Slaves were forceably taken and used for labour, and were sold on if needed.
Normally, people were made slaves by other tribes who would have considered themselves ‘different’ from them.
Slaves were taken as the result of warfare for other reasons, which is different than starting wars solely to acquire slaves.
People could bond themselves as slaves to repay debts, which differs from being held as a slave purely based on the color of one’s skin.
Slaves could buy their way out of slavery and could rise in rank ands social class among the people who enslaved them; they were not held as chattel with no possessions of their own and no right to purchase their freedom and no social mobility once they achieved freedom. (A limited number of slaves in the U.S. were able to buy their freedom, but those rare events were based on the “largesse” of the owner, not enshrined in culture.)
This is a hijack, but one can discover the differences by looking into the issue of chattel slavery.
When people can’t win, they call names. No different from the schoolyard. The pugs have had their asses kicked in the realm of ideas, and all they can do is throw out scary words like socialist and liberal. If they called them “progressives” it would make the truth obvious – they oppose progress, and basically want to take us back to the 50’s at least, if not the middle ages.
This is all another cycling of the false consciousness myth. Communists and socialists need an answer to why the working people are not lining up behind their natural leaders. The answer can never be ascribed to the failures of their ideology so they invent fanciful mental contortions whereby the ruling classes fool normal people by inventing other things to be mad at instead of what they are supposed to be mad at.
Leftists in this country started calling themselves progressives, until their actions discredited that label. Then they started calling themselves liberals until their actions discredited that label. Now some liberals want to claim that labels mean nothing even though everyone knows what liberalism stands for. Since wide pluralities in this country reject liberalism, some want to pretend that what is being rejected is the word and not the ideaology.
True. Slavery that predated the slave trade to the west was often one of the spoils of war, where either side might have found themselves slaves. It was also used, and still is in some parts of the world, as a way to pay debts through free labor; a form of extreme indentured servitude. Again, where either party could find himself on the losing side. The chattel slavery in the U.S. and the west was based on one group viewing the other as less then men.
I think the OP is off his rocker. Yes, some people use liberal as a pejorative, but nigger is several magnitudes worse. Moreso, how many people actually get offended by being called liberal? I know plenty of liberals, who self identify as liberal, and yet somehow they should be offended by being called something they call themselves? The only people I see use it as a pejorative are conservatives, who perhaps see it as a pretty serious insult, but people they would call that probably don’t take them seriously anyway.
And just to give a comparison, I see pretty much the same from the other side, with liberals using conservative, or Republican, or pub, or whatever as a pejorative and it has absolutely no sting on them either.
I do think terms like socialist, communist, fascist, nazi, etc. might actually carry a bit of a sting, but it’s difficult to use those terms without it looking like you’re exaggerating, and they’re still miles away from nigger.
