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Mystical Buddhism, Orientalist Confucianism, polytheist Hinduism never accomplished the abolition of slavery. Only Christian Europe actively sought the end of this immoral trade in human flesh. China uses slave labor. Throughout Asia and in parts of Africa, various forms of slavery are practiced. Islam has always enshrined it as a vibrant and important part of its political theology – Dhimmis and beautiful women taken in jihad are demanded as slaves, as recompense for not following the Allah-cult. Slave trading within the Islamic world still goes on today. Yet the really smart people scream, that Islam is a 'faith'. What 'faith' allows slavery ?
It is well known that Muslim women who are slaves remain so for their entire lives. Any offspring are likewise slaves – forever. There is no 'upward mobility' in Islam if you are a slave. In Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan, Pakistan, Muslim India, and the Islamic regions of South Asia, slavery is passed down as a heritage within a family from mother to daughter to grand daughter. Female Muslim slaves abound. Girls as young as 13 are traded for money to older men, oftentimes uncles, who want virgins for sex. Usually the covenant will last a few years until the man tires of the girl and passes her on to someone else. But the girl remains a slave – one for sex – but someone who is not a human, just a piece of property to be used and traded much like a house, a bed, or an old shirt.
American Blacks still complain and whine about 'Southern slavery'. The US media portrays every white person as a sheet wearing Klansmen – an organization with a handful of real members, and which is dwarfed by the many thousands – tens of thousands in fact -- who are enrolled in Black racist groups such as the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, whose website openly avows the destruction of white and Jewish America and the installation of a Black Caliphate. Blacks still slave trade today in West Africa and mixed Blacks are still slaves in Brazil. Yet whitey is to blame. The reality is that it was whitey, and European Christians who first ended slavery some 1200 years. It was whitey, and American Christians who then ended slavery in the US 150 years ago. It was whitey who shed blood and money to stop history's most horrific crime. And it was Christian theology which was the animus and power behind the eradication of the flesh trade.
Like the creation of the modern world, only the Christianized area of Europe was able to mount the moral, economic, and military means to end slavery. Why is that ? One hears today all sorts of wonderful mish-mash about the Oriental theologies. The meditation of the Buddhists. The conservative mysticism of Confucius. The peaceful intentions of the Hindus. The aspirations of pagan animists and nature worshipers. These are indeed heart warming initiatives. They can even be of use in balancing a person's mental health through reflection and coming to terms with the 'self'. But they never lead anywhere.
There is no overarching faith, nor any aspects of reason in Orientalist thinking. Buddhism for instance does not lead to inquiry, debate, or science in the name of finding out God's perfect design. It simply leads to mysticism and meditation which leads to inaction. So it is with the rest of the Orientalist philosophies. They are irrational.
None of these much vaunted systems bothered to ask why slavery exists and why it is a moral project. None took the time and energy to analyze the ethical and even economic aspects of the system. No inventions were made to relieve the mass of slave labor. The Great Wall[s] of China built over 2000 years, and involving some 20 different wall systems, killed probably 10 million laborers – all of them slaves. Why didn't the Chinese automate this construction ? They had the ability to concoct gun powder and in the 10th century had iron foundries [which were destroyed by the Confucian Mandarins in the 11th since they were seen as a threat to centralized power], yet they never had the collective intelligence even to question the existence, the immorality and the economic poverty of slavery. Blame their ideology.
In the ancient world freedom was a privilege not a right. Only European languages had a word for freedom. The very idea does not exist outside of the Latin world. Ancient Greeks believed that slavery was natural. Plato opposed the enslavement of Greeks, but not of 'barbarians', he himself had foreign slaves. Without slave labor, Aristotle argued, clever men would not have the time to figure things out, and invent the important features of society. For Aristotle who is held up by Arabs, Muslims and Europeans as the greatest mind of all time, slaves were dumb animals, akin to cattle and removed from the human realm.
It was only with the gentle and necessary decline and 'fall' of Rome that slavery begins its path to perdition and extinction. By 800 AD throughout most of Christian Europe, slavery and slave trading of Christians was ended. By 1000 AD general slavery of non-Christians was also by and large, a thing of the past. Christian morality that all men are created equal, and the Church's insistence that slavery would offend Christ and the teachings found in the good book, were absolutely essential for transformation of European society from an ancient one based on human labor, to a modern one based on technology, machines, human ingenuity and equality.
In the modern mind medieval serfs are thought of as slaves. But this is of course a nonsense. When Rome fell, local populations had to band together for safety, economic development and to expand local infrastructure. Feudal serfdom had nothing in common with slavery. In exchange for protection from a powerful local 'lord', the common man on his farm would guarantee a payment in production – usually about 20-30% of the total output. He could marry, own property, educate himself and his family, go to church if he wanted, not go to church if he did not want to, and even move location with his 'lord's' permission. He was not shackled, beaten or set upon by his liege leader.
This feudal system was highly effective as a means of promoting quick local defenses. When Arabs or Vikings raided an area, a centralized far off state could never reply fast enough to repel the invasion. But local forces could and over time would fight off the depredations of the inferior Muslims and northern marauders. Feudalism grew out of necessity and out the belief that local governance was far more effective than the Orientalist and centralized bureaucracy of Rome or any other centralized and oppressive state.
Feudalism in other words led not only to the eradication of slavery, but created a direct path to the modern world. In no other area of the world did this occur. Yet we are told by really smart people that Christianity is barbaric, that it is a cult; that it militates against reason and that it is pointless. On the other we all believe that slavery is evil. That slavery was ended by Christianity seems lost on those educated by the cultural Marxists and those who hate the Western world. It is however, one of the great victories in man's history.
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