well, I was going with the narrative of the OP, that discussions of slavery (in the general sense) are primarily centered around specific discussions of the American slave trade and the evils visited upon the Africans by the Caucasian westerners. And to the extent that is the case, then yes, such commenters are minimizing the far broader and longer lasting Islamic slave trade, or at least conveniently ignoring them.
As Stranger noted, it’s rather misleading to call the medieval/early modern Old World enslavement commerce the “Islamic slave trade”, as though it were somehow a uniquely Muslim phenomenon.
It was an intercontinental trade network in which Christian and other non-Muslim societies also participated. Medieval Christians and other non-Muslims were very active in enslaving Muslims, Christians, and whoever else they could get their hands on.
That’s the best part! The G. Gordon Liddy one killed me. By Liddy’s own account, he captured, cooked and ate a rat! To become more manly!
I’ll bet it’s because a large segment of the US population consistently tries to minimize and downplay slavery and the centuries of white supremacist oppression that followed and still persists to this day. Some people here really need help grasping that it’s kind of a big deal.
Couple of turds for the punch bowl:
Suffering does not automatically bestow nobility. Those of you who’ve endured suffering and consciously used the experience to become better people know that, with a different choice, you could have simply gone dog-mean instead. If for no other reason to normalize the injustice and making what happened to you somehow okay.
Adding to the OP’s examples, some other: the freedmen who were returned to Liberia and then established plantations and enslaved indigenous Africans. The Suffragettes who went on to join the British Union of Fascists. Custer’s duty roster was Irish-heavy with Famine refugees, and German legacy-refugees from the Revolution of 1848, and even an Italian veteran of Garibaldi’s army. Stokely Carmichael’s remark that women’s only place in the Civil Rights Movement was “prone,” meaning as sexual refreshments (did he mean “supine,” or was Stokely an exclusive fan of women’s butts?) Which leads to:
Hypocrisy is an inextricable component of human nature. No matter how noble, every philosophy carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Unchallenged and assured of its own perfection, it will always degrade into dogma and self-justified oppression. It must engage with an opposing philosophy in an active dialectic, and must therefore tolerate the opposing philosophy to some extent. Returning to the topic of suffering and its redemptive quality, it was the generation of Americans who learned of the Holocaust that could no longer be as complacent about Jim Crow as before.
Of course, Karl Popper thought dialects was bullshit, and truth depends solely on falsifiability. But it’s not so easy to test social philosophy with a chemistry set. Popper also framed the Paradox of Tolerance: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” Okay Karl, so allow us to limit the tolerance to the reasonable scale of actual harm, and get along with each other. Karl was buddies with the Vienna School and their Milton Friedman ilk, so he hypocritically tolerated their demonstrable harm.
I also believe this and I think that’s why hypocrisy doesn’t bother me as much as it bothers other people. I could list five ways I am a hypocrite right now. But I think there are degrees of hypocrisy and there are some deeply bad and specific ways to be a hypocrite. Hypocrisy may be a common feature of humanity, but some people just really get carried away with it.
I don’t know anything about ‘campism’, but based on that Wikipedia article, it sounds nothing like I’ve heard any leftist of my acquaintance say.
I do have a personal illustration of how complicated ‘oppression’ dynamics can be. My MIL is old enough that she was a small child during WWII, and had to go in hiding from the Nazis. She actually gets reparation payments from the government of Germany because of this. The place she was born (Ukraine) is currently being invaded, and most people would agree that Russia/Ukraine fits an oppressor/oppressed dynamic. The place she lives now (Israel) is taking actions that more and more people agree are oppressive (to put it kindly). It would not be useful to try to put her in one box or the other – she’s a person with an intersectional relationship to oppression.
I bet every dominant social group that engaged in slavery in the past (to the extent they still exist) tries to downplay it. Just as every group that engages in genocide or mass killings tries to downplay that. Basically, people try to downplay bad stuff they did.
Intersectionality:
“Hey! You got Patriarchy in my Late-Stage Capitalism!”
“Well you got Late-Stage Capitalism in my Patriarchy!”
“Hmm… Patriarchy is best addressed at the level of its main abuse: by the top 1% of the wealthiest men!”
Beats the shit out of Oppression Olympics
Speaking only for myself, the history of the US slave trade is more important and interesting to discuss, because it’s the history of my country, and my ancestors. I want to understand them as well as I can, because it helps me understand the current US. It’s not a matter of focusing on it because it’s the worst, just that it’s the most relevant to my life.
Progressives may not say this is the way they think, but you can predict which group they’ll support with almost perfect reliability simply by identifying the “oppressed” one. So if there are other factors, they almost never influence the result.
It’s the natural result of postmodernist influence. When you reject notions of good/bad, right/wrong, true/false, lawful/illegal, and so on, there’s not much left but oppressor/oppressed (incidentally, I think MAGA is probably also a postmodernist movement, but that’s a different story).
Intersectionality is just a bad, incomplete reinvention of individualism. It correctly identified the fact that a single axis (race, sex, gender, etc.) is not enough to predict the outcomes for an individual. It fails to note that when you add a sufficient number of axes, it reduces the size of the group to a single individual.
It’s more like a vector drawing that helps you understand the interactions of forces on a body. The purpose isn’t to define a group of people. It’s to understand the power dynamics at play.
I’m just not very surprised that a lot of Americans who live in America like to talk about American slavery, the one that directly impacts their current situation.
I’d say it’s the opposite. The whole point is that being, say, a gay Black person is not just the simple combination of being gay plus being Black. You have to consider both together. But then that’s also not the same as the sum of being gay, Black, and neurodivergent. And so on. Eventually you realize that the forces on an individual are always individual. There are patterns at a statistical level but when you look more closely there are differences all the way down.
Well, yes, the math doesn’t work like vector addition (if there even is math, which I would never rule out). But it’s a tool with the same kind of utility. We are all individuals, yes, but operated on by societal forces. We can study those forces.
The concept of intersectionality has been a great eye-opener for me, when reading and talking about identity. It’s helped me understand the world a lot better!
This part is actually really important when you’re trying to address systemic problems.
It helped me better understand myself. And also I think when you can put yourself in touch with the ways you’ve been disadvantaged it can create more empathy for people dealing with other issues. In grad school I had to really take a close look at this stuff, my stuff and find my way from my own various identities to the broader struggle.
Here’s an analogy: Let’s say I have a net worth of $0 because I lack assets and debt. But my pal has a net worth of $0 because he has $1M in assets and $1M in debts. Do you think the same advice on how to increase net worth would apply to us?
In the same way, people can be in what appears to be a similar boat, oppression-wise, but the path to dealing with it isn’t necessarily the same.
Or, I guess we could just throw away the idea of looking at assets and debts because no two people are likely to experience them identically …
I’ve certainly seen it pushed by progressives. I’ve seen the argument for example, that a woman can’t commit violence or murder, only men can commit violence or murder, and that it wouldn’t count as violence if women were to somehow exterminate all men. I’ve seen it claimed on this forum that rounding up all the men and boys in a town and killing them wouldn’t be sexism, because men can’t be the victims of sexism.
Probably the most prominent recent example would be all the leftists who supported the invasion of Ukraine by Russia because Ukraine is perceived as aligned with the West and therefore deserves conquest and genocide. I ran into a lot of those.
Fucking Tankies
It can be, but can also be misleading. A trend which appears to be in one direction can be entirely reversed when you break it down further. At any rate, my point isn’t that it’s entirely useless. It’s just that it seems to have become a kind of race to the bottom. At least if social media profiles are any indication.
That suggests it’s valuable for psychotherapy, but as the basis of a political ideology I’m not sure it’s so great.