There's an interesting book
"Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa", where journalist Keith Richburg, who spent three years in Africa as the Africa bureau chief for the Washington Post, came to an interesting conclusion.
Yes, slavery was bad. So? Take a look at human history. Humans do bad things to other humans. There's been lots of white-on-white slavery. The very word
"slave" comes to us from all the Slavs that were enslaved. The Romans enslaved other Europeans. The peasants of Europe were effectively slaves to their feudal lords.
African Muslims took over one million Europeans as slaves from piracy and raids of coastal European towns. I don't see a fuss being made over those.
The reason your posts are so immature when it comes to history is that history is not a matter of good guys and bad guys, or right opinion versus wrong opinion.
You simply post conclusions from others who use history to forward their opinions. That is not what history is; that is not how professional historians view or use history. History is a series of accepted judgments.
You need to read history books; not political or social opinions and conclusions that use snippets from history to strengthen those opinions or win an argument.
You are just a fanatic of certain political and social views and use snapshots of history, out of context, to support your fanaticsm. And I use the word fanatic as Winston Churchill defined it: "A fanatic is someone who won't change his mind and can't change the subject." (why else would you derail all the hotties and babes on this thread to push your views?)
It is good that you have an interest in history, but you don't understand what history is or how to use it.
Slavery, in all the other civilization and cultures of the world was qualitatively different than slavery in America.
The difference is that all those other civilizations were not founded on the idea that all men were created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
That incongruency in the basis of this nation brought certain economic interests into conflict with the principles and the cultural and moral beliefs of the episteme that existed in the United States at the time.
It isn't simply a matter of "so what?"
From Herodotus onward, an element of history is moral evaluation as much as anything else.
Slavery in the Arab world, or in Ancient Rome or Greece, or in Africa, or anywhere else in history never posed a moral dilemma in society. It did in America.
And this is how and why history is not simply a matter of using facts out of context to strengthen a political or social or prejudiced opinion.
The Anabaptist Jacques
