White Gold

Posted by Guest Blogger on Saturday, 23 April 2005 12:40.

When most people think of slavery they probably have an image of a white slave owner and a black slave. This is the picture of slavery we have been given through countless books, films and TV shows.

It’s an image which fits in well with left-wing theories that white men have established a dominant power structure which oppresses other races, and that therefore white society is morally illegitimate and must be deconstructed.

Up to now, the main argument against such a left-wing view has been that it was actually white men who ended the slave trade. This is a good and effective argument, but it now appears that much more ought to have been said against the left-wing view.

Last year, Professor Robert C. Davis wrote a book which revealed that more than a million Europeans had been enslaved in Muslim North Africa over a period of three centuries.

And now Giles Milton has written a work of popular history on the same theme, entitled White Gold. Milton writes for the mass market, and his works are likely to be stocked by your local bookshop. So a hidden part of European history has now been well and truly revealed.

What’s even better is that White Gold is an exceptionally well-written book. It follows the extraordinary story of one European slave, Thomas Pellow, whilst also giving the broader history of the trade in European slaves in North Africa.

Many of the European slaves were captured at sea by pirates, although there were also raids on coastal villages. For instance, in 1625 a corsair fleet attacked the coast of Cornwall. The pirates captured 60 villagers at Mount’s Bay and 80 at the fishing village of Looe which they then torched. A second corsair fleet then captured Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel as a base and raised the standard of Islam. By the end of 1625 the two pirate fleets had captured about 1000 Englishmen for the slave market.

Many slaves were taken to the port of Sale on the coast of Morocco. There they were crowded into unhygienic underground pens before being sold. The slaves were shackled with heavy leg irons and many were employed by the sultan to perform hard labour on his grandiose palace building project.

Some slaves were allowed to remain Christian but many others were forced, often with the use of torture, to convert to Islam. A combination of meagre rations, hard labour and unhygienic conditions meant that the mortality rate was very high.

The European slaves were on the bottom rung of the hierarchy in the North African system. The Muslim slave owners were served by loyal black slaves who acted as bodyguards, personal attendants and palace troops and were also overseers of the European slaves. There are many accounts of beatings and executions by the black African overseers of the European slaves.

European slavery in North Africa only ceased in 1816 - nine years after the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire. Even then it was only stopped by force of arms when Sir Edward Pellew led a British and Dutch fleet to Algiers and bombarded the city into submission.

This is, of course, only the most cursory description of the facts of European slavery in North Africa. To get a truer grasp of the extent and nature of this slavery you would have to read a book like White Gold.

Even so, it should be enough to show just how false the left-wing theory of a dominant power structure established by whites to oppress other races is. The left-wing theory has relied for effect on a “filtering” of history in which only those cases in which Europeans were dominant are emphasised.

So we hear a lot about slavery in North America because that’s an instance where Europeans were generally in charge. The slavery in North Africa has been, in contrast, almost hidden away up to now, as it shows Europeans not in their ideologically assigned role as oppressors but very much as the oppressed.

Tags: History

Comments:

Posted by Kubilai on Sat, 23 Apr 2005 15:44 | #

Excellent post and thank you for the information. I am reading two books currently that I have recently purchased. One is the book by Robert C. Davis that you mention above. It is fascinating for me to learn about a part of our history that has NEVER been taught to us. As you rightfully state, this does not further the leftist agenda of “evil White oppressor” and therefore it is thoroughly suppressed. People should not only read one or both of these books, but also tell as many others about them as possible.

Some interesting facts to consider. Here we have two examples of enslaved people. One White and the other Black. The White slaves totalled over 1 Million in three centuries and the Black was 600-700K over roughly the same time period for the US. The number of Blacks in total for all countries/continents, including South America, the Arab world, Africa, and Asia is ~6 Million.

White population in slave regions: (?) Not sure, though my guess would be minimal in relation to native populations. If anyone has concrete numbers, please let me know.

Black population in the US: Approximately 32 Million.

White effect of being enslaved: Ho-hum, forge ahead and continue to advance western society. Never brought up and definitely no handouts ever asked for.

Black effect of being enslaved: Underachievement ALL due to slavery and evil “Whitey”. Constant societal shakedown by Blacks that ranges from ridiculous public policies to advance the Black man to suppressed information of Black on White murderous hate crimes.

Poor, poor, poooooooor Blacks. They had it so rough in the US that they have managed to increase their population nearly 50-fold. Talk about oppression! Nary a peep about the treatment of Blacks in these other regions of the world that brought over Blacks by the race huslters, including the castration of Blacks by the Chinese. No, there ain’t no profit there. The White man is the only one stupid enough to fall for this organized extortion.

Oh, the other book I am reading is “The Sword of the Prophet” by Serge Trifkovic. An honest account of the brutality of Islam.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 23 Apr 2005 18:06 | #

”Black effect of being enslaved: Underachievement ALL due to slavery and evil ‘Whitey.’ Constant societal shakedown by Blacks that ranges from ridiculous public policies to advance the Black man to suppressed information of Black on White murderous hate crimes.” (—Kubilai)

The women’s vote is responsible for a lot of this stuff being taken seriously. There aren’t enough limp-wristed lithping effeminate men to sway elections or convince politicians and their pollsters and powerful white élites they need to pay lip-service to this crap and get it on their policy agendas without 50% of voters being clueless women who should be in the voting booths a lot less and in the homes and maternity wards a lot more. How this problem of women’s suffrage is going to be dealt with I don’t know but it needs at least to be brought up in order that people begin now to think up ways. The solution is going to involve the careful tailoring of nation-saving propaganda to the white female mind exactly as the anti-Caucasian side is very careful to tailor nation-destroying and race-destroying propaganda to the white female mind (for example, this constant bombardment—in college, by Hollywood, on women’s daytime TV, etc.—with the view that among men only Negro ones and other non-white ones like Mexicans and Puerto Ricans are marriageable and nice, white men being mean, dangerous tyrants who abuse women, and so on). And part of the solution will have to be to remove certain things, such as immigration policy, from the category of those that are alterable by simple election (exactly as the Constitution and Bill of Rights do: take certain things off the list of those that can be voted on except in the extra-ordinary manner of a Constitutional Amendment): if the 1924 immigration reform policy had been made into a Constitutional Amendment, Ted Kennedy, Emanuel Celler, and the other anti-white Christian forces wouldn’t have been able to get it replaced with the 1965 Genocide-Against-Whites Kennedy-Celler Immigration Holocaust Bill which has, exactly according to plan, led to the current genocide against whites in the U.S. I would favor a new category of rules which can’t be changed by any means whatsoever: not through a simple vote, and not through a Contstitutional Amendment either. You’re stuck with them as long as you’re a citizen of this country. Immigration policy would be one of them. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to say, “So, Ben Wattenberg, Robert Lindsay, and so many of you typical women voters out there, you don’t like a permanent, unchangable national-origins immigration policy of the type in place from 1924 to 1965? Well, sorry about that—that immigration policy is in the new category of rules that can’t be changed by any means whatsoever, no, not by simple vote, and not even by Constitutional Amendment. Your only choices are to foment armed revolution to overthrow the entire government or get the hell out and move to Rhodesia, Morocco, China, Mexico, or Puerto Rico—and ... good riddance.”

Something tinkering’s going to have to be done on women’s suffrage before the nation-state will have a real chance of long-term survival. At the very least, no country should allow women to set foot in the voting booth without stringent laws in place removing certain things like immigration policy from the list of those that can be changed by simple vote.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 23 Apr 2005 18:12 | #

And I agree with Kubilai: that was an excellent log entry by Mark.

Posted by Phil Peterson on Sat, 23 Apr 2005 19:17 | #

The women’s vote is responsible for a lot of this stuff being taken seriously.

You’ve hit the nail on the head there, Fred. Not many talk people about it.

Posted by GayLikeAFox on Sat, 23 Apr 2005 20:52 | #

I’m surprised the poster didn’t mention that the word slave comes from “Slav”, the group of people most commonly enslaved by the Romans. Unless I’m mistaken, I think the Arabic word for slave is also derived from the Arabic word for “Slav”, since the Slavs were the group most commonly enslaved by Arabs!

Too bad I’m a southern as opposed to an eastern European. I could have a read-made excuse for every setback I’ve ever encountered. On the plus side, my great-grandfather, an Italian, was beaten up by a gang of racist Irishmen when he came to America. So perhaps I should start asking for handouts from everyone with the surname “O’Hara”.

Posted by Svigor on Sat, 23 Apr 2005 22:18 | #

Mark Richardson:
Even so, it should be enough to show just how false the left-wing theory of a dominant power structure established by whites to oppress other races is. The left-wing theory has relied for effect on a “filtering” of history in which only those cases in which Europeans were dominant are emphasised.

It also ha relied on a “filtering” of ideas rather heavily. The practice is rather heavy-handed, really. Using the Africans in America tale before us one can see this. One can grow to adulthood in America without ever having heard even the most basic of objections in the public sphere to the modern flavors of “Civil Rights.” Has the simple fact that people have been enslaving people the world over for ever been presented? Is precedent (vis-a-vis affirmative action, the welfare state, etc.) ever discussed? (what happens when the British decide they want affirmative action because the Romans invaded? What happens when the Poles sue the Mongolians over Temujin?) Why is collective punishment suddenly okay when the victim is black and the perpetrator is white? CAN you people convince any informed person that blacks ended up the worse for slavery?

Fred Scrooby:
The women’s vote is responsible for a lot of this stuff being taken seriously. There aren’t enough limp-wristed lithping effeminate men to sway elections or convince politicians and their pollsters and powerful white élites they need to pay lip-service to this crap and get it on their policy agendas without 50% of voters being clueless women who should be in the voting booths a lot less and in the homes and maternity wards a lot more. How this problem of women’s suffrage is going to be dealt with I don’t know but it needs at least to be brought up in order that people begin now to think up ways

Y’know Scroob, you have a point there, and it pains me to admit it. I take on my share of sacred cows, and consequently I leave some consistently alone. Women’s suffrage is one of them. I mean really, who wants to be that much of a “dinosaur.” Unfortunately, the fact remains that women are absolute suckers for socialism and big government and maladaptive altruism and my guess is that we’re worse off for women’s suffrage.

Posted by Phil Peterson on Sat, 23 Apr 2005 22:31 | #

I mean really, who wants to be that much of a “dinosaur.”

When I am not in a public forum and let my mind go into free fall, it wanders into the far reaches of the early triassic. (chukle)

On a serious note, women’s suffrage was the most significant political event of the 20th century. Its true political impact will only be guaged a few centuries from now.

Posted by Phil Peterson on Sat, 23 Apr 2005 22:37 | #

This article by Fred Reed is a must-read.

Posted by Phil Peterson on Sat, 23 Apr 2005 22:41 | #

Quote:

The growing feminization accounts for much of the decline in the schools. The hostility to competition of any sort is an expression of the female desire for pleasantness; competition is a mild form of combat, by which men are attracted and women repelled. The emphasis on how children feel about each other instead of on what they learn is profoundly female (as for that matter is the associated fascination with psychotherapy). The drugging of male schoolchildren into passivity is the imposition of pleasantness by chemical means. Little boys are not nice, but fidgety wild men writ small who, bored out of their skulls, tend to rowdiness. They are also hard for the average woman to control and, since male teachers are absent, gelded, or terrified of litigious parents, expulsion and resort to the police fill the void. The oft-repeated suspension of boys for drawing soldiers or playing space war is, methinks, a quietly hysterical attempt to assuage formless insecurity.

Posted by Kubilai on Sat, 23 Apr 2005 23:24 | #

Excellent point Fred! I agree wholeheartedly and I, like Svigor, hate to constantly be pointing fingers, especially at women, though this is one of the major issues that has emasculated the White man.

Here are blurbs of some very good articles on feminism and the nidus for the decline of Nordic society and Nordic men….

Monday, April 11, 2005

Confessions of an Ex-Feminist
I got many comments to my posts about Muslim rapes and gang rapes of Swedish and Norwegian women, which were quoted on LGF and Dhimmi Watch, too. Several of my readers asked what Scandinavian men are doing about this. What happened to those Vikings, anyway? Did they drink too much mead in Valhalla? Despite the romantic mystique surrounding them today, the Vikings were for the most part savage barbarians. However, I doubt they would have looked the other way while their daughters were gang raped by Muslims. In some ways, this makes present-day Scandinavians worse barbarians than the Vikings ever were.

~~~~~~~~

Swedish Feminist Party under Construction
Gudrun Schyman, the former leader of Sweden’s “reformed” Communist party the Left Party, has earlier compared Swedish men to the Taliban and called for a special tax to be paid by men only. And no, she didn’t mention the Muslim gang rapes of Swedish women. That would be racist, and all men are evil, anyway. The new set-up is called Feministiskt initiativ:

~~~~~~~~~

Norwegian Feminist Wants More Muslim Immigration
This one via Human Rights Service.

Gry Larsen, the leader of the Youth Organization of the Norwegian Labor Party, wants a more open immigration policy, with less restrictions on asylum seekers than we have now. She is worried that the Center-Right government is copying too much of the restrictive immigration policies of Denmark. She claims that according to a new EU study, Swedes are less negative towards immigrants than Danes. The Danish line thus fosters xenophobia, while the softer Swedish way leads to integration and tolerance.

~~~~~~~~

Feminists Pave the Way for Women to be Raped

In Sydney Australia, two Pakistan-born Muslims were found guilty of gang rapes of two teenage girls. Muslim men have been roaming Sydney gang, raping non-Muslim women, calling them “Aussie pigs” and “sluts” who ask for it. But feminist reaction was not praise; it was hostility. They were outraged over the “racism” of the strict punishments given to the Muslims rapists. Feminists pounced on the issue of rape not because they cared about rape victims, but because it allowed them to spread class warfare. Spreading scare tactics about rape allowed them to make women feel like “victims.” Victimhood is a precondition for socialism. Despite what Shirin Ebadi says, the problem for women in the Middle East is not “the patriarchy,” it is Islam. Muslims are literally given a free pass to do whatever they want – including raping women.

http://fjordman.blogspot.com/2005_04_01_fjordman_archive.html

Luckily, not all women are as nutty and irrational as these extreme feminists, though the spectrum of beliefs of women does lean more towards these beliefs than true conservative ones. There is obviously something wrong when you have women not protecting their own offspring, as is the case in Sweden and the Muslim rapes perpetrated against Swedish girls. Has extreme Liberalism so affected Nordic women’s brains that they are acting counter evolutionary, instead of rearing an ugly maternal protective head and screaming for the blood of the perps. They yammer on about wanting MORE diversity in the form of Muslims? To me, this is mind boggling and unforgivable.

That said, the Nordic men may appear emasculated on the surface, and without a doubt some truly are, however, more that a few have a strong resentment of the current situation beneath the facade.

Posted by Phil Peterson on Sun, 24 Apr 2005 00:14 | #

Feminism was an expression of the utter corruption and decadence of western man. As an adjunct of advanced liberalism it has more to do with egotism and narcissism of its practitioners, their lack of psychological stability and their pathological self-hatred combined with a contradictory narcissism and vanity.

None of those things should come as a surprise to anyone really. While it is cruel to say this, a people who engage in such self-destructive behaviour will pay for it. No question. The world is an unforgiving place and the practitioners of such fantasies will find their throats appropriately slit at the opportune moment by the very savages whose cause they wish to espouse.