whites then had worldwide empires, we also abolished it among the backward peoples elsewhere (you’re welcome, everybody!)
During this time, the British Empire expended a fortune interdicting the slave trade, with many sailors lost at sea during the operation
On a side note, it seems that colonialism wasn’t such a bust after all
As for the USA…
Africans were sold into slavery by their own people (usually rival tribes), and merchant ships simply were buying from markets already long in existence
As soon as he was able to do so under the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson banned the importation of slaves
Even in the antebellum South, only a small minority had slaves
Some Indians and free Blacks also owned Black slaves
Large numbers of Whites opposed slavery
The legacy of all that slavery and discrimination is that America’s Blacks have an average income about ten times higher than Blacks in their ancestral homeland
There’s a lot more than that, but those are the basics.
(1) I don’t care about ‘the jewish holocaust’ because I’m not a jew.
(2) I don’t care about non-White slavery, only White slavery.
But would you say this right to their faces? If it were me, I’d be right careful how I express these opinions in real life. Moi, I’d start out by pointing out their own lack of concern about us and our lives. Of course I can see how this “conversation” would proceed! These are not people of good will we are dealing with.
I predict it would result in them getting “triggered”. (As to whether it’s good optics or not is another matter.) The fact is that much likewise, nobody else cares about anyone except their own people. Guilt narratives are just a tactic – it’s a psychological hack, and they’re well aware of what they’re doing. For instance, Professor Dorkheimer might wax eloquent about the plight of the Plains Indians in the 19th century. On the other hand, he won’t give a hoot about settlers slaughtered by Indian tribesmen, or Indians massacred by other Indians for several thousand years prior. Don’t expect him to shed a single tear about it.
In general, when on enemy territory, I prefer silence to ostentatious declamation. My point is that I don’t care about the jews and their ‘concerns’ because I’m not a jew. I don’t care about negros and their ‘concerns’ because I’m not a negro.
Whites have gained nothing by engaging with those people and the sooner we can push our lifeboat ethnostates away from the sinking ship that is jewish life and negro life, the better.
Our goal is racial separation.
Our method is building solidarity through Whites caring about Whites because they are White.
We spend too much time arguing with an enemy that will never listen and too little time listening with compassion and interests to our own people about what they want and what they’d like to contribute.
We want to create a nation of Whites who have moved passed the Christian tendency to gravitate towards claims of martyrdom and the Christian tendency to believe that sacrificing oneself is the highest virtue.
Once Whites start caring about what happens to them, things will change.
As the great Sam Francis pointed out long ago, White exist objectively (as a demographic) but not subjectively (as a race with interests).
Melvyn Bragg, veteran English broadcaster, has a very long-running high-brow radio show and podcast, based around three guest academics, called In Our Time which I am enjoying less and less with the passage of the years. It recently made a fairly convincing attempt to put the blame for White slavery to the Ottoman Empire on renegade Whites, it being implied that it was evil Whites selling their own kin (a bit like in W. Africa – My analogy) which drove the trade. They’re onto this tactic and making sophisticated efforts to ensure even pro-White narratives are anti-White.
‘The Barbary Corsairs’ , 7th December 2023
Some of the best sea captains among the North African Muslims were in fact European renegades. We shouldn’t be surprised at that. We’re better at that sort of thing, the Odyssean spirit. Unfortunately they were engaged in the bad practices which prevailed there. But those practices prevailed there because of the Muslims, as evidenced by their ferociously sadistic trade across land of sub-Saharan Africans, so you’re right to be concerned about the misplaced emphasis.
May 1986: Seven-year-old Francis Bok was selling his mother’s eggs and peanuts near his village in southern Sudan when Arab raiders on horseback burst into the quiet marketplace, murdering men and gathering the women and young children into a group. Strapped to horses and donkeys, Francis and others were taken north into lives of slavery under wealthy Muslim farmers.
For ten years, Francis lived in a shed near the goats and cattle that were his responsibility. After two failed attempts to flee–each bringing severe beatings and death threats–Francis finally escaped at age seventeen. He persevered through prison and refugee camps for three more years, winning the attention of United Nations officials who granted passage to America. (This description taken from amazon dot com).
From: Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in America Paperback – October 4, 2004
——————
“Freedom in America”, Francis? But White people were slave sellers and owners. Aren’t you concerned that slavery could reappear?
You’re quite right but of course the overall story of Ottoman slaving is not addressed, concentrating instead on anecdotes of Christians made good, because of the ‘less rigid class system’ in the Barbary states. There’s no mention that European-level talent might have been a scarce and highly valued commodity.
I’m listening to the episode again. Full of interesting information and yet a masterful piece of subtly anti-White multicultural one world propaganda aimed at exactly the intellectually inquisitive people we need to reach. Loving descriptions in clipped accents of the joys of Christian Europeans living as second class citizens with some religious freedom under enlightened Muslim suzerainty…….
The attempted narrative control is repulsive, I know. News about how savage the Muslim slave trade was is getting out. We’ll just stay on message, persistently, without our former polite reserve, and truth will out.
Immediately after WWII, hapless Germans became virtual slaves. As General Patton wrote: “We are turning over to the French several hundred thousand Prisoners of War to be used as slave labor in France. It is amusing to recall that we fought the Revolution in defense of the rights of man and the Civil War to abolish slavery and have now gone back on both principles.”
George Orwell was also disgusted. He noted that those who, before the war, had been outspoken in denouncing the evils of colonialism and slavery were now relishing newspaper reports of German POWs being used as forced labour.
In the Soviet Union imprisoned Germans were slaves untill 1955. There were also imprisoned Japanese in Siberia.
Since many today derive their thinking from the Left’s holy tabernacle of equality, strong claims about the white race’s superiority or the black race’s incapacity for self-government will fall on deaf ears. The Left has inoculated its base against such claims. But it has not inoculated its base against perceiving the cruelty and horror of these other systems
But it actually has. How many times have you seen a jew/shitlib article mocking the idea that “All Lives Matter” or some such nonsense? How many times have well-meaning conservatives said something like “Imagine if a white person had said/done the same thing! Gosh, there’d be so much outrage!” only to be met with eye-rolling and laughter from the left? The same thing goes for the issue of modern slavery or even indentured servitude. Pointing out the left’s hypocrisy and double-standards is just not the gotcha moment that so many on our side seem to think it is. I’m not saying we should stop doing it, but just recognize that it’s not the silver bullet so many of us seem to think it is. Sure, it will convince a few people, but not in any significant numbers.
“How many times have you seen a jew/shitlib article mocking the idea that “All Lives Matter” or some such nonsense?”
The people that write these articles have a long time ago deliberately taken an anti-white position and their minds will not be changed ever, and indeed never could have been to start with. The Weak Claim Paradox is a great means of reaching out to ordinary non-politically aligned whites and perhaps even some non-whites.
The eye-rolling and laughter of which you speak coming from our enemies is merely a sign of their complacency at having had their own way without being stood up to for such a long time. Things are definitely changing. Ordinary whites are getting fed up. People who talk to me not knowing what my opinions are mention the double standards of those who they term “The Do-Gooders” more commonly known to us on this site as leftists . A storm is brewing. The eye rolling and laughter will turn into the snarling salivating mask of a dangerous wild animal that has been cornered and knows it can’t escape, lashing out indiscriminately in all directions and exposing itself as the monster it truly is; in fact its happening now at an accelerating pace. We just have to maintain our composure and continue telling the truth.
Well, I think a major point of the slavery argument with American blacks is as an excuse for their dysfunction. Their social problems are blamed on the history of slavery and oppression. Whites were never enslaved in proportions to retard the advance of our civilization, I guess they would say. A better analogy might be serfdom in Russia which was abolished at roughly the same time as slavery in America. Former serfs do not form some sort of underclass in Russia today like blacks do in America, however. In fact no one knows who was a serf and who wasn’t. That is to say a history of legal servitude or proscriptions doesn’t necessarily destroy a people.
I’ve said my say. For today.
I would put it simpler, just like it was with the colonies. The peoples in former colonies are underdeveloped not because they were colonized. Rather they were colonized because they were underdeveloped – before the colonization. The same could be said about the former slavs, and, well, “retarded” are mostly former African slavs, not former European and Asian slavs like Russians and Chinese.
Thank you Mr. Quinn . This was an excellent article. The “Left” (as you say, I would use other terms like “The Co-alition of anti Whites” uses the issue of “slavery” to bash our collective White European Americans, remaining Whites left on planet earth exactly the same way the Chosen use the so called “Holocaust” to bash all Whites, not just Germans.
I live in Illinois, Land of Lincoln. Illinois was and still is a “free state” Slavery was never legal here, but in the war against Whites, that doesnn’t matter – some grandson of Hungarian or Polish White immigrants to metro Chicago are supposedly just as guilty for Negro slavery, Euroepan Colonialism, or the (Exactly) “6 Million Gassed Jews Holocaust” as actually White slaver owners, crackers in the Slaveocracy South 170 years ago or supposedly torture guards at Auschwitz or Dachau. (no gassing at Dachau or any camps in Germany, the official 6 million gassesd Jews Holocaust Myth used to insist there were mass gassing at Dachau, the allies even made fake gas chambers – but that doesn’t matter – the official 6 Million Gassed Jews myth goes on and it’s a huge propaganda winner for the Chosen, really bad for us).
This top “Slavery” falls in to the area of “Propaganda” and religious myths. As a very successful Socialist Nationalist propaganda minister in Germany 100 years ago said:
“The Truth is the Best Propaganda” so we should stick to the truth, never lie. But that’s not enough.
We need to study, get better at effective propaganda. As in so many live or die areas, White Conservative Americans tend to really SUCK at propaganda, just as we’ve sucked in national Presidential elections, tend to not be very good in things like public speaking, partner dancing, boxing, basketball slam dunking. Whites in the UK, Eastern Europe have dominated professional boxing for over 20 years, not European American Whites – part of our poor performance is we haven’t developed good trainers, good amateur contests and the promoters have been mostly Black anti White Racists like Don King. BUt those are just excuses.
Boxing is a science and an art – and it’s the same with goof political, racial propaganda.
I’ve studied this subject and have had success in this area.
I was the co creator of the “Missing a Future for White Children” flier/propaganda poster which turned out to be the most popular White Nationalist flier/propaganda poster in the 1990s.
Hey Greg Johnson and others – is there anyway to allow attached images in the comment section so we/I can share propaganda ideas.
IMO – our side has always had very good writers – but IMO the written word, ~ 300 page text books are not very effective in reaching the hearts and minds, body and souls of regular White European Americans. IMO the last decent mainstream American political consultant kind of on our side was:
Lee Atwater. Lee Atwater helped George HW Bush erase a ~ 20 pt poll deficit to MA Governor Mike Dukakis using the true story of Lib MA Governor giving Black murderer Willie Horton an unsupervised weekend pass where Willie Horton proceeded to do a home invasion, rape and torture of a middle age White woman.
Lee Atwater did very effective TV adverts showing real photos of ugly, scary Black A American murderer rapist Willie Horton and then showing revolving door exists of criminals from prison. Lee Atwater finessed the racial issue just a bit, by showing most of the getting out of prison convicts being White, but that just shows his skill as a propagandist. Lee Atwater pushed the envelope , used the true in propaganda ways that worked.
Can anyone remember any TV advertisements from the Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, John McCain campaigns that were high quality, effective propaganda that reached the hearts, minds, body and souls of regular White Americans? Did George W Bush’s top political consultant Karl Rove ever do any, even one good propaganda piece. I can’t remember even one.
In fact the losing John McCain campaign refused to even reference Barack Obama’s crazy, White hating Black Liberation Theology cult mentor Rev. Jeremiah Wright!
Mr. Johnson I would like to do some teach ins about the basics of good political/racial propaganda. I have a very good text book with strong visuals included.
How should I/we proceed.
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