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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8758078" data-attributes="member: 18">I strongly disagree and you haven't answered any of my points about why it's the case, which I made at some length. Nor did you even accept the obvious ahistorical falsehood you put forwards re: the Greeks inventing chattel slavery! There's obviously no point repeating myself if you're going to dismiss it without actually arguing your case in the least, and not even accept a basic error on your own part.I'm also not an American, so claiming I'm asserting "American exceptionalism", rings hilariously hollow.It is. I already explained how. Just move away from chattel models of slavery as the focus, and particularly don't echo the bizarre and specific elements that are associated with the slavery situation in the Americas. Note I say the Americas. You keep talking about "Americans", but it's obviously not true that this concern is limited to the United States of America. I mean people in the UK tore down a statue of a slaver and threw into the sea for goodness sake. We'd have got more if it wasn't for local governments taking them down pre-emptively or putting stuff around them or the like, and then the pandemic hitting. It's not a radical or even unusual opinion among anyone here to think they shouldn't be displayed as if they were figures worthy of respect. I don't want to get too much into that lest we talk politics, but my point is it's mistaken to paint this is as a uniquely American concern, and has seemingly caused you to make an error in talking about "American exceptionalism" (which is a misuse of the term anyway).Anyway, point is, the solution is simple - focus on oppression and forms of slavery that aren't chattel slavery - brutal serfdom like Sparta or Japan or even Europe and Eurasia, actual face-the-facts serfdom. There's a long tradition in Europe, a very long tradition, of pretending serfs were just land-bound farmers, and that they had it fine. They weren't, and they didn't. They were slaves. They weren't chattel slaves, because they weren't owned by individuals (though in Russia it did get pretty close to that - in some cases arguably the serfs there were treated worse than say, Roman chattel slaves typically were). This was particularly evident in some societies - in Japan as a serf (I forget the exact word) you couldn't even travel off your lord's lands without a permit, let alone own land (or even really goods) beyond what he'd granted to you, and so on.Over the centuries, as with Roman slavery, things got looser and looser and looser and serfs stopped being slaves, then they just became poorly-treated tenant farmers, then eventually free people, and so on.Indentured servitude, especially debt-bondage, especially if the Sorcerer-Kings and their states help usher people into it, also works. As does penal slavery which combines well with oppressive governments like the Sorcerer-Kings (and has been all over the world for centuries and still is in much of the world now).You've got loads of options. Just steer clear of chattel slavery (which means a kind of unrestricted private ownership of slaves), multigenerational slavery and slave breeding particularly.This isn't really a reasonable response to my point.You pushed an actual honest-to-god conspiracy theory. There are no fact that back you up. News24 is a grotesque tabloid channel that offers no sources, whereas that Wikipedia article is extremely well-sourced and based in fact. You'll notice that 2015 New24 article has:A) No sources.andB) No author.No-one was willing to put their name on that conspiracy-theory tripe. You're posting the equivalent of "Aliens kidnapped Elvis!" and claiming it as fact.What I think may have happened here is a translation error. Someone has confused indentured servitude and chattel slavery - you see in your article where it says (and yes, people, this is in a supposedly serious news article, I'm not paraphrasing):It's not discussed because it never happened. The transportation of Irish people in indentured servitude absolutely did happen, albeit in smaller numbers than the article suggests (indeed the article also suddenly throws in something that happened to African chattel slaves as if it happened to Irish indentured servants, I note). And if you read actual history books, regarding indentured servitude, as I said, you'll see the "WASPs" as you put transported far more of "their own" (i.e. other White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) in indentured servitude than the did Irish people.As for Cromwell, well obviously he was a monster re: Ireland, but that's discussed in the link I sent you to Wikipedia, and it's well-sourced fact there, not semi-literate fiction as it is on News24.Translation and comprehension errors of this magnitude have happened before. A British author wrote an lengthy work about how in the after 1830, contrary to common belief, we still used to execute people for being gay. Except, problem is, we didn't. She'd tried to do her own research and had misunderstood a bit of legal terminology, and ignored people who tried to set her straight until she finally got demolished by a professor in an interview on Radio 3 just before the book came out:[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/24/naomi-wolf-admits-blunder-over-victorians-and-sodomy-executions[/URL]Finally, you say:Yes, exactly. That's what you're doing. You pushing fiction as history, because you read some poorly-written propaganda on a South African tabloid news site, and you believed it unquestioningly.</blockquote>

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