"an anarcho-syndicalist commune"

"War and slavery, exploitation
The common basis of a Western nation
Official version, a falsified story
The truth lies buried in a shroud of glory"

 

KMFDM - Glory

 

 

I've said it before, but as chauvinistic garbage goes, there's a particular comedic wealth of pratfalls in the "woke" glorification of The Correct sex/race/sexuality, in just how often the politically correct thugs manage to trip over their own propaganda. I've been trying an amateurish but promising low-fantasy, low-budget RPG called The Necromancer's Tale recently, which I'll address in full later. But among the various "man bad; woman good" moral lessons and other standard snowflakery, one of the various trendily ethnic extras assuring us of non-European superiority stands out for sheer concentrated irrationality.

I'm amused enough at seeing Senegal gradually become everyone's go-to victim nation reference after The Good Place. So nice of the show's writers to teach everyone that word. The laser-focus on "The French And The English" is standard fare for reflexive adolescent posturing in ignorance of other cultures' interplay in maritime empires. As is flat-out ignoring the centuries of existing and continuing Arabic/Muslim oppression of North/East-Africans and central Asia before West-European Christians caught up in the imperial game. But the real cherry on top of the turd comes of having a character self-righteously wail and rail against slavery while praising the glory (of all things) of the Ottoman Empire! Ya randomly lobbed yer lil' ol' pokeball and of all places it could've landed, that's who you pika-chose to name-drop in counterpoint to slaving!?

 

This is not just a matter of "everybody used to do it" oh nonono. It is difficult if not impossible to think of any slavers in all of history more vicious, enduring, conniving and prolific than the Turks! Not Chinese ports, not Viking raiders, not ancient Egypt, nobody. The Atlantic triangle trade provides recognizable talking points (plantations, racial profiling, the middle passage) and ratcheted up to a dedicated industry indeed eclipsing other examples in a couple short centuries in sheer numbers. Astounding and lamentable, yes. But the Turkish love of slavery pervaded not only their own society but the slave networks of surrounding lands as well. If it's more difficult to pin down, it's because it wasn't one vast enterprise, no one gigantic demographic like black plantation labor. The Ottomans just had their fingers in every possible form and channel of slave trafficking spanning from Northern Africa to Western Asia to Eastern Europe.

 

Its most famous feature would be the regular, institutionalized slave tribute of young boys they forced from among victims of their invasions. But then you've got the Red Sea / NE-African slave trade inherited from their Muslim precursors, the fact that their every military campaign doubled as a slave raid, the off-the-books slave raids and other local banditry they funded across Eastern Europe, bankrolling Berber slavers down across the Sahara and Tartar khanates raiding North-eastern Europe, especially Poland, being the biggest players in Mediterranean coastal slave raids alongside their rabid pets off their leashes the Barbary Corsairs (think back, who's Conrad's antagonist in The Corsair?) colluding and trafficking with the multiple (and prolific in their own right) Muslim slaver-states in India, or being the chief sex slave runners and routinely castrating the males they caught, and when the whole game finally started winding down, when Europeans finally forced them to step back, continuing in places like Circassia where they reached a heartwarming compromise of a final solution with their perennial enemy empire to the north: let the Russians handle the genociding while the Turks cozily enslaved the remainder. And yes, just like in, say, Twelve Years a Slave, this institution so pervaded daily life that the Sultan had to occasionally crack down on his own slavers poaching his own subjects to sell back to each other. (Nobody likes a re-gifter.)

 

And if Americans were late to outlaw it, the Turks did not do so for another sixty years afterward. This all and more went on not for three centuries, but for the six-and-change centuries of the empire's official existence, that's if you're not counting the region's pre-imperial view of European heathens and Eurasian native societies in general as rightful slaves of the faithful. It far preceded, it out-lasted, it omnidirectionally out-reached the European version. In fact, given its geographic position, the Ruritania wherein is set The Necromancer's Tale would have been fighting off or fleeing Turkish slave raids as a mundane fact of life for several centuries by 1700!

 

It takes a self-flagellating, brainwashing, politically correct (and dare I say it: slavish) modern education to so bullheadedly, boneheadedly ignore all historical proportion and deliberately glorify such millennial sadism as morally superior. Bloody peasant!