The Slave Trade Continues
Slavery is a very old human institution. Its end in the west was spearheaded by William Wilberforce of Britain. This is a very interesting article on the subject:The Scourge of Slavery.Now naturally we think of a cruel and inhuman institution that was mainly American. This due in no small part to our civil war. And then I began reading. Of all the slaves shipped to the western hemisphere less tha 5% went to North America (mainly the American Slave States).
I found out that the slave trade to the west comprised about 10% of the trade. The vast majority went to the countries of Islam. In transporting the slaves to the Americas about 10% died in transit. In transporting slaves to Muslim countries 80% died in transit.
Although the slave trade has ended in the west it still continues in Islam. Here is a recent (June 10, 2005) reminder close to home:
A Saudi Arabian couple is charged in federal court with keeping an Indonesian woman in her early 20s as a virtual slave in their Aurora home for four years while the husband regularly raped her.Welcome Roger Simon readers.
A federal grand jury in Denver returned an indictment Thursday against Homaidan Al-Turki, 36, and his wife, Sarah Khonaizan, 35. Both were living legally in the United States and are now in custody.
Many thanks also to Freedom's friend whose work I have greatly admired.
Joe Katzman at Winds of Change has linked. Check out the discussion!
update 22:06z 19 July 05
Mike Huggins of Irvine, CA sends a couple of links
USDOJ
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
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9 comments:
Would be good to see a source on the differential death rates. 10% given the shipborne conditions seems a bit light. Not sure how we get 80% for a shorter trip to Arabia - unless they marched them across the desert, which I wouldn't put past them.
Ah, it's in the article. And yes, they did march them across the desert.
All numbers related to the slave trade are rough estimates. While a figure like 80% of all slave traffic to the Middle East region seems high, it may stem from the fact Arabian slavery predates Middle Passage slave transport by at least 1,500 years.
A fascinating aspect of this pre-Americas slave system was many of the victims were Caucasian peoples from Southern and Eastern Europe. They were transported to Northern Africa to serve as mercenary soldiers and cavalry men, primarily for the Nubians. Thus, the word "slave" is derived from "Slavic". Therefore, Serbs, Czechs, Russians, Poles, Bulgarians, etc. were your original slaves.
Truth is stranger than fiction.
I already left this at WoC, but here it is again:
One thing to remember about the abolition of slavery is that it was a Christian undertaking, advocated by dedicated Christians who believed that religious principle demanded that slavery be abolished.
It must hurt the modern multi-culti groupthink to confront this fact. Furthermore, what are now considered to be the universal principles of human rights were originally a 19th-century Christian concept.
I am a teacher. I am amazed at the ignorance about the true nature of slavery and the slave trade in the New World. Even my fellow teachers who are Black are astounded when I show them the numbers concerning the importation of slaves to the New World. One fact that caps it for most of them is the fact that South American slave traders stopped importing female slaves because they usually died before they could bear children, and you could get more work out of a male slave before he died.
I really enjoyed Rodney Stark's "For the Glory of God : How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery". The Slavery section covered some of these same facts, and explored the various slave trading and slavery-ending cultures as well as some of the implications to present. Amazing that slavery still exists, and many vocal American psudo-anti-slavery civil rights groups seem to ignore it.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691119503/
TinyURLed: http://tinyurl.com/8fd9f
How come there's no picture of the despicable creeps in the paper. If they were white Americans their pictures would be beamed all over the world. This story should be getting international attention.
One of the things that set me against the UN was when I learned that the UN Human Rigths conference was drafting resolutions to declare North american slavery, which ended 90 years before the UN was founded, a crime against humanity. And one of the countries voting on it, the Sudan, practices slavery to this day.
Is this correct?
If ten percent of the total slave trade went to the west, and if five percent of that ten percent went to what is now the USA then one half of one percent of the total slave trade went to the USA.
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