Protesters in America and Europe have shown a keen sense of history in their iconoclasm. There is clear awareness that hundreds of years of Western civilisation lay behind one particular tragedy. Statues may be toppled, but history remains on the plinth.
Furthermore, where do we begin this awful history: John Locke has been conspicuous by his absence, a shareholder in the Royal African Company and champion of liberty. A contradiction, if ever there was one. So have the Founding Fathers.
"We have come a long way from the old injustices that once stained our nation's reputation and denied some Americans the full blessings of American citizenship," pronounced John McCain, on the election of Barack Obama. The sharp distinction between citizen and non-citizen ("one of us, and one of them") in America made slavery such a stigma and curse (unlike, say, in Brazil, or the Iberian civilisation in general). Non-citizens are barely human, and are killed by the millions, like rodents, such as the Iraqi and Yemeni children. Non-citizens have no right even to exist.
Prior to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the citizen/non-citizen distinction had been largely absent (barring the Greek world). I have argued that Freedom and Unfreedom were antithesis in the Western world, not shared elsewhere (interested readers may wish to read my essay, Freedom and Freedom). In Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (2002), anti-apartheid activist Ronald Segal traces the enslavement of Turks, Slavs, Javanese and Africans to the Middle East - but where are they? "The result is that, despite this book's subtitle, there is no 'Black Diaspora' in Islam," observes the reviewer. The stigma that attached to slavery in the West had no counterpart in the Middle East: a slave was an unfree person, rather than a thing, coloured or otherwise. Manumission and miscegenation were common.
According to M. I. Finley, "It is impossible to translate the word 'freedom', eleutheria in Greek, libertas in Latin, or 'free man', into any ancient Near Eastern language, including Hebrew, or into any Far Eastern language either, for that matter" (The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p 28). In Finley's words: "No matter how many slave women a historian may manage to tot up in the harems of the Caliphate of Baghdad, they count for nothing against the fact that agricultural and industrial production was largely carried on by free men."
"Slaves seldom worked plantations, but rather were employed as household servants, concubines or soldiers. In numerous instances black slaves, and particularly eunuchs - whose value was up to seven times that of ordinary slaves- rose to positions of great wealth and even kingship," continues the reviewer. Mamluks were men of slave origin; and the Slave Dynasty of Delhi consisted, frankly, of slaves.
Now, consider the timeline below.
June 1989 Tiananmen Square incident
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