I never realized how deep racists’ obsession with Black people went until I began voicing support for Palestine of all things. I just kinda assumed the only real targets of Israel and its supporters were Arabs, most Palestinians, and that I could be this untouchable ally or whatever. I was wrong.
These last few weeks have made me even more aware of how much imperialists weaponize anti-Blackness. Even when Black people aren’t directly involved in a conflict, we’re targets. While talking about Israel with some friends online, I basically said that child death is more tragic than soldiers dying while performing their job (i.e. indiscriminate killing, in the IDF’s case). I made this one supposedly apolitical person mad but they pretended not to be as they made edgy jokes about the Arab slave trade and buck breaking. The shit he said was so cruel that I had to break off all contact to preserve my sanity.
Even the people pretending to be leftists are using the genocide in Palestine to be racist to Black people. Lee Fang literally thinks that BLM is like the Israeli government. There’s also currently a post on TrueAnon complaining about how there isn’t a Palestinian Lives Matter, how unfair it is that libs just looooooove Black people so much, blah, blah, blah, wah, wah, wah—all while completely disregarding the many, many ways this country intentionally brutalizes and kills us. It’s fucking tiring, man. I’m so sick of this shit. Like, fine, we get it, you don’t like BLM or Black people—how about LBPFA (leave black people fucking alone) instead?
I never asked to be the permanent focal point of every awful loser’s convoluted political worldview. Literally everything I do triggers psychos. Honestly, sometimes I want to be reincarnated as a rock and just chill without any thoughts.
It’s false equivalency. Things like thralldom and the Arab slave raids are not on the same scale of inhumanity as the Atlantic slave trade. There is a reason that abolitionism became a large political movement in those times and not before.
Also abolitionism can only really come from industrial slavery. Industrial as in quantity, not just manufacturing. I consider a large slave plantation to be “industrial” slavery.
A good example is that there is no Greek analog of Sparticus. Roman slaves were used for large scale industrial projects at the command of the wealthiest elite. Greek slaves were usually the property of small farmers and businesmen.
The practical upshot of this is that if youre a slave in ancient Greece all you have to do for freedom is kill your master and his familly in his sleep and then run to the closest enemy city state. Freeing yourself in ancient Rome required either being a good boy or large scale collective action.
Please tell me about thralldom. I love the history of slavery. Was it industrial, as in, did the existence of thralls threaten the livlihood of peasants who owned no slaves? That was a major problem in the Roman Republic - small farmers being bought out by hyper aristocrats who built mega plantations worked by slaves.
The most famous examples of thralls are people taken as plunder in Viking raids. They were expected to work but could buy their own freedom or be set free by their master. Of you killed someone else’s thrall you were expected to pay a weregild to the person who owned him, but not as much as for free person of course. So it’s a lot like the Greeks.
According to lore, the person who first settled Iceland permanently, Ingólfur Arnarsson, made a stop in Ireland to get some thralls. Some of those thralls killed his brother and fled to an group of islands near the south coast. They were hunted down and killed and the islands have been called Westman islands since, as the Irish were called Westmen, since Ireland is to the west of Scandinavia.
Another thrall, Náttfari, may actually have been the first one to settle in Iceland, but he came with Garðar Svavarsson and escaped or was set free and we don’t know enough about his story except a bay in the north of Iceland called Náttfari Bay.
Like the wikipedia article says it was also a feature of Anglo-Saxon and maybe Norman society but I don’t enough about that to comment, also that you could become a thrall through debts.
