WHEN EUROPEANS WERE SLAVES

WHEN EUROPEANS WERE SLAVES:

RESEARCH SUGGESTS WHITE SLAVERY WAS MUCH

MORE COMMON THAN PREVIOUSLY BELIEVED

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 – a far greater number than had ever been estimated before.

In a new book, Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, developed a unique methodology to calculate the number of white Christians who were enslaved along Africa’s Barbary Coast, arriving at much higher slave population estimates than any previous studies had found.

Most other accounts of slavery along the Barbary coast didn’t try to estimate the number of slaves, or only looked at the number of slaves in particular cities, Davis said. Most previously estimated slave counts have thus tended to be in the thousands, or at most in the tens of thousands. Davis, by contrast, has calculated that between 1 million and 1.25 million European Christians were captured and forced to work in North Africa from the 16th to 18th centuries.

Davis’s new estimates appear in the book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan).

“Enslavement was a very real possibility for anyone who traveled in the Mediterranean, or who lived along the shores in places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England and Iceland.”

“Much of what has been written gives the impression that there were not many slaves and minimizes the impact that slavery had on Europe,” Davis said. “Most accounts only look at slavery in one place, or only for a short period of time. But when you take a broader, longer view, the massive scope of this slavery and its powerful impact become clear.”

Davis said it is useful to compare this Mediterranean slavery to the Atlantic slave trade that brought black Africans to the Americas. Over the course of four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade was much larger – about 10 to 12 million black Africans were brought to the Americas. But from 1500 to 1650, when trans-Atlantic slaving was still in its infancy, more white Christian slaves were probably taken to Barbary than black African slaves to the Americas, according to Davis.

“One of the things that both the public and many scholars have tended to take as given is that slavery was always racial in nature – that only blacks have been slaves. But that is not true,” Davis said. “We cannot think of slavery as something that only white people did to black people.”

During the time period Davis studied, it was religion and ethnicity, as much as race, that determined who became slaves.

“Enslavement was a very real possibility for anyone who travelled in the Mediterranean, or who lived along the shores in places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England and Iceland,” he said.

Pirates (called corsairs) from cities along the Barbary Coast in north Africa – cities such as Tunis and Algiers – would raid ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, as well as seaside villages to capture men, women and children. The impact of these attacks were devastating – France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships, and long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants. At its peak, the destruction and depopulation of some areas probably exceeded what European slavers would later inflict on the African interior.

Although hundreds of thousands of Christian slaves were taken from Mediterranean countries, Davis noted, the effects of Muslim slave raids was felt much further away: it appears, for example, that through most of the 17th century the English lost at least 400 sailors a year to the slavers.

Even Americans were not immune. For example, one American slave reported that 130 other American seamen had been enslaved by the Algerians in the Mediterranean and Atlantic just between 1785 and 1793.

Davis said the vast scope of slavery in North Africa has been ignored and minimized, in large part because it is on no one’s agenda to discuss what happened.

The enslavement of Europeans doesn’t fit the general theme of European world conquest and colonialism that is central to scholarship on the early modern era, he said. Many of the countries that were victims of slavery, such as France and Spain, would later conquer and colonize the areas of North Africa where their citizens were once held as slaves. Maybe because of this history, Western scholars have thought of the Europeans primarily as “evil colonialists” and not as the victims they sometimes were, Davis said.

Davis said another reason that Mediterranean slavery has been ignored or minimized has been that there have not been good estimates of the total number of people enslaved. People of the time – both Europeans and the Barbary Coast slave owners – did not keep detailed, trustworthy records of the number of slaves. In contrast, there are extensive records that document the number of Africans brought to the Americas as slaves.

So Davis developed a new methodology to come up with reasonable estimates of the number of slaves along the Barbary Coast. Davis found the best records available indicating how many slaves were at a particular location at a single time. He then estimated how many new slaves it would take to replace slaves as they died, escaped or were ransomed.

“The only way I could come up with hard numbers is to turn the whole problem upside down – figure out how many slaves they would have to capture to maintain a certain level,” he said. “It is not the best way to make population estimates, but it is the only way with the limited records available.”

Putting together such sources of attrition as deaths, escapes, ransomings, and conversions, Davis calculated that about one-fourth of slaves had to be replaced each year to keep the slave population stable, as it apparently was between 1580 and 1680. That meant about 8,500 new slaves had to be captured each year. Overall, this suggests nearly a million slaves would have been taken captive during this period. Using the same methodology, Davis has estimated as many as 475,000 additional slaves were taken in the previous and following centuries.

The result is that between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly 1 million and quite possibly as many as 1.25 million white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.

Davis said his research into the treatment of these slaves suggests that, for most of them, their lives were every bit as difficult as that of slaves in America.

“As far as daily living conditions, the Mediterranean slaves certainly didn’t have it better,” he said.

While African slaves did grueling labor on sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas, European Christian slaves were often worked just as hard and as lethally – in quarries, in heavy construction, and above all rowing the corsair galleys themselves.

Davis said his findings suggest that this invisible slavery of European Christians deserves more attention from scholars.

“We have lost the sense of how large enslavement could loom for those who lived around the Mediterranean and the threat they were under,” he said. “Slaves were still slaves, whether they are black or white, and whether they suffered in America or North Africa.”

#Ohio State University, 2010

Civic nationalism has no future

 

Civic nationalism has no future

 (By Mark Richardson of the 'Oz Conservative' blog site, 2008)

On what basis do nations exist? It was once thought that a nation was a people sharing a common ethnicity living together in the same country and governed by their own state.

This kind of nationalism fell out of favour in the modern West because it was held to discriminate on the basis of an unchosen quality, namely ethnicity. It was replaced by a civic nationalism, in which membership of a nation was determined by citizenship, and in which national identity was based on liberal political values, such as non-discrimination.

But can a civic nationalism do the job? Can it maintain the existing nations of the West? The answer seems to be clearly no.

One problem is that a civic nationalism blurs the boundaries of what is or isn't part of a nation. For instance, if it is a belief in liberal poltical values which makes me an Australian, then why can't people everywhere who believe in the same values also be considered a part of my nation?

And if it is a belief in liberal political values that defines a nation, then why shouldn't nations be merged together if there is an economic or diplomatic advantage in doing so? Why not abandon the traditional nations of Europe in order to build a European Union? Why not abandon Australia to build a Pacific Union?

There's one further problem with a civic nationalism. The older type of nationalism was rejected on the grounds that it discriminated against people. But so too does civic nationalism: it discriminates between citizens and non-citizens. Therefore, it will increasingly be seen by the more rigorously intellectual types as being immoral and illegitimate.

Enter Professor Peter Spiro, author of Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization. He has done what intellectuals will inevitably do, and taken the ideas of civic nationalism to their logical conclusion.

His argument is that a territorial citizenship is becoming increasingly more difficult to justify. If being an American is based on liberal political ideals, then membership of the nation should include those living outside America who agree with these ideals:

But here's something that really is new: the underinclusion of members-in-fact outside the territory of the United States.

One of the commenters on my first post pressed the proposition that America is an idea. That's completely consistent with strong civic notions of American citizenship and identity.

At one time, that idea was distinct. No longer. The American idea of constitutional democracy has gone global. That's American's triumph, but it may also be its downfall.

As I ask in the book, if that person in Bangalore wants to take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, on what grounds can we deny him membership? ... And what of the child born in Juarez, whose interests and identity will be connected to El Paso, Austin and Washington ... but who has the bad luck to have been born a mile on the wrong side of the line? ...

So: whatever it means to be American, it's everywhere. But that makes it all the harder to draw the membership line in a meaningful way.

Another person to have followed through with the logic of civic nationalism is the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. He has called for the European Union to be extended to include non-European countries. Specifically he wants the countries of the Mahgreb (North Africa) and the Middle East to join a European Union free trade association "not as an alternative to membership, but potentially as a step towards it". Miliband believes that such an enlarged EU would develop shared values and overcome an east/west divide, whilst providing trade and investment opportunities. This is where civic nationalism leads: to membership of a state with no definable borders.

Finally, there's the issue of citizenship and discrimination. Our former PM, Paul Keating, was in the vanguard on this issue, railing against the "exclusiveness" of civic nationalism which involves:

constructing arbitrary and parochial distinctions between the civic and the human community ... if you ask what is the common policy of the Le Pens, the Terreblanches, Hansons and Howards of this world, in a word, it is “citizenship”. Who is in and who is out.

For Keating, it was "parochial" to establish any kind of community other than an international "human" community. Keating thought that a civic nationalism was a radical, extremist form of discrimination.

Lawrence Auster wrote a good post recently on this theme, in which he observed that:

To a consistent liberal, and thus to a consistent libertarian, there can be no justification for any kind of unequal or exclusionary treatment. If a country comes into existence by the use of force (as all countries throughout history have done), well, the use of force is a form of inequality and oppression, meaning that the country is illegitimate. If a country simply exists as a country with borders, its very existence distinguishes between members and non-members and thus it violates the equal freedom of all humans and is illegitimate. If a country has a state, that represents a further inequality in which some people exercise power over others. If a country elects its government through democratic elections, that means that the majority has more power than the minority, which is also a violation of equality.

As I've said many times, liberalism, consistently applied, is incompatible with the existence of any organic, self-governing institution or society, since all such societies and institutions violate the liberal principle of the equal freedom of all human persons.

The nations of the West will not be held together by civic nationalism. The logic of a civic nationalism is toward its own dissolution.

The Multi-Layered Betrayal of Britain.

The Multi-Layered Betrayal of Britain

by Paul Weston

Poor old Britain is in a terrible state. Whilst the recent obscenity of a Labour government is mostly to blame for this, they were not alone in the cultural and racial war which has been waged against the British people over the last half-century. Such has been the all-encompassing assault on who we once were that it is now hard to find any social group which has not been betrayed.

For example:

The Wartime Generation: They sacrificed so much, indeed died in their hundreds of thousands in order that our generation could live in freedom. Today they are sidelined and ignored by the Socialist ruling classes, who consider the culture and politics of these aged warriors to be wildly out of tune with modern liberal group-think.

A book was published last year called The Unknown Warriors which collated the stories and concerns of this greatest, yet disregarded people. And it is a heartbreaking read. Over and over again these brave and stoic people mentioned one word — betrayal.

Their principal concerns were the submission of vast swathes of British cities to various foreign entities without due recourse to the democratic process, coupled with the bitter irony of handing over their bloodily defended democracy to an unelected, dictatorial foreign power in Brussels.

One particularly harrowing story was that of the extraordinary bravery shown by a Lancaster bomber rear-gunner, who continued to climb into his turret time and time again even as he saw scores of his friends killed in the most horrific ways imaginable. His bravery has been betrayed though, because he is now reduced to a prisoner within his own house, too frightened to go outside because of the violence and abuse he receives from Socialist-educated children as young as nine.

His despairing voice can be heard through another Royal Air Force veteran, who remarked eloquently of his comrades who had made the ultimate sacrifice for their country: “I mourned them then, but now surviving in a world indifferent to their hopes and dreams, I grieve more for the living.”

The Elderly: Mostly too young to fight in the war, they are nonetheless similarly excluded from modern liberal society. Their views on marriage, homosexuality, morality, Christianity, parenthood, etc. make them the enemy of Socialist ideology. In Africa, the elderly are treated with respect as learned human beings. In Britain the elderly are vilified for simply defying the Socialist Revolution, and as such are considered an embarrassing clutch of old dodderers who can be safely labelled as extremist whilst their views are carefully withheld from the young — who incidentally, and quite literally, frighten the life out of the elderly.

Why Is This Not Treason?

 

Why Is This Not Treason? 

By Paul Weston

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague. — Cicero

On the 3rd of January 1946, William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, was the last man in Britain to be hanged for the ancient crime of treason. Unless a future government changes the law it is unlikely that traitors will ever dangle again, after Tony Blair rather conveniently repealed the death penalty for such a crime in 1998.

That is not to say treason no longer exists. Now the full extent of Labour’s thirteen-year rule has become apparent, an increasing number of Britons are volubly accusing the Labour Party of wilfully and cold-bloodedly betraying Britain and deliberately jeopardising our children’s future.

Lord Haw-Haw of course sided with the Nazis during the hot war of 1939-1945. The recent Labour government might not have been operating in a hot-war theatre, but they certainly carried out a warm-war against the British (principally the English) via mass immigration from one of the most hostile and anti-Western countries in the world, Pakistan.

Consider some of the following statistics:

• Only nineteen percent of Pakistanis have a negative view of Al Qaeda and by default the Taliban, whilst seventy-five percent wish to see Sharia law implemented. British-born Muslims make an estimated four hundred thousand trips a year to Pakistan, where as many as thirty threats against Britain are being monitored at any given time.
• Thirty-three percent of Muslim students in Britain think killing in the name of Islam is permissible. Only thirty-seven percent oppose the introduction of Sharia law and only twenty-five percent oppose the creation of a worldwide Muslim caliphate.
• MI5 believe there are up to four thousand potential terrorists and thirteen thousand Al Qaeda sympathisers living in Britain. The CIA devotes an astonishing forty percent of their anti-terrorist homeland security operations against suspects not in Afghanistan or Waziristan, but in Britain itself — a country described by one CIA operative as “a swamp of Jihadis.”
• Barack Obama’s counter-terrorist advisor Bruce Riedel recently stated: “The British Pakistani community is recognised as probably Al Qaeda’s best mechanism for launching an attack against North America.”

All in all then, it would seem less than prudent to allow any more bearded ideologues into Britain, yet the Labour government — and this must sound quite insane to most people — actually went to the extraordinary lengths of advertising for foreign colonisers from the very same country the Home Office was paying Danegeld to in a typically limp-wristed appeal to stop it from blowing us up.

The British Embassy in Pakistan distributed glossy pamphlets entitled “Multicultural Britain — a Land of Immigrants” which gave a raft of arguments as to the benefits of living in Britain such as well paid jobs, plain old welfare, and the prospect of inviting over the entire extended family (sans goat) once a British passport had been acquired.

And of course there was the rather unpleasant — nay, treacherous — implication that there was no such thing as a homogenous Britain, no such place as an English homeland, just an indeterminate area of land settled by a vague mongrel collection of disparate peoples including any number of rag-tag colonial racists awaiting divine racial redemption from those they once oppressed.

So desperate were the Labour traitors to destroy Britain that, having secured power, they immediately carried out two political acts which could only place our peaceful future in doubt. The Human Rights Convention was immediately incorporated into British law and immigration rules were relaxed to allow an open-door policy of mass Muslim immigration.

A few thousand people who could gently assimilate were of little use to the Labour government. To ensure the success of their revolutionary plan, they urgently needed inassimilable millions and were quite prepared to deceive the British public about the real number of Muslim immigrants — and the real reasons Tony Blair wanted them in Britain.

And once the floodgates were opened, it became supremely important not to turn anybody away. Of the 2 million visas issued every year, fifteen percent of them were “processed” when they should not have been in order to hit “productivity targets,” with immigration officials placed under intense political pressure to issue visas rather than reject them.

Arguments for Our Side

 

Arguments for Our Side

Some ideas on how to debate the race question

by Jared Taylor

For more than ten years I have been an open advocate of racial consciousness for whites. During that period, in hundreds of radio interviews and dozens of television appearances, I have debated people who defend current racial platitudes. In this process, I have come across a number of effective arguments, and several to which there appear to be no effective replies. Readers of AR may find some of these arguments useful.

Our society is filled with debates, whether over the air, in print, in classrooms, or in private conversation.

These debates are what establish the “opinions” of the vast majority of Americans who do not have ideas of their own. Most people absorb what they hear around them and are most likely to absorb what they hear most often. Americans encounter dissident views on race so infrequently they will not be persuaded through simple repetition. A defense of white racial consciousness must therefore be clear, even arresting, in order to have an effect. 

‘Racism’
 

Unfortunately, the other side has, until recently, so dominated the debate and so grossly misrepresented our views that anyone who departs from racial orthodoxy will at some point have to contend with the charge of “racism.” “That’s a racist statement,” your opponent will say, in a tone that suggests he has just dropped a nuclear bomb, and for timid people — about 95 percent of whites — that ends the argument. The “racist” apologizes, back-peddles, and shrivels into silence. 

You, of course, are not going to do that, but the whole “racism” issue means you must defend against an accusation, and gets in the way of making positive arguments. Some racial advocates try to put opponents on the defensive by asking them to define “racism,” but this is a bad mistake. 

What kind of nation sells its soul to the highest foreign bidder?

 

As the last British-owned port is sold abroad...
What kind of nation sells its soul to the highest foreign bidder?

 

By Alex Brummer, Daily Mail.  23rd March 2011

As a great maritime and trading nation, Britain ought to treasure the ports that have been built up over centuries around our shores. Yet despite their vital importance to our economic and military security, barely a murmur of protest has been heard as the great publicly-quoted companies that own them have been sold to foreign-based firms one by one.

Yesterday, Forth Ports — the last remaining British port owner to be listed on the stock exchange — was sold for £754million to an assortment of financial groups (with the help of Germany’s Deutsche Bank) led by a little-known European investment firm. The new company now has control of London’s Tilbury Docks, several Scottish ports and 400 acres of Edinburgh waterfront.

At a time when other maritime nations, such as China and the United Arab Emirates, are jealously guarding their own trading hubs and snapping up ports across the world — from Sri Lanka to Africa — Britain has effectively sold off the nation’s family silver.

The great pity is that politicians of all parties have scandalously allowed this steady erosion of our dominant role in international trade.

The tragedy is that ports have played a critical economic role in Britain since the 12th century, when a royal charter established the Cinque ports of Hastings, New Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich to maintain ships for the Crown in case of need. In return, the five ports were granted exemption from taxes and tolls.

The idea was so successful that it spread from the South-East to Liverpool, Bristol and London as overseas trade stepped up. The nation’s maritime exploits, symbolised by the adventurism of men such as Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, became the stuff of Elizabethan legend as the UK established itself as the world’s greatest seafaring nation.

Now there appears to be a pathetic acceptance that the identity of those who own our ports does not matter.

But the truth is that the ownership of these keystones of the British Isles is absolutely vital. As a traditional trading nation dependent on imports of gas and oil for so much of our energy needs, the control of our ports — as well as access to strategic ports overseas — is crucial.

Truth, Heresy, and Heroes

Truth, Heresy, and Heroes 

By Christian Miller

White identity politics is a form of heresy, and heresy has grave consequences. Advocating White nationalism or merely defending White interests often results in a loss of social standing. Moral cowards, amoral sycophants, and racial traitors are rewarded while heroes and righteous guardians are demonized. Pretending that Whites are social constructs or have no legitimate interests to defend is accepted, even celebrated, in a society infested with anti-White multiculturalism. White racialists realize that the cornucopia of cultures is designed to exclude any White culture, and the future rainbow of races is actually a muddled mess of miscegenation. It is therefore a tremendous challenge to steadfastly support of the White extended genotype. The anti-White opposition is well-funded, well-organized, malicious, and persistent.

White advocacy is beset on all sides. Campaigning against White genocide attracts derision and scorn from anti-Whites. Lamenting the decline of the White population into minority status is attacked as intolerance. Merely calling attention to, let alone denouncing, the maliciously disproportionate amounts of violent interracial crime committed against White people is paradoxically described as hate. Protecting the continuity of family lineage by expecting exclusively White marriages and White procreation is seen as backwards, provincial, or outdated. Suggesting that many trends or ideas that harm White interests have been disproportionately created, organized, disseminated, or financed by Jewish interests can lead to accusations of insanity or mental instability.