« UK: Clare College Students Harassed by Police |
| US: How to Smear a People »
March 2, 2007
History: When Justifications Are Crimes
The Ottoman institution of devshirme was a system of human taxation in which young Christian boys were enslaved and trained to serve the Sultan and his armies. Islamic apologists have advanced several defenses of the institution, none of them very convincing. Among these the most creative may be what I call "the appeal to parental feeling", the view that the enslavement of the young boys was humane because some of their parents were content to let it happen because avenues of advancement would increase for their sons after enslavement. Better a slave than poor and humiliated.
Slavery itself is an old, well established human institution. There are several myths surrounding it, most of them politically motivated. In an effort to dispel those myths, scholar Thomas Sowell wrote a long essay titled The Real Story of Slavery. The essay is full of interesting facts, but one of them particularly caught my attention--it refers to a different kind of slavery under the Ottomans. Here it is; the passage below is from page 120 of Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Although the slave trade was formally abolished in the Ottoman Empire, under pressure for the British government, slavery itself continued. As of 1891, the imperial palace purchased eleven slave girls for its harem, as others in the Ottoman Empire purchased women as concubines--typically white women from a region near the Caucasus and the Black Sea known as Circassia--even though every nation in the Western world had by then outlawed slavery. Not only the Turks accepted such slavery, so did the Circassians. Mothers often groomed their daughters for this role and sold them into what was considered to be a desirable situation, at least by comparison to what was available in Circassia. British foreign secretary Palmerston said, "the only complaint we have ever heard from the Circassians has been against our attempts to stop the traffic."
We should notice that Foreign Secretary Palmerston was unduly naive in his assessment. The Circassians were under brutal Ottoman control, and had little choice but to "complain" following their masters' wishes. But less assume, for the sake of argument, that the assessment is largely true. Let's assume the Circassians accepted slave concubinage and even tried to make the best of it. Let's also assume that Christian parents in the Balkans were sometimes happy their children were enslaved. Does that make the Ottomans less guilty? Does that make Islam, which mandates an inferior status for Christian and Jews, and allows both slavery and the sexual abuse of slave girls any less guilty?
It does not. If anything, it makes it worse. Because oppressing people to the point they would rather have their boys enslaved than remain in a life of despair is no justification. And neither is corrupting mothers to raise their daughters to become concubines. Those are not justifications, but whole new Ottoman--and Islamic--crimes.
Posted by Ruy Diaz at March 2, 2007 3:53 PM
Comments
It's time all those depending apologies for slavery in the past in the USA didn't stand up and demand an end to all slavery, everywhere, once and for all. I wouldn't dream of asking them to admit it was THEIR cultural tradition in Africa, not ours. Make the UN get over themselves and pass an ultimatum, no more slavery, no more owning, buying or selling of humans by another human, this generation or the next.
Posted by: Catawhumpus ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.westernresistance.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 2, 2007 8:47 PM
What most people don't think about is that the slave trade and slavery which had endured for several thousand years ended in the west in an extraordinarily short period of time from basically the beginning of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. They never really ask the question of why, when they do they usually attribute it to the tireless work of a group of committed Christian radicals, Wilberforce for example in Britain. The truth in fact is a little more mundane. Slave labour became too expensive. With the rise of the factory system and industrialization the 18th century, it was found that it was cheaper to hire labour than own it. Slavery was literally prized out of the market. Do you imagine for one moment that a Southern plantation owner would have held on to his slaves if he had had an efficient automatic cotton picking machine in 1835, that harvested his crop at a quarter of the cost it took with slave labour. People like James Watt with all of his inventions which made Steam power and steam engines a practical reality has done more for the eradication of Slavery than any Christian preacher with a bee in his bonnet.
Posted by: Holger Dansker at March 3, 2007 9:35 AM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)