The Real History of Slavery (Full Documentary) — Transcript

A documentary challenging common narratives about slavery, focusing on the African origins and brutal realities of the transatlantic slave trade.

Key Takeaways

  • Slavery was a global and complex institution, not unique to the United States.
  • The majority of slaves in the transatlantic trade were sent to places other than the US, such as Brazil and the Caribbean.
  • African kingdoms like Dahomey played a significant and brutal role in capturing and selling slaves.
  • Historical narratives often omit or distort facts about slavery’s origins and scope.
  • Understanding slavery requires acknowledging the roles of multiple actors, including African societies.

Summary

  • The video critiques anti-American narratives that portray the US as uniquely evil due to slavery and racism.
  • It highlights widespread ignorance about the history of slavery, including misconceptions about its origins and scope.
  • Only about 3% of slaves brought in the transatlantic trade went to the future United States, with many more going to Brazil and the Caribbean.
  • The Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa was a central and brutal player in the slave trade, capturing and selling millions of slaves.
  • Dahomey’s military power and wealth were built on perpetual warfare and slave raids, often conducted by an all-female military unit called the Dahomey Amazons.
  • The Dahomey practiced extreme cruelty, including human sacrifice and mass executions, with slaves often subjected to brutal torture.
  • Slaves who were unsellable were used in religious sacrifices, and large numbers were killed during royal ceremonies.
  • The documentary emphasizes the complexity of slavery, including African involvement, which is often omitted from mainstream education.
  • It challenges the notion that slavery was primarily a white-on-black phenomenon and calls for a more nuanced understanding.
  • The video is part of a series aimed at correcting what it describes as propaganda and historical misinformation.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:02
Speaker A
For more than half a century, anti-American propagandists
00:07
Speaker A
have waged a demoralization campaign against us.
00:10
Speaker A
Generations of Americans have been force-fed lies designed to beat us into a state of submission and self-loathing.
00:16
Speaker A
We've been taught to hate ourselves, to hate the West, and to hate the figures, mostly white, mostly male, who built America.
00:23
Speaker A
We're all familiar with their narrative.
00:26
Speaker A
America is uniquely evil because of racism, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and so on.
00:31
Speaker A
They've waged intellectual warfare against our founding fathers and national heroes.
00:36
Speaker A
They desecrated their reputations.
00:39
Speaker A
Tore down their statues.
00:40
Speaker A
Their rewriting of history is such flagrant propaganda, they would make Pravda blush.
00:44
Speaker A
That doesn't mean that it's not pervasive or successful.
00:48
Speaker A
One professor from the University of Wisconsin spent 11 years administering historical literacy tests to his students.
00:53
Speaker A
He discovered that they overwhelmingly believed that slavery began in the US, was almost exclusively an American phenomenon.
01:01
Speaker A
A view shared, by the way, with at least one United States Senator who attended Harvard Law.
01:05
Speaker B
The United States didn't inherit slavery from anybody.
01:09
Speaker B
We created it.
01:10
Speaker A
Despite almost total ignorance on the topic, one Washington Post poll found that
01:16
Speaker A
a 67% majority of the public says the legacy of slavery affects American society today.
01:21
Speaker C
that question every black person gets, which is slavery was a long time ago.
01:26
Speaker C
Why don't you get over it?
01:27
Speaker C
How do you get over something that is as foundational to your society as anything can be foundational?
01:32
Speaker A
We've been told that the history of slavery is straightforward and uncontroversial.
01:36
Speaker A
We've been told that black slaves were mostly captured by whites.
01:40
Speaker A
That white colonists in the Americas routinely enslaved free black men.
01:44
Speaker A
And that more black people were enslaved than whites.
01:47
Speaker A
And we've been told that we're not allowed to question any of that.
01:50
Speaker A
Well, enough is enough.
01:51
Speaker A
We're launching a monthly series setting the record straight on various historical topics.
01:55
Speaker A
We'll give you the facts that the propagandists and idiot school teachers have left out of the mainstream curriculum.
02:00
Speaker A
And we'll start today by taking on one of the central claims of modern anti-American mythology.
02:06
Speaker A
This is the real history of slavery.
02:13
Speaker A
Historians and political pundits spend a lot of time talking about the transatlantic slave trade.
02:19
Speaker A
The 350-year period in which an estimated 12.5 million slaves were brought to the Americas.
02:24
Speaker A
But what we don't learn in school
02:27
Speaker A
is where those slaves actually went.
02:30
Speaker A
Just under half of them, an estimated 5.4 million, went only to Brazil.
02:35
Speaker A
And many more went to the Caribbean.
02:37
Speaker A
1.2 million went to Jamaica.
02:39
Speaker A
More than 900,000 to Saint Dominique.
02:42
Speaker A
And 889,000 to Cuba.
02:45
Speaker A
The grand total of slaves brought to the future United States was about half the number brought only to Cuba.
02:51
Speaker A
472,372, or 3% of the total.
02:57
Speaker A
The ones who came to the 13 colonies
03:00
Speaker A
were the lucky ones.
03:01
Speaker A
In the context of global slavery, getting put on a ship to New Orleans
03:06
Speaker A
was really a best-case scenario.
03:08
Speaker A
If you think American slavery was bad, wait until you see what happened to the ones who didn't make it here.
03:12
Speaker A
And we'll show you that over the course of this video.
03:16
Speaker A
But first we start with a West African country you've likely never heard of.
03:20
Speaker A
The Kingdom of Dahomey.
03:22
Speaker A
Dahomey was not a peripheral player in the Atlantic slave trade.
03:26
Speaker A
It was central to it.
03:27
Speaker A
The kingdom's wealth, its military power, and its cultural splendor were built entirely on the systematic capture, sale, and export of human beings.
03:35
Speaker A
By the end of the kingdom, an estimated 1.9 million slaves came from West African coastline controlled by the Dahomey.
03:42
Speaker A
The kingdom obtained its slaves by waging perpetual warfare upon its neighbors.
03:49
Speaker A
In the 19th century, a Dahomeyan king named Gezo described the slave trade as "the ruling principle of my people.
03:59
Speaker A
It is the source of their glory and health. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery."
04:07
Speaker A
In many cases, the Kingdom of Dahomey obtained these slaves
04:13
Speaker A
by deploying an all-female military unit called the Dahomey Amazons.
04:19
Speaker A
They were the chief slave catchers of the empire.
04:23
Speaker A
The Amazons would raid nearby towns and return with large contingents of slaves
04:29
Speaker A
along with the heads of anyone who resisted.
04:32
Speaker A
One missionary who visited the country in 1861 described some of Dahomey's soldiers as "equipped with three-foot long straight razors,
04:40
Speaker A
which they held two-handed, and which were supposedly capable of splitting a man into two halves.
04:44
Speaker A
According to one historian, quote, "When Amazons walked out of the palace, they were preceded by a slave girl carrying a bell.
04:53
Speaker A
The sound told every male to get out of their path, retire a certain distance, and look the other way."
04:59
Speaker A
If the men didn't get out of the way, they stood a very good chance of being split in half.
05:05
Speaker A
Dahomey Amazons ran roughshod over the region.
05:10
Speaker A
An American missionary named Jacob Bauer discovered 18 depopulated towns over 60 miles near the territory of Dahomey.
05:17
Speaker A
The death toll was massive.
05:19
Speaker A
Gezo, the king we mentioned earlier, built a palace called the Singboji,
05:26
Speaker A
which used human skulls for bricks and human blood as mortar.
05:30
Speaker A
His throne sat on the skulls of four enemy chiefs.
05:36
Speaker A
Assuming you survived a Dahomey raid, which wasn't likely, and were taken captive,
05:43
Speaker A
it was far preferable to be sold to Europeans than to remain in Dahomey.
05:48
Speaker A
Slaves they couldn't sell or that they didn't want anymore, were subjected to torture and public executions.
05:54
Speaker A
That's because the Dahomeyans believed that they could communicate with the gods through human sacrifice.
06:00
Speaker A
On average, they dispatched about 500 people a year.
06:04
Speaker A
Roughly 10% were killed at the annual custom.
06:07
Speaker A
A yearly mass slaughter.
06:10
Speaker A
In 1893, the Sacramento Daily Union reported, quote,
06:15
Speaker A
"Hundreds are annually put to death with the most savage tortures.
06:21
Speaker A
They are dismembered limb by limb.
06:24
Speaker A
They are tied to posts and hounds are set to worry them to death.
06:28
Speaker A
They are securely fastened to the ground near the nests of the ferocious ants of the country, that attack them and tear their flesh, bit by bit, away, the spectacle of a still living man with his body half eaten by the ants being not infrequently seen.
06:39
Speaker A
Near the royal palace there are long avenues, and when the King desires to receive an embassy with unusual pomp, gibbets are erected.
06:46
Speaker A
And on these are hung, head downward, dozens of hapless slaves.
06:52
Speaker A
They are to remain, guarded by the King's soldiers, until death puts an end to their sufferings.
06:58
Speaker A
Even before the breath has left the body, however, the vulture, in Dahomey, a sacred bird, begins his work, and the screams of the sufferers, torn to pieces by the greedy birds, render the vicinity of the palace hideous.
07:10
Speaker A
Such gruesome accounts were an ironic outcome.
07:14
Speaker A
Of European powers ending the slave trade decades earlier.
07:20
Speaker A
Unsellable slaves were only useful as human sacrifices.
07:25
Speaker A
But the annual mass execution festivals weren't even the most brutal event in Dahomey.
07:32
Speaker A
According to the Sacramento Daily Union, they were, quote,
07:36
Speaker A
"Far surpassed by the scenes which take place when a monarch is crowned.
07:44
Speaker A
500 to 1,000 men are put to death in order to provide the deceased King with a suitable retinue in the other world.
07:50
Speaker A
Then blood flows in streams.
07:52
Speaker A
On the accession of the present ruler so great was the number of those wantonly slain that a large trench was made in the ground in which a canoe was placed.
08:00
Speaker A
The blood of the murdered men was conducted by conduits into the trench until its quantity was sufficient to float the boat."
08:07
Speaker A
This was the level of barbarism that defined the intra-African slave trade.
08:12
Speaker A
The Dahomey literally sailed canoes in the blood of their slaves.
08:18
Speaker A
They butchered thousands of slaves as an offering to their king.
08:22
Speaker A
Slavery and barbarism were a fundamental part of their culture.
08:27
Speaker A
It's worth noting here that although black Africans themselves did have slaves and routinely sold slaves,
08:34
Speaker A
they weren't big players in the trans-oceanic transportation of slaves.
08:40
Speaker A
They also didn't participate in the raids on the coast of Europe.
08:44
Speaker A
That we'll address later in this episode.
08:46
Speaker A
That's because, quite frankly, they just didn't have the technology to do that.
08:51
Speaker A
But that's never addressed by mainstream historians.
08:56
Speaker A
Nor are the details on the enslavers in Dahomey.
09:01
Speaker A
Consider, for example, Ken Burns's recent PBS documentary on the American Revolution.
09:06
Speaker A
Where he uses passive voice to creatively skirt the question
09:10
Speaker A
of who exactly did the enslaving.
09:14
Speaker D
Tens of thousands were from West Africa, captured from what is now Senegal, Gambia, and Gabon.
09:23
Speaker D
Angola, Congo, and the Ivory Coast.
09:29
Speaker D
Nigeria, Cameroon, and Ghana.
09:33
Speaker A
It would be inconvenient for propagandists like Burns to point out that the slaves were already enslaved by other Africans.
09:40
Speaker A
Mostly women, by the way.
09:42
Speaker A
That reality makes the white guilt narrative
09:46
Speaker A
a little less straightforward.
09:49
Speaker A
And if they did mention it, they'd also be obliged to point out another inconvenient fact.
09:56
Speaker A
That the horrors of Dahomey ended in 1894 because French colonizers invaded the country and burned the royal palaces.
10:03
Speaker A
The French, who freed their slaves in 1848, built hospitals, schools,
10:10
Speaker A
instituted social services, mostly through Catholic missionaries.
10:15
Speaker A
In other words, they brought civilization to some of the most savage people in human history.
10:22
Speaker A
Slavery's roots go back at least ancient times.
10:26
Speaker A
In Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as well as the Amerindian empires of Mexico and South America.
10:32
Speaker A
One of the earliest references to slavery comes from this clay tablet from a Middle Eastern city called Uruk,
10:40
Speaker A
dated back to around 3300 BC, which
10:44
Speaker A
gives us a look into Babylonian slavery.
10:48
Speaker A
For example, on one surface of the tablet, there's a notation showing that at least 213 people were designated
10:56
Speaker A
by the sign combination Sal Kur, which means female and male slaves, respectively.
11:00
Speaker A
Young slaves and specifically infants
11:03
Speaker A
were considered the most valuable.
11:05
Speaker A
Poor parents often sold their own children into slavery.
11:08
Speaker A
The historian Amanda Podany writes in her book Weavers, Scribes, and Kings, quote, "A woman named Ku'e made what must have been a heartbreaking decision.
11:16
Speaker A
She would sell her daughter.
11:18
Speaker A
We've encountered this phenomenon before in the Ur III period, when a family had to sell a child into slavery because that was the only way that the child would be able to be fed and to live, and that the parents could survive.
11:29
Speaker A
The price of the baby was 30 shekels.
11:33
Speaker A
A thousand years later, Ur-Nammu, the leader of the Sumerian Dynasty of Ur in Southern Mesopotamia,
11:41
Speaker A
issued a legal code with different penalties depending on whether you were legally classified as free or a slave.
11:50
Speaker A
A more famous ancient reference to slavery comes from the Code of Hammurabi,
11:55
Speaker A
which established slaves as property, set rules for interactions between slaves and their owners,
12:00
Speaker A
included penalties for harboring fugitive slaves, and had class-based punishments for crimes
12:05
Speaker A
based on whether the perpetrator was free or slave.
12:10
Speaker A
Slavery was so common in ancient Greece that most classical scholars
12:15
Speaker A
agree that Plato simply assumed that there would be non-Greek slaves in the ideal city in the Republic.
12:22
Speaker A
In Aristotle's Politics, he openly declared, quote, "Some men are by nature free, and others slaves,
12:28
Speaker A
and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right."
12:34
Speaker A
Indeed, in ancient Athens, slaves comprised more than 35% of the population.
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Speaker A
Athenian slaves were private property
12:43
Speaker A
and could be bought and sold.
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Speaker A
Slaves who worked domestic jobs or skilled crafts had a decent shot at acquiring freedom.
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Speaker A
But there were also slaves who were sent to the mines.
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Speaker A
They wore leg iron, routinely starved, savagely beaten, seldom saw daylight, and were worked to death, with a typical life expectancy of about four years.
13:06
Speaker A
Athens, by the way, was the best place to be a slave in the ancient world.
13:11
Speaker A
In Sparta, slaves known as Helots, outnumbered citizens 7 to 1.
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Speaker A
And one thing that made them unusual
13:20
Speaker A
is that they were public, not private property.
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Speaker A
But because they vastly outnumbered citizens, Sparta used brutal secret police to intimidate the slaves
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Speaker A
and gave the secret police power to execute slaves who seemed strong or rebellious.
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Speaker A
Sparta was a total apartheid state and banned Helots from using the same roads as Spartan citizens.
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Speaker A
Every year Sparta's leaders would declare war on the slaves, killing them was not considered homicide.
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Speaker A
In the late stages of the Roman Republic, there were an estimated 2 to 3 million slaves,
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Speaker A
including roughly a third of the population of Rome.
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Speaker A
Roman slaves were chattel, the full property of their owners.
14:03
Speaker A
Some worked in agricultural chain gangs.
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Speaker A
The punishment for runaways was often crucifixion.
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Speaker A
After a slave rebellion in 71 BC, the Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus crucified 6,000 slaves
14:18
Speaker A
on the road from Capua to Rome, a dead slave mounted to a cross every 100 feet or so.
14:24
Speaker A
The word slavery itself provides some insight into just how ubiquitous slavery has been throughout history.
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Speaker A
Slave comes directly from the ethnic term Slav, because the people who lived in Central and Eastern Europe,
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Speaker A
Slavic peoples, were so frequently captured and sold into slavery from the 8th to 11th centuries.
14:41
Speaker A
Slavery was widespread outside of Europe, too, of course.
14:43
Speaker A
According to the anthropologist Pierre Van Den Berghe, war captives and slaves were systematically humiliated and often tortured to death in some North American Indian societies.
14:52
Speaker A
Among some South American groups of the Amazon Rain Forest, slaves were well-fed, but only in preparation for a cannibalistic feast
15:00
Speaker A
preceded by a mock battle in which the slave would be clubbed to death.
15:04
Speaker A
Often slavery was a simple function of power dynamics.
15:08
Speaker A
As countries rose and fell, they'd shift from enslavers to the enslaved.
15:12
Speaker A
Consider the case of the Irish in the early 5th century, as the power of Rome declined.
15:19
Speaker A
Irish marauders frequently raided the British coast for loot and slaves.
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Speaker A
Thousands of men, women, and children were taken.
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Speaker A
In one raid on the village of Bannavem Taburniae, near modern-day Wales, Irish raiders kidnapped a 16-year-old boy named Succat.
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Speaker A
Succat spent six years as a slave at a sheep farm in Northern Ireland.
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He later escaped, returned home, became a priest, and came back to the land of his captivity as a missionary.
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We know him today as Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland.
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Speaker A
By 795 AD, the tides had turned.
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And now Vikings were enslaving the Irish.
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Along with many other Northern Europeans.
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Viking slaves were seen as cattle,
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or as advanced domestic animals, who typically lived in the darkest end of the longhouse with the other domestic animals.
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After Oliver Cromwell conquered Ireland in the mid-17th century, the situation reversed.
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And the Irish were at the mercy of their former captives.
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The new English regime forced the relocation of roughly 80,000 Irish men, women, and children
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to sugar colonies in the Caribbean, where they were held in bondage and forced to work in the fields.
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Not easy to do with an Irish complexion, by the way.
16:40
Speaker A
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Speaker A
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Speaker A
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Speaker A
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Speaker A
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17:39
Speaker A
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Speaker A
It's a statistical reality that every living white person
17:51
Speaker A
has ancestors who were enslaved.
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Speaker A
But a great deal of white slavery was not done by fellow Europeans.
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Speaker A
This is the town of Baltimore in County Cork, Ireland.
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Speaker A
The tranquility of its rocky shoreline was shattered on the night of June 20th, 1631.
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That evening at precisely 2:00 in the morning, Islamic pirates led by a commander named Murat the Younger,
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arrived banging war drums and screaming in Arabic.
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They arrived on two large raiding vessels flying crescent moon flags.
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One 300-ton flagship equipped with 200 men and 24 pieces of ordnance, including 12 cannons on each side,
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and a smaller, more maneuverable 100-ton ship with six iron guns on each side.
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It came as a shock to the Irish villagers,
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Speaker A
who were mostly fishermen.
18:47
Speaker A
According to a book called The Stolen Village, quote, "None of these untraveled fisherfolk would ever have seen anything like the Turkish warriors
18:55
Speaker A
with their flashing scimitars, their swirling, flowing robes with distinctive cowls, the torchlight glistening on the sweat of bare arms
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which they contemptuously left unprotected by armor.
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Storm them, my brave ones, some of the Janissaries would have been yelling,
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while others responded with shouts of Allah, Allah.
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These pirates were Janissaries.
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And they were raised from a young age to become fearsome, monk-like fighters for the Ottoman Empire.
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Their story offers a good look into the proliferation of slavery.
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Speaker A
They forced levy of Christians to become Janissaries is called the Devsirme system, and it involved the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Christian boys
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over the 300 years it was in place.
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After they were kidnapped, they were forcibly converted to Islam.
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They were extraordinarily disciplined and well-equipped.
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They carried muskets and pistols, carried in a red scarf tied around their waist, as well as their signature double-curved blades.
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The Janissaries had spent weeks sailing to Baltimore from Algiers, 1200 miles away, preparing silently for precisely this moment.
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And when that moment arrived,
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the Janissaries were prepared.
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The villagers were not.
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The British knew through good intelligence gathering in Algiers that the Janissaries were planning an attack,
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but expected it to happen at a much larger and wealthier town called Kinsale, 50 miles away.
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Through a captured and likely tortured fisherman,
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the Janissaries learned that the British fleet had left Baltimore unguarded.
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Outnumbered 10 to 1, the citizens of Baltimore
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never stood a chance.
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Neither did the British Navy, which was responsible for patrolling the coast and protecting villages like Baltimore from attack.
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The British knew through good intelligence gathering in Algiers that the Janissaries were planning an attack,
20:50
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but expected it to happen at a much larger and wealthier town called Kinsale, 50 miles away.
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Through a captured and likely tortured fisherman, the Janissaries learned that the British fleet had left Baltimore unguarded.
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And they planned to move into the interior of the country
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to collect more Irish slaves.
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But Irish ingenuity claimed the day.
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Resourceful villagers gathered nearby, collected firearms and rum, and started making as much noise as possible.
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This convinced the pirates that an English army was marching on them, and they retreated from Baltimore,
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limiting themselves to around 100 slaves.
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The raid on Baltimore is unique because of where it happened.
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But such raids into Europe were fairly common.
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In 1627, for example, corsairs took five ships in a raid on remote Heimaey Island in Iceland.
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With total ferocity, they killed and maimed, they raped the women and girls, dismembered infants,
21:50
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desecrated churches, and slaughtered a priest at prayer.
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They burned and looted everything in sight, and quote, "settled down to a long, unhurried orgy of rape, mutilation, and murder
22:02
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which seems to have been motivated by nothing more than sadistic sport.
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One account tells of the corsairs cutting people in half and callously snapping the necks of infants.
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Anyone unable to keep up with their pace was cut down, and in their madness for blood these villains then chopped and hacked the bodies into small pieces with the greatest enjoyment and lust for blood, wrote one eyewitness.
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Speaker A
In that particular raid on Iceland, the corsairs kidnapped half the island's population.
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They murdered 1 in 12 villagers, including several priests.
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Speaker A
All in all, they returned to Algiers with roughly 400 slaves taken from the coast of Iceland.
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And along the way, they would seize church bells and attach them to the masts of their ships as trophies.
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They destroyed crucifixes and mocked Christians by destroying the Eucharist at every opportunity.
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According to the book The Forgotten Slave Trade, historian Simon Webb described this shocking contemporaneous account.
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Quote, "They began to set fire to the houses.
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There was a woman there who could not walk, whom they had captured easily.
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Her they threw on the fire, along with her two-year-old baby.
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When she and the poor child screamed and called to God for help, the wicked Turks bellowed with laughter.
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They struck both child and mother with the sharp points of their spears, forcing them into the fire, and even stabbed fiercely at the poor, burning bodies."
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In just seven days, the historian Des Ekin writes,
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the typical medium-sized corsair ship usually seized five vessels,
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enslaved nearly 100 Englishmen, and stole roughly 60,000 pounds.
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Victims who weren't killed, in many cases,
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became galley slaves.
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Since the Roman era, galley slaves were considered the most effective way to keep the galleys moving,
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since they required coordinated rowing.
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If anyone took a break, they'd make the ship much less efficient.
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Web notes that after a naval battle in 1571 between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League, which included Spain and Venice,
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it became evident just how many Christians had been forced to row boats for the Ottomans,
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and what horrific conditions these galley slaves had to endure.
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Following the battle, the Holy League discovered that
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more than 12,000 European Christians had been forced to row the galleys for the Ottomans.
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They were shackled 24 hours a day.
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They were not afforded the opportunity to lie down to sleep.
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Not that there was any room to do so, in any event.
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Web writes that, quote, "A typical galley might have 25 oars on each side
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and perhaps three to five rowers for each oar.
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The slaves were shackled in place and were therefore physically unable to move from their designated positions.
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It was said in the 16th century that a galley crewed by slaves could be smelled from as far away as a mile.
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This was unlikely to be an exaggeration.
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Imagine, if you will, hundreds of men confined in a narrow space and compelled by nature to open their bladders and bowels where they were seated,
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day in and day out, for years at a time.
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There was no provision for washing.
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The only prospect of escape for the Ottoman galley slaves was if ships of a Christian nation defeated the Ottomans.
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A more dreadful fate is difficult to imagine.
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But not all slaves were forced to row the galleys.
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After returning to Algiers, some slaves, men, women, and children, were put up for the auction.
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Children as young as 12 years old were sold as concubines in a normal auction.
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Children younger than seven could sell for over 100 pounds, roughly double the asking price for an attractive woman.
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Between 1500 and 1800 AD, the Ottomans and their North African corsairs,
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also called Barbary pirates,
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likely enslaved roughly 1.5 million people from Christian Europe.
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Unlike the transatlantic slave trade, which was driven by pure profit,
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the Barbary raids on Europe were motivated by bloodlust and hatred.
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One historian described it as "revenge, almost a jihad for the expulsion of Muslims from Spain in 1492,
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for the centuries of crusading violence that had preceded them, and for the ongoing religious struggle between Christians and Muslims."
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In the first half of the 17th century, Barbary slavers were sailing through the English Channel
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and into the Thames Estuary, plundering local shipping and coastal towns.
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Such that, as the minutes of Parliament put it, the fishermen are afraid to put to sea,
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and we are forced to keep continual watch on all our coast.
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By 1640, at least 3,000 British nationals were enslaved in Algiers alone.
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In just the seven-year stretch from 1609 to 1616,
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466 English ships were, quote, "boarded and the crews taken to North Africa as slaves."
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In April 1625, three ships from Cornwall and one sailing from Dartmouth in Devon were captured by corsairs and the crews taken.
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In August 1625, a raiding party landed at Mount's Bay in Cornwall.
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The villagers saw the ships at anchor and fled for safety to a local church, but this was not enough to save them.
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The slavers dragged 60 people out of the church, loaded them onto their rowing boats and took them on board the waiting ships.
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They all ended up in the slave markets of North Africa.
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On the 12th of that month, the Mayor of Plymouth wrote to the Privy Council in London.
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He pleaded for assistance from the Navy, because in 10 days, 27 ships had been taken and all of the men on board, over 200 of them, had been made slaves.
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As bad as it was to be in British waters,
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it was worse in Southern Europe.
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Muslim raids on the northern shore of the Mediterranean were almost annual events of terror and pillage.
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In 1544, in the Bay of Naples, Algerians took 6,000 captives.
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6,000 more Italians were taken during the sack of Vieste in Calabria.
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In 1566, they took 4,000 slaves in Granada, Spain in a single raid.
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They described it as "raining Christians in Algiers."
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The list goes on.
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In 1617, 1200 men in Madeira.
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In 1636, another 700 in Calabria, Italy.
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Then 1,000 more in 1639, and 4,000 more in 1644.
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In 1683, the French military attempted to free some of the slaves being held in Algiers.
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The Algerians didn't take kindly to it.
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Quote, "Infuriated at their helplessness in the face of such an attack, the Algerians decided to vent their anger upon those Frenchmen who were at their mercy,
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including Jean Le Vacher.
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Algiers had at that time the most powerful cannon in the whole of the Mediterranean.
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It weighed 12 tons.
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The 23-foot long gun had a range of three miles.
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The unfortunate French consul was pushed partly into the barrel; the cannon then being discharged with a load of shrapnel, blowing him to pieces.
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The Algerians found 22 other Frenchmen and tied them to the muzzles of other guns and killed them the same way."
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For the most part, these slaves, unless they were ransomed or executed inside a cannon,
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spent the rest of their lives in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire.
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Which, incidentally, is one of those colonial empires that no one on the left seems to mind,
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assuming they're even aware of it.
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One of the most shocking slave trades did not involve Europeans at all.
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It involved an Arab-run slave trade operation in East Africa,
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roughly around the same time as the Middle Passage was bringing slaves from places like Dahomey to Brazil.
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But unlike slaves arriving in the New World, Arabs frequently castrated male slaves to prevent them from breeding.
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The castration process was, in some cases, so brutal that 80 to 90% died during the operation.
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It wasn't just castration leading to mass deaths.
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Conditions were so brutal that three out of four died before even getting to market.
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The East African slave trade included legendary traders like the black ivory merchant Hamed bin Mohammed Al-Murjebi,
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also known as Tipu Tip.
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He organized the removal of between 50,000 to 100,000 slaves from the Congo to move ivory to markets on the coast.
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Al-Murjebi earned his nickname Tipu Tip from the sounds his men's guns made during their raiding parties into the Congo.
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When he finally brought his slaves to the African coast with their ivory,
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they were then auctioned off to the highest bidder.
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So many slaves moved through East Africa that Zanzibar became the biggest slave market in the world.
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By some estimates, as many as 17 million East Africans were sold into slavery over 1300 years,
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dwarfing the transatlantic slave trade.
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Many of them worked spice fields and plantations in East Africa.
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And the practice wasn't abolished until 1909.
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Once again, because of colonizers.
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This time from Britain.
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The reality is that the East African slave trade, which exceeded the West African slave trade in its duration, barbarity, and quantity of slaves,
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has received relatively little attention from academics and journalists.
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That's because it's not a useful tool for a demoralization campaign against white Americans.
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White Americans, by the way, whose ancestors were enslaved as well.
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In 1800, there was not a single country on Earth
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that had abolished slavery by law.
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Not one.
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By 1900, Britain, France, the United States, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, had all outlawed it.
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Every single abolition took place in societies under European control or heavy European pressure.
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In a perfect Orwellian twist of irony, it turns out white men are the heroes of the slavery story.
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It was the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron that freed hundreds of thousands of African slaves,
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all done at the expense of the British taxpayer.
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It was the nearly 400,000 Union soldiers who died in the American Civil War.
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And the entirely white Congress and white legislatures that passed the 13th Amendment, ending slavery.
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If the legacy of slavery is a permanent, unpayable debt that justifies racial redistribution and perpetuity,
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then literally every ethnic group on the planet
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owes every other one.
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The descendants of the Kingdom of Dahomey, which sold millions of their fellow Africans,
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would owe reparations to the descendants of their victims.
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The Arab world would owe West Africa and Europe.
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The Ottomans would owe the Balkans.
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The Irish would owe the English.
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And the English would owe the Irish.
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The list is endless because slavery is the norm.
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Not America's unique shame.
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But only one civilization ever decided the guilt outweighed the profit
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and bled itself dry to end it.
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That's the real story.
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They don't teach.
Topics:slavery historytransatlantic slave tradeKingdom of DahomeyDahomey AmazonsAfrican slave tradeAmerican slaveryhistorical revisionismMatt Walsh documentaryslavery mythsslave trade brutality

Frequently Asked Questions

What percentage of slaves brought in the transatlantic trade were sent to the future United States?

About 3% of the total slaves brought in the transatlantic slave trade were sent to the future United States, significantly fewer than those sent to Brazil or the Caribbean.

What role did the Kingdom of Dahomey play in the slave trade?

The Kingdom of Dahomey was a central player in the Atlantic slave trade, capturing and selling an estimated 1.9 million slaves through warfare and raids, often conducted by the all-female Dahomey Amazons.

How does the documentary challenge common narratives about slavery?

It challenges the idea that slavery was primarily an American or white-on-black phenomenon, highlighting African involvement and the brutal realities of the intra-African slave trade, which are often omitted from mainstream education.

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