Knowledge
of History is an important part of psychological defense
The news service in connection with Black
Lives Matter shows how important it is that historical references are used
correctly. In order for the public to be able to understand and assess what is
being said, it is important that proper time is set aside in schools teaching the subject of history.
Now the public and journalists may get the
impression that the United States is the country that should be condemned for
slavery above others, but is that true? Slavery is taught extensively in US
schools, and for half a century there have been extensive social support
programs for African Americans. The United States is a nation most eagerly
embracing theories of multiculturalism.
One could always argue that more could have
been done, but the United States has addressed its history in a way that other
countries, such as African and Asian, have not. Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who
previously lived in Somalia and the Netherlands and now lives in the United
States, has recently stated that there is no better country to live in than today's United
States for a person who is black and female. Economics professor Thomas Sowell
(2006), himself an African-American, rejects slavery as an explanation for
today's problems for African-Americans.
Historically, people in all parts of the world,
including Europe, were held as slaves or "unfree". An expression
that professor Harrison (2015) prefers to indicate that unfreedom has had different
degrees. Slaves are mentioned in the earliest texts of mankind, such as
Hammurabi's law from 1700 BC in Mesopotamia. If you read researchers like
Harrison, you see that northern and western Europe is an exception in the world
in that freedom declined and disappeared in the late Middle Ages, and that the
historically remarkable thing is not that slavery survived but that it began to
be fought in the early 1800s.
Slavery has existed not only in Africa but also in the Middle East, India and China right into the 20th century. Here we will focus on Africa. In the case of Africa, Africans have used other Africans as slave labor since time immemorial and as the main commodity along with gold and salt. A person could be turned into a slave by becoming a prisoner of war, being assaulted in a raid, having been convicted of a crime or unable to pay his debts.
Africans were from the beginning involved in the sale of African slaves to merchants who brought them to what we now call the Middle East. To reduce the risk of escape, the prisoner was immediately removed from the home area to make it impossible for him to have any opportunity to receive help from relatives.
The Arab slave trade went in caravans through the Sahara, with high mortality, and along the east coast of Africa from Zanzibar and Madagascar up to Egypt but also across the Indian Ocean towards India and the Indonesian archipelago. Slaves were used for household chores, as soldiers and for agricultural work. Female slaves were wanted and sometimes more expensive than men.
The African slave trade to the Middle East began earlier and ended later than the transatlantic slave trade and is estimated to have involved slightly more people. Domestic African slave trade and that of the Middle East increased sharply in the 19th century, when Britain and the United States banned the slave trade, and it developed especially in East Africa and included, among other things, the plantation economy.
Some African countries such as Mauritania did not make slavery illegal until 1981. Even today, the conditions of some workers in countries around the Persian Gulf have similarities to slavery. There have been no major movements to abolish slavery in Africa or the Middle East or any major initiatives to compensate the victims.
It is seldom pointed out that Europeans have also been victims of the slave trade. In the Ottoman Empire, people were enslaved from what we now call the Balkans and Ukraine, and the word slave is considered to come from the name of the slave people.
With
bases in North Africa and, above all, Algeria, slave traders hijacked between
1,500 and 1,800 European ships in the Mediterranean and turned crew and
passengers into slaves. Raids were also carried out on Spanish and Italian
coasts to capture slaves. The transatlantic slave trade is best documented and
most thoroughly studied. It was awful like all slave trade, and although slaves
were everywhere in America, Brazil was especially known for slave labor. The
strange thing, however, was not that there was slavery in America, but that for
the first time in human history there was a strong condemnation of slavery. In
the United States and Britain, the demand for the abolition of slavery became a
popular movement based on the idea of the equal value of all human beings.
After Britain and the United States themselves
made the slave trade illegal, their ships patrolled the seas to force other
countries to stop the slave trade. As is well known, the United States itself
fought a bloody civil war in 1861–1865, in which the abolition of slavery was a
major issue, and nothing similar has happened in any other country.
The condemnation of slavery became so
successful that the public has forgotten that slavery existed throughout the
world and who pushed for it to be abolished. It is therefore something that
rubs off with the recent protests in the United States aimed at today's
American citizens. One would expect the protests to be directed at such
countries, where people are still in various ways unfree. A reflection for
Sweden is that we are talking about the need for psychological defense and
about tracking fake news. What we should do in the first place is to study more
history.
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