RUTHFULLY YOURS

• The “1619 Project” literature is characteristic of today’s neo-racist movement, which reduces the West to slavery and slavery to the West. In this nursery rhyme, everyone born with white skin is wrong, if not satanic.
• The Republic of Venice (697-1797 AD) made a specialty of transporting shiploads of white slaves from Northern and Eastern Europe to Constantinople and from the Black Sea to North Africa.
• The origins of slavery are white. It is just a timely reminder that slavery is an integral part of human history components and that the practice of slavery is not the prerogative of any particular group. “Slavery”, as Paul Louis reminds us, “is one of the few features that were common to all civilisations”.
• Slavery is not a moral choice, it is a financial one. Large US companies and pension funds rush to invest in China despite its reported use of Uyghurs there as slaves.
• Regrettably, there was no movement in the Muslim world comparable to Western abolitionism. The West, led by a fiercely abolitionist British state, was the one stopping and then breaking the millennia-old and perfectly-oiled slavery mechanism of the Arab-Turkish-Muslim world.
• In short, there is nothing specifically Western about slavery; but everything specifically Western about abolitionism.

In August 2019, The New York Times initiated The 1619 Project, consisting of a collection of articles designed to illustrate that slavery was “one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution”. This project is directed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times staff reporter who is not a historian but an avowed “critical race theory” activist. ^[2]

When American historians denounced the obvious falsehood of this assertion, and its revisionist and negationist nature against proven, documented and source-based historical reality, The New York Times altered the original version of the articles in question to say “some” colonists fought to defend the practice of slavery. The New York Times stated:

“We recognise that our original language could be read to suggest that protecting slavery was a primary motivation for all of the colonists. The passage has been changed to make clear that this was a primary motivation for some of the colonists.”^[3]

This modest “clarification”, so superficial that The New York Times only bothered to make it after a large mobilisation of historians, destroys the essence of the 1619 Project, which is to show that slavery is supposedly the foundation of American society and the ideal in which American revolutionaries were macerating. Moreover, to say that “some colonists” thought this way is completely meaningless, in the same way that “some colonists” had brown eyes or had nightmares.^[4] It should be noted that many colonists, including Quakers^[5], vehemently opposed slavery and worked tirelessly on both sides of the Atlantic until they finally achieved its abolition.

The 1619 Project literature is characteristic of today’s neo-racist movement, which reduces the West to slavery and slavery to the West. In this nursery rhyme, everyone born with white skin is wrong, if not satanic.

The meaning of the word slave, from the mediaeval Latin word sclavus, meaning “slavic” in the seventh century, shifted to “slave” in the 10th century^[6]. This was the great century of slavery that saw the Arabs of North Africa, the Byzantines and the Europeans enslave vast populations. French Historian Alexandre Skirda explains:

“These Slavs from Central and Eastern Europe, Orthodox Christians were considered heretics and devoid of ‘soul’, thus ‘talking goods’ were sold to the Muslim world from the 8th to the 18th century. Thus, today’s Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, Moldavians, Bielorussians, Ukrainians and Russians were captured by the Franks and Scandinavians first, relayed then from the 12th to the 15th centuries by the Venetians and Genoese; finally, the Crimean Tatars would continue the trade on behalf of the Ottoman Empire, a phenomenon that will affect millions of victims in total”.^[7]

The Republic of Venice (697-1797 AD) made a specialty of transporting shiploads of white slaves from Northern and Eastern Europe to Constantinople and from the Black Sea to North Africa. According to English Historian Peter Akroyd:

“The Venetians were greedy for this particular source of income since the profit on each item was said to be 1,000 per cent. They sold Russians and even Greek Christians to the Saracens. Men, women, and children were purchased or captured in the region of the Black Sea, Armenians and Georgians among them, before being despatched to Venice, where they were in turn sold to Egypt, Morocco, Crete and Cyprus. They sold boys and young women as concubines.”^[8]

The origins of slavery are white. It is just a timely reminder that slavery is an integral part of human history and that the practice of slavery is not the prerogative of any particular group. “Slavery”, as Paul Louis^[9] reminds us, “is one of the few features that were common to all civilisations”. ^[10]

Slavery is not a moral choice; it is a financial one. Large US companies and pension funds rush to invest in China despite its reported use of Uyghurs there as slaves. Historically, slavery was everywhere. The realization of its inhumanity was not broached until its antithesis, the affluent society, appeared. ^[11] We are so accustomed to abundance that we have forgotten that it is a recent miracle, tiny in its historical extent. The tension of the “golden thread of civilisation”(Ernst Jünger^[12]) is preceded by thousands of years of need, reducing the current commendable revulsion against it to a historical footnote.

In many societies, especially in ancient times, slavery represented an improvement in the status quo ante. In these societies, the previous usual fate of the defeated had been extermination. Paul Louis writes:

“In the eyes of the Assyrians, Romans, and Egyptians, slavery was not a monstrous violation of the person but a mitigation of the fate of captives, a first reaction against the savage law of primitive warfare. This law (…) involved the massacre of the defeated, the total annihilation of the army that had suffered defeat. The kings of Egypt and Assyria took glory from the number of their victims. (…) Carnage was the final incident of any battle”. ^[13]

Let us leave the possible financial and political motives of the American neo-racists for a moment and take a look at the worldwide situation of slavery in 1750.

In China, the Qing dynasty, in power since 1644, continued the practice of slavery, which had been inseparable from the birth of Chinese civilisation.^[14] The absolute number of slaves in China is striking, but according to Angela Schottenhammer, a historian at the University of Leuven, this number seems never to have exceeded 1% in relation to the total Chinese population.^[15]

In North Africa, Muslim regimes imported shiploads of white slaves, Slavs and Europeans. Prague long served as a sorting centre for the castration of white slaves ^[16] before they were transported to the Maghreb. These Slavic and European slaves were used for domestic and sexual slavery and sometimes for military duties. The Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire formed an elite military corps composed mainly of white slaves. ^[17]

In what is now India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Islamic conquerors imposed slavery from the eighth century and practised it on an unprecedented scale. Hindu women and children were forced into domestic and sexual slavery. Endless convoys of Hindu slaves were continually sent to what is now Syria and Iraq, and then to the Muslim-controlled international slave markets. The practice of slavery in this region extended, uninterrupted, from the eighth to the eighteenth century.^[18]

In the eighteenth century, throughout the world slavery was a normal institution, as normal as it was in ancient Greece^[19] and was practised on a large scale. There are recognisable nuances. “Compared to the European-organized slave trade, the Muslim world’s slave trade started earlier, lasted longer, and, more importantly, involved a larger number of slaves”, notes Economist Paul Bairoch in Le génocide voilé : enquête historique.^[20] The Franco-Senegalese Tidiane N’Diaye notes that, while millions of Black Americans can claim a slave heritage, there is almost nothing left of the millions of black slaves in Islamic lands. Indeed, they were often castrated.^[21] “The Arab-Muslim trade in black Africans involved 17 million victims who were killed, castrated or enslaved for more than 13 centuries without interruption”, says N’Diaye, whose powerful and moving investigation completes the book The Slave Trade: A Global History Essay, published by Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau in 2006.

Is this “normality of slavery”, until Western modernity put an end to it, deplorable and unacceptable? Absolutely. From the standpoint of our values, there is no doubt. We find the enslavement of men, women and children horrendous; however, we are not what Raymond Aron contemptuously called “beautiful souls” who judge the world as if they were handing out sweets.^[22] It is easy to hurl imprecations at the past. If we institute this tribunal of times, we should at least avoid arbitrarily selecting the periods and regions considered.

In the eighteenth century, slavery was not practised in the same way everywhere. While it was not contested in the Muslim world — whose economic relationship to slavery, which was completely unrestrained, resembled that of the ancient Greeks — it was already being moderated in the China of the Qing dynasty.^[23] The Europeans, following the British, sought to limit the practice when they could not abolish it.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, a movement arose, initially confined to the Anglo-Saxon cultural sphere, called abolitionism.^[24] This movement, particularly under Christian influence, especially that of the Puritans and even the Quakers, and later the Methodists, ^[25] accurately regarded slavery as an abomination and demanded its abolition. Civil abolitionist societies were formed, carrying the abolitionist ideal throughout the British Empire to its very top. Once the Crown had embraced this moral imperative, it took only a few years for the abandonment of the slave trade to be decreed in the British Empire in 1807, followed the abolition of slavery in 1833.^[26] As early as 1807, London had launched an ambitious international abolition campaign, imposing the abandonment of the slave trade and then of slavery on both its defeated enemies and dependent allies. At the same time, the Royal Navy established a West Africa Squadron to assist in hunting slave ships off the African coast. Between 1808 and 1860, the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans.

Regrettably, there was no movement in the Muslim world comparable to Western abolitionism. The West, led by a fiercely abolitionist British state, was the one stopping and then breaking the millennia-old and perfectly-oiled slavery mechanism of the Arab-Turkish-Muslim world. ^[27]

In short, there is nothing specifically Western about slavery; but everything specifically Western about abolitionism.

To consider slavery as the foundation of the West is a revisionist and negationist lie,^[28] a “conspiracy theory” ^[29] in the strict sense, whose evocative power is reminiscent of the formidable international career of that other crude forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. ^[30]

Drieu Godefridi, a classical-liberal Belgian author, is the founder of the l’Institut Hayek in Brussels. He has a PhD in Philosophy from the Sorbonne in Paris and also heads investments in European companies. He is also the author of Critical Race Theory.