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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:15
The Truth About Slavery: Past, Present and Future
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Thank you. Hi everybody, Stefan Molyne from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing well. This is the truth about slavery.
Now why are we even going to talk about such an ancient and evil institution?
Well, We really don't understand the history of slavery.
We cannot identify its causes and we therefore have a very tough time fighting its echoes and remnants in the here and now.
And I would really like to make the case that we can put an end to human slavery once and for all.
But first of all, we have to understand what it is and where it came from.
So let's dive in, shall we?
Thank you so much for your time.
So, the history of slavery.
Slavery is an ancient institution common to all cultures throughout history up until the 19th century and in many places into the 20th and 21st century.
How did you become a slave?
Well, you became an insolvent debtor, ran out of money.
You were sold into slavery by your parents or you were born to slave parents a lot of times or you were captured through kidnapping by slave raiders and pirates, particularly the Barbary Coast.
Slave-dealing was an accepted way of life throughout all of human history, fully established in all societies, unopposed by religion, in fact, almost always supported by religion.
Christians supported slavery through the Old Testament, Muslims supported slavery explicitly, and Jews supported slavery, ran a lot of the slave trade.
Now, a lot of the slaves in the world throughout history were white people or Europeans.
In fact, the very word slave comes from Slav, or people of Eastern Europe.
Now, the people from Eastern Europe, the reason why Slav became slave was because for thousands of years they were subjected to every conqueror who swept through the region, Celts, Greeks, Romans, Barbarians, or the Conans.
The ancient Greeks, who a lot of Westerners get culture, art, music and philosophy from, were utterly dependent on slavery.
Plato's Republic, one of the first blueprints for fascistic totalitarianism in the history of the world, was firmly based on slave labor.
Plato himself said that owning 50 or more slaves represented the possessions of a wealthy man.
Under Roman law, rebellions against your slave owners were kind of discouraged.
So if your slave owner was ever found killed, all of the slaves, all of you would be put to death.
There was one Roman slave owner who was found murdered, and 400 of his slaves were put to death.
So, a little tough to get out of the institution.
0 AD, or when Christ was born, half of the population of the Roman Empire were slaves.
Three-quarters of the population of Athens were slaves.
Now, not really known very often, up to one-half or more of the arrivals in the American colonies early on were white slaves.
We'll get into that a little bit later.
They were slaves for life.
Generally, the slavery was hereditary.
Some of them were called indentured servants, so they would sign up or be kidnapped and sold into bondage, and yet these contracts were generally extended at will.
Nobody was really there to enforce them.
It was rare in America to own slaves.
At the very peak of black slavery in America, only 6% of Southern whites owned slaves.
This, of course, would be the richest 6%, and we'll get into how they used the state to maintain slavery in a few minutes.
So if you include all the white people in the North, at the very height of slavery, only 1.4% of white Americans owned black slaves.
Monstrous, immoral.
That was the truly evil 1% of the day.
Slavery was, of course, indigenous to African and Arab countries before it made its way to Europe.
Slavery was widely practiced by the tribes of American Indians long before Columbus came to the New World.
Ethiopia had slavery until 1942, Saudi Arabia until 1962, Peru until 68, India until 76, and Mauritania until 1980.
Also coming a tad late to the anti-slavery party...
Was the Catholic Church because certain passages in the Old Testament sanction slavery?
The New Testament didn't give any clear teachings to abolish it.
In 1965, the Second Vatican Council declared without qualification that slavery was an infamy that dishonored the Creator and was a poison in society.
To be fair, Christians, theologists mostly followed St.
Augustine in arguing that slaves should be treated well, and they did discourage the owning of Christian slaves.
Blacks own slaves. Even in America, according to the United States Census of 1830, in just the one town of Charleston, South Carolina, 407 black Americans own slaves themselves.
One study has concluded that 28% of free blacks own slaves, which is far higher than the free whites who own slaves.
It was a lot of a class thing.
I mean, the rich whites would own slaves.
The poor whites hated slavery and hated the institution.
For a variety of reasons we'll get into, not least of which was the fact that it drove down the price of labor to the point where they found it almost impossible to compete.
Now, what are some of the myths?
Well, slavery is often portrayed as a free market phenomenon that had to be ended by governments.
But the reality is there were in fact only two countries in the history of the world that found it necessary to end or at least attempt to end slavery through civil war.
One was the United States of America and the other was Haiti.
Of course, the civil war, as we'll get to in the next presentation, the truth about Abraham Lincoln didn't really have anything to do with slavery but had more economic motives.
So slavery was a worldwide phenomenon that existed from prehistory until the 18th and 19th centuries when Western powers, in particular England, ended it as a moral crusade.
Now why were so many Africans enslaved?
Well one of the reasons was because the African rulers within Africa, particularly in southern middle Africa, were endlessly warring against each other, civil wars and so on.
They would capture slaves, they would bring them to the seaports where the Europeans and the Arabs would pick them up.
Some Arabs went inland.
But you couldn't, as a white person, you couldn't go into Africa.
I mean, the average life expectancy for a white person going to Africa was 11 months to just get downed by big and small animals, lions or bugs of various kinds, cholera and so on.
So they had to get caught by the blacks, black rulers, and then they would be shipped off to the ports where they'd be picked up by the Arabs and the Europeans.
England, as a moral crusade led by a man will meet in a moment, was ended by attacking the slave ships, agitating for the removal of government support for slavery, which is really essential, and bribing slave owners to release their slaves or buying their property.
Of course, you can't – under common law, retroactive law is not valid.
I can't say something was illegal five years ago and charge you for that.
So what was legitimate property had to be bought, and the British government did spend a lot of blood and treasure trying to end slavery.
So, I mean, this is one of the great misconceptions of history.
So, Western Europeans were very late to the party.
The Muslim slave trade went on for 1400 years.
The Christian slave trade went on for a few hundred years.
They were late to the party. They took very few of the slaves, as we'll see.
They treated their slaves far better than what occurred in the Muslim countries, as we'll also see.
So Europeans ended up fighting against slavery, Europeans ended slavery, and therefore you only ever hear Europeans being blamed for slavery.
This is horribly unjust. Look, if we want to move the moral standard of mankind further up, which I think we all want to do, let's stop attacking everyone who shows the first sign of conscience and better behavior in the world and only ascribe the blame to them.
Let's not look at European guilt as a mineable resource, which you can squeeze with state power to produce the diamonds of fiscal transfers.
So let's look at the Eastern trade.
So you know about the Atlantic slave trade, I'm sure.
What is the Eastern slave trade, which is the Trans-Saharan slave trade going to the Muslim countries?
So the death toll from 14 centuries of the Muslim slave trade in Africa is estimated at a little over 112 million people.
And remember, this is a time when the world was quite a bit less populated, which had a lot to do with the Muslim slave trade and its excellence at depopulating and disassembling human beings.
Historian Robert Davis estimates North African Muslim pirates abducted and enslaved more than a million Europeans between 1530 and 1780.
Half a million black African slaves ended up in North America.
Twice that were kidnapped by North African Muslim pirates.
It's a power differential.
It's not a race thing, fundamentally slavery.
Scraps of history indicate the Muslims enslaved over 150 million African people, about 50 million from other parts of the world.
That's not good, and I guess we can hold our breath awaiting for the Islamic culture to start making its apologies and for people to press Islamists for reparations.
Now, one thing that's just horrifying and tragic, I mean, all of slavery is horrifying and tragic, but there are things that stick out even in this horror.
Why does the Arab world not have a large black population?
I mean, they took a lot of black slaves, marched them across the Zahara, and sold them in the slave auctions in the Middle Eastern world.
Why? America's got a big black population.
South America has a big black population as a result of slavery.
Why aren't there any really in the Middle East?
Well... Historian Bernard Lewis provides an answer, quote, He said,
I have it estimated that five or six years are sufficient to carry off or kill a generation of slaves, at the end of which time the whole has to be replenished.
You didn't really want to be a slave going east.
If you had to choose, you'd want to be going west.
North African Muslim pirates raided European coastal towns and villages from all the way down in Sicily, all the way up to Cornwall, as well as European ships for about 300 years enslaved over a million Europeans, including many American seamen.
Some say it's 1.5 million.
Christopher Hitchens points out how many know that perhaps a million and a half Europeans and Americans were enslaved in Islamic North Africa between 1530 and 1780.
What are the people of the town of Baltimore in Ireland, all carried off by corsair raiders in a single night?
It doesn't fit the narrative. Right?
The narrative says that it's a race issue.
It's state and power issue, which I'm going to make the case for.
These ghastly slave raiding practices of the Muslim pirates It had a huge effect on particularly coastal regions of Europe.
France and England and Spain lost thousands of ships, devastated their seaborne trade, retarded the growth of the economy.
Long stretches of the coast in Spain and Italy were almost completely abandoned until the 19th century.
The fishing industry was virtually devastated, which of course led to starvation throughout certain parts of Western Europe.
Well, Christians did come, tragically, to the party.
Islam dominated the slave trade from the 7th to the 15th century, but between 1519 and 1815, Europe also joined in the trade in human flesh.
Interestingly enough, it was the European nations who had suffered most at the hands of the Muslim slave raiders and under centuries of Muslim military occupation, such as Spain and Portugal, who dominated the European slave trade.
It was the enemies of the Reformation who brought Europe into the slave trade.
The Reformation was a 16th century movement led by Martin Luther, who tried to get the Bible translated into the vernacular, into the common tongue of the people and gave them copies of the Bible, allowed them to come to their own conclusions, shattered the unity of Christendom.
Under the Catholic Popes and the Catholic Church into Calvinists, Wingalians, Anabaptists, Lutherans, and so on, thus provoking a century or two of vicious religious civil war, resulting in the separation of church and state for the mere survival of European civilization.
So Martin Luther defied Charles V by saying, My conscience is captive to the word of God.
Here I stand. I can do no other.
So the Holy Roman Empire, which was...
In reality, neither Holy nor Roman nor an empire authorized Europe's involvement in the slave trade in 1519.
Britain's involvement in slavery was at first authorized in 1631 by the delightful King Charles I, who was executed by Parliament.
His son Charles II reintroduced it by Royal Charter in 1672.
Popes were very keen on slavery.
One pope even rode around in a giant boat, rode by slaves.
So it was not a great bulwark against religion.
The destinations are surprising because generally you hear about black slavery in America.
According to the slave trade by Hugh Thomas, four million slaves went to Portuguese-controlled Brazil.
It's over 35% of the Atlantic slave trade.
Two and a half million to the Spanish nations of South and Central America, which is 22%.
Just under 18% of the British West Indies, mostly Jamaica.
14% of them went to French West Indies and half a million 4.4% to the Dutch West Indies and half a million slaves, black slaves generally, went to North America, 4.4% of the entire slave trade.
I don't see a lot of people trying to give Brazil a hard time, although Brazil ended slavery in the 1880s, much later.
So here's a chart. You can just look at this to see where the enslaved Africans were sent from 1500 to 1870.
It's a very small amount that went to British North America.
So how did this end? Well, William Wilberforce, the least ghetto name in history, on October 28th, he wrote in his diary, God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of society.
For the rest of his life, he dedicated his life as a member of Parliament to opposing the slave trade and working for the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire.
On February 22nd, 1807, 20 years after he first began his crusade in the middle of Britain's war with France, Wilberforce and his team's labors were rewarded with victory by an overwhelming 283 votes, 4 to 16 against the motion to abolish the slave trade was carried in the House of Commons.
In 1809, the British government mobilized its navy to search suspected slave ships, even foreign vessels on the high seas.
At the height of the British Empire, it covered a third of the globe.
The British navy was the undisputed king of the waters.
One of the tragic effects was that when a slave ship would see a British corsair coming up to it, they would generally kill the slaves and dump the bodies overboard so they wouldn't be found to be slavers.
In 1810, the British Parliament declared slave trading a felony punishable by 14 years hard labor.
In 1814, The British representative of the Congress of Vienna insisted on the abolition of the slave trade being included in the International Treaty.
The treaty was signed by all the European powers on June 9, 1815.
In 1825, Britain passed a law making slave trading punishable by death.
Three days before William Wilberforce died by an Act of Parliament in 1833, the British abolished slavery itself, setting all 700,000 slaves in British overseas territories free.
Wilberforce's lifetime campaign of 59 years was now fully successful.
He said, shortly before he died, thank God, that I've witnessed the day in which England is willing to give 20 million pounds sterling for the abolition of slavery.
A moral hero of mankind, did you ever hear his name?
Of course not, does not fit the narrative and does not serve the powers that be, which we will get to.
Now, one of the great tragedies of ending the Atlantic slave trade wasn't like the number of slaves captured in Africa or other places diminished.
They took more of the slaves from Africa and sent them over to the Sahara.
Missionary explorer David Livingstone wrote graphic descriptions of the ravages of the East African slave trade.
He wrote this.
Two of the women had been shot the day before for attempting to untie their thongs.
That would be these arm thongs, not the butt floss bikini thongs.
One woman had her infant's brains knocked out because she could not carry her load and it.
And a man was dispatched, i.e.
killed with an axe because he had broken down with fatigue.
Those taken out of the country are but a very small section of the sufferers.
We never realized the atrocious nature of the traffic until we saw it at the Fountainhead.
There, truly Satan has his seat.
Besides those actually captured, thousands are killed and die of their wounds in famine, driven from their villages by the internecine war waged for slaves with their own clansmen and neighbors, slain by the lust of gain which is stimulated, be it remembered always, by the slave purchases of Cuba and elsewhere. be it remembered always, by the slave purchases of Cuba there.
The trans-Sahara slave trade was truly appalling.
So boys from about 8 to 12, if they were captured, would be castrated.
This would be penis and testicles, because Arabs had superstitions about the sexual prowess of blacks, and also castrated boys were more docile.
And... So they would castrate the boys.
The survival rate was very low.
They went to the homes of wealthy Arab landlords and they forced-marched young women across endless miles of scorching sand in the Sahara Desert to become sex concubines.
Most of the women died in transit.
So murderous castration, obviously without anesthetic or any other kind of medical procedures or protection against infection, And the force marching of women across the desert for the rape rooms of the eastern lands was unbelievably brutal and far worse statistically than what happened in the Atlantic slave trade.
So eunuchs, the penises and scrotum of 8 to 12 year old African boys.
The survival rate from this process of castration range from 1 in 10 to 1 in 30.
And so it's impossible to estimate hundreds of thousands, probably millions of young boys bled to death during this ghastly procedure.
And in diminishing or eliminating the Atlantic slave trade, more boys went that direction rather than to the relatively safer lands in North and South America.
So... The reason why I say if you're going to be captured, then you want to go west, not east, is that if you look at this graph here, this is 1650 to 1750, the rise of the US slave population is enormous.
When you were a woman in the Muslim countries, if you had a baby, As a result, of course, of being raped in these concubines, if you had a baby, the baby would be murdered, generally.
So, the men were castrated and the women's babies were murdered, which is why there aren't a lot of blacks in Islamic countries these days, despite such a rampant history of 14 centuries of slavery.
But early you can see that the U.S. slave population is increasing.
Slaves could marry and were encouraged to have children and so on.
And although the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished.
Slave population in the U.S. nearly tripled over the next 50 years.
It doesn't make slavery moral, of course, a completely evil institution, but it makes it much more survivable in the Americas.
Now, the confusion of Slavery with the free market is truly tragic because then we think that it was free trade that produced slavery and it required 600,000 odd dead Americans in the Civil War to end it.
This, of course, is not the case.
Generally, all governments had to do was stop catching the slaves and returning them to their masters.
I mean, you think about it. You've got a plantation.
You've got a bunch of slaves. They just walk off.
How are you going to catch them? Where are you going to find them?
You can't possibly do that.
The government has to go and catch them for you, the taxes and labor of which are paid generally by others.
So there are two state statutes that reduce the private cost of slavery.
They were largely ignored.
And this made slavery look a lot more efficient.
We'll get into them. So it's slave patrols and bans on the freeing of slaves from a manumission, which we will get to in a little bit more detail.
It's worth understanding just so we can really get how little slavery was economically efficient.
And of course, those who had bought slaves tended to resist the introduction of labor-saving devices, and this prevented industrialization, this prevented farm machinery from coming into being.
And of course, the more productive slaves were, to the degree that they were productive, simply meant that you had to pay more to buy them, and therefore eliminating a lot of the gains.
So... Also, states prevented immigration of free blacks, and if you were freed through some miracle, you had to leave the state.
You restricted movements and rights and so on, which meant that basically most of the blacks in a given state would be slaves, which made them a lot easier to identify and to capture.
So, forced slave patrol.
So, the patrol statutes in the South required all white males to participate in slave patrol duty.
So the counties established these regular patrols, the counties placed responsibility for organizing these patrols on local judges and constables, and they appointed these patrol leaders that rotated in and out, responsible for organizing and reporting on the activities of their patrols.
Now, if you didn't participate in these patrols or carry out organizing responsibilities, you got a series of escalating fines, which would end up with you going to debt as prison and possibly being sold off as a slave.
So to prevent slaves from escaping, these drafted, poor whites were responsible for patrolling the rolls at night, monitoring the movement of blacks, checking their passes, inspecting slave residences.
Pretty scary for the blacks.
A lot of these guys weren't big fans of this whole thing and took it out on the blacks, which was wretched and tragic.
And you didn't even get paid.
All you could get paid was maybe you get a little reward if you catch a runaway slave.
So this is a way in which, remember, it's the rich who use the power of the state to screw the middle class and the poor.
I mean, we see this right now going on with the bank bailouts.
I mean, how much money did you get?
How much money did you have to pay if you're not in the 1% at the top of the financial food chain?
You don't get crap. Well, you get crap and debt.
And, you know, can we really be said to have ended forced indentature when children are born hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt because of the spending of the state to buy votes?
I would argue no.
So, it was tragic.
The costs of capturing, of patrolling for and capturing the slaves were born by the people who were forced to do it, not the people who owned the slaves.
So this is really important.
If the trend of freeing slaves had been allowed to continue, slavery would have ended before the Civil War peacefully.
It's a strong claim to make.
Let me give you the numbers behind it.
You couldn't free your slaves.
Well, originally you could, but too many slaves were being freed, which made it harder to catch the ones who ran away.
So, you couldn't buy your freedom anymore, you couldn't be granted freedom, and you couldn't be given your freedom even in a last will and testament.
And therefore, there was not much freeing or manumission of slaves.
Not because people didn't want to do it, but because it became illegal.
So, if the government had not Banned the freeing of slaves.
More slaves would have been freed.
There would have been more competition for labor.
Labor would have begun to displace slavery in terms of efficiency and so on.
And more slaves would then have been freed.
So as states enacted statutes against manumission and immigration and required slave patrols, the growth of the free black population decreased.
And it fell below the rate of growth in the slave population and was reduced to a trickle in the decade prior to the Civil War.
If the free black population in the South Atlantic states had grown at the same rate between 1800 and 1860 as it did between 1790 and 1800, every slave in the South Atlantic states would have been freed twice.
By 1860, the equivalent of virtually every slave in the country.
So they were being freed.
The government stepped in and stopped it to serve the interests of the wealthy plantation owners, the couple of percent of people who had the ear of the government as they do now and use it to shaft everyone else.
But even if you did the slower rate of growth, between 1790 and 1810, which was 88% growth in freeing of slaves, every slave in the region would have been freed only 1.5 times, which I guess is still pretty good.
Let's talk a little bit about white slavery.
The Irish slave trade.
Oh, my lovely ancestors from Ireland who came across with William the Conqueror in 1066, I'm sure were very, very effective at slaughtering and covering themselves with blue and red of disassembled local Britons.
Very good ancient murderers, my relatives, which are my ancestors, which meant that they got lots of land as a result for being very good at killing people, which is really the foundation of the aristocracy.
All money with royalty on it is blood money.
And the Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World.
His proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners to be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies.
By the mid-1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat.
At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.
Now, I mean, I'm half Irish.
And half German. And while the German part of me wants to invade Poland, the Irish part of me, when exposed to sunlight, bursts into fiery flames and freckles.
So not exactly the blackest of the black slaves in the universe.
So Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants.
The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually whites.
In the 1600s, white slaves in America outnumbered the black slaves.
So, Reverend Augie, who lived in the South for 11 years, had both black and white congregations told of preaching to slaves, some with red hair and blue eyes, a third of whom were just as white as he was.
Dr. Alexander Milton Ross attended a slave auction in New Orleans where many of the slaves were much whiter than the white people who were buying them.
In Lexington, Kentucky, Reverend Calvin Fairbank, well, I guess that's the least hood name you'll find, described a woman who was going to be sold at slave auction as one of the most beautiful and exquisite young girls one could expect to find in freedom or slavery being only 164th African.
In 1855, Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York Central Park, was in Alabama on a pleasure trip and saw barred bales of cotton being thrown from a considerable height into a cargo ship's hold.
The men tossing the bales down somewhat recklessly into the hold were Negroes.
The men in the hold were Irish.
He said, what's going on?
Why is it this way?
Oh, said the worker, the niggers are worth too much to be risked here.
If the paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke...
Nobody loses anything.
The economics of Irish slavery were pretty tragic.
From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves.
You see, half a million blacks get to North America, 300,000 whites sold as slaves in a 10-year period.
Ireland's population fell from about 1,500 to 600,000 in one single decade.
This would be about the equivalent of America losing 100 million people.
Families were ripped apart.
The British did not even allow Irish dads to take their wives and children.
Across the Atlantic, this led to a helpless population of homeless women and children.
What would the English do with those helpless women and children?
Oh, let's auction them off as well as additional slaves.
Oh, the British.
During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold to slaves in the West Indies.
Virginia and New England.
In this decade, 52,000 Irish, mostly women and children, were sold to the Barbados and Virginia, long before the SPF 9 million that you need if you're an Irish person out in the sun.
Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder.
In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2,000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.
The British would routinely scoop up orphans and send them across as slaves.
They would also troll brothels, rip the women out of the brothels, and send them over as breeders to the New World.
So African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s, 50 pounds sterling.
Irish slaves came a lot cheaper, no more than 5 pounds sterling.
And this is, you know, partly because you could just grab them.
You didn't have to pay the African warlords for the slaves, and they were cheaper and easier to transport.
If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime.
A death would be a monetary setback, but much cheaper than killing a more expensive African.
And the English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for own personal pleasure and for greater profit.
Children of the slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the merchant's workforce.
Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her children would still be born as slaves to the master.
So they're not going to go and abandon their kids.
kids, they just generally hung around to take care of them.
England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century.
Records state that after the 1798 Irish rebellion, why would they rebel?
Such a lovely environment.
Thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia.
They were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives.
So, white slaves, um, Middle Eastern slaves, African slaves, it was all over the world.
And there are still some significant differences to be noted between the Atlantic slave trade and the Trans-Saharan slave trade.
So two out of three slaves shipped across the Atlantic were men, but two women for every man were enslaved by the Muslims, again, for sexual concubinage or institutional rape.
The mortality rate for slaves being transported across the Atlantic was as high as 10%, but the percentage of slaves dying in transit on the Trans-Saharan East African slave trade was between 80% and 90%, which is why I say if you're going to get caught, you want to go East, not West.
So almost all the slaves shipped across the Atlantic were for agricultural work.
The ones that went east were for sexual exploitation in harems and for military service.
So many children were born to slaves in the Americas.
So your marriage wasn't legally recognized, but you could get married and have kids, millions of their descendants are citizens in Brazil and the USA. But there are very few descendants of the slaves that ended up in the Middle East.
One of the great genocidal, murderous, barbaric, vicious tragedies of human history, generally unacknowledged.
So, again, as we mentioned, you get married in the Americas, North and South America, in the Middle East, you were generally castrated as a male, and your babies were murdered if you were female.
So, the Atlantic slave trade was not the result of market forces.
It was not a free market.
It was developed under the power of the state.
We've already talked about how the state used the power of law to socialize or to offset the cost of capturing and returning slaves and did not allow slave owners to free their slaves.
So, of course, slavery existed in the tribal African societies, which was the source of slaves.
Europeans could not go into Africa and catch slaves.
They would just catch disease and die.
This was not a market force that was going on.
It was not free trade and private ownership that was going on in the tribal African societies.
The slave trade as a whole was not founded by private firms.
It was established by the colonial powers, which instituted monopolies to exploit the indigenous population.
So, the Dutch West India Company was chartered in 1621.
The Royal Company of Adventurers for the Importation of Negroes was formed in 1662.
These were not private corporations or companies of any kind.
They were governmental military structures which gave a monopoly on the slave trade, subsidized it, and in return for great profits.
Think of it as the military-industrial complex of its time.
So they were very efficient in generating slaves, revenues, and domestic influence.
So there is a statement that said, Negroes therefore were stolen in Africa to work land stolen from the Indians, but this was always and forever a government involvement.
When governments gave up the practice of catching and returning slaves, slavery collapsed.
So... Let's understand what slavery is.
Slavery is the 100% ownership of the products of somebody's labor in a non-voluntary environment.
If I go to work at a restaurant, they'll take some portion of my salary, they built the restaurant, they do the advertising, they heat it, but I take some portion.
of the profits for my salary.
It's voluntary. When you force someone to hand over 100% of their earnings, that is pure slavery.
What percentage of your earnings are forced over at the hands of the state?
See, we really haven't fundamentally outgrown it as an institution.
We've become free-range serfs or slaves.
We can choose our own occupations, but we must still remit property taxes and income taxes and all other forms of taxation to the state in order to secure our freedom.
And we really haven't understood what slavery was and where it came from.
We've been told to turn it into two things that are fundamentally incorrect.
One is it's become a race issue for obvious financial gain reasons and reasons of the profitability of victimization in the face of a relatively empathetic culture.
So, it's become a race issue when it fundamentally wasn't.
It was a power issue.
When the British could get away with enslaving the whites, they got away with enslaving the whites.
When they could get away with enslaving the Africans, they enslaved the Africans.
When the Muslims could get away with enslaving everyone, they enslaved everyone.
When the Jews could profit from their participation in the slave trade, they did and could.
So, it is not a race issue.
At all, fundamentally. We've been told to make it a race issue so that we fight amongst ourselves rather than looking at the real source of the problem of slavery, past, present, and future, which is the powers that be, who indoctrinate us to fight with each other rather than look at the genuine power structures in the world, which are around the viciousness and violence and exploitation of state power at the behest of the financial powers who lend to the state.
So the state can bribe us with goodies and have our children pay off those goodies.
So we've made the mistake of thinking that slavery is foundationally about race so that we can fight each other as races rather than recognize that we are brothers and sisters in the tax farms called countries run by governments.
And we've also thought that it has something to do with the free market.
So we think that our enemies are racial and our enemy is the free market.
Well, it is not a race-based institution and it was the complete opposite of the free market.
It was a central fascistically controlled pseudo-market.
It's called crapitalism, crony capitalism, where you use the power of the state to benefit financial interests.
That's not the free market at all.
Forcing people to go and catch slaves, that's not the free market.
Forcing people to not do what they want with their own property.
If slaves are property, you should be able to set them free, right?
But banning people from setting their slaves free is not treating slaves even as property as it should have been at the time under the law.
Because that would have been a way of peacefully ending By making slavery diminish out of the guilty generosity of the slave owners, particularly on their deathbeds when they would set slaves free.
So it is completely wretched for us to misunderstand what slavery was, who the cause was.
Financial interests, using the power of the state to exploit the resources.
Now, the resources are money, the resources are the environment.
In the past, the resources included human beings.
But the idea that one race is guilty of slavery and owes reparations is like saying, you and I owe reparations for the bailouts that were handed to the bankers, to the banksters.
Of course not. We didn't like them, those bailouts.
We would have resisted them if we could, but the money is taken from us at gunpoint.
Well, the facilitation of slavery The violent power of the state which made slavery possible and sustained its continuance was imposed upon both whites and blacks and mulattoes and Chinese and Irish and you name it.
It was imposed upon them against their will.
Just as the national debt is imposed upon your children against their will.
Just as bank bailouts are imposed on you against your will.
All we should do is band together to recognize The great owners of mankind are the political and financial and military powers of the world.
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