[video=youtube;yextpoQw-w4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yextpoQw-w4&list=WL&index=10[/video] Yeah, I just happened to stumble across this looking for something else entirely. I thought it was going to be some doofy revisionist crap that tried to diminish Black suffering in some way...but then I remembered that there was something akin to White slavery in America, thought it might not have been called slavery, and there was something very akin to slavery in Europe depending on the particular brutalities of the masters of "lords" as they prefered it then. Either way, I had too much to do at the moment to give it more than a bookmark in my head, but it was definitely interesting and worth looking into later. It if true, would definitely underscore my belief that racism and slavery were tools of oppression and power and that at the root of it is not race but greed and the power to accomodate that greed at the expense of others. I was wondering if anyone had heard anything like this. I know Medieval and pre-Medieval Europeans sold their people into slavery, or the peoples they raided and conquered so that's not a unique thing in and of itself, but it was novel to me in terms of the America's since I usually used the term serfdom rather than slaves and though I know there was different degrees to this kind of thing, I'm not sure if it ever reached the point of slavery, but listening to this guys (his appearance in the video is humorously...lax) synopsis of it definitely made it a read I'll come back to.
Slavery has a very long history. The Romans were the first culture to really have life-long slaves. In Latin "slave" is "servus", so you can see the English word "serve" develop out of that. Usually slavery was a punishment. In Mesopotamia you'd be a slave up to 6 years and then get your freedom back. So it was more of a punishment of the defeated army than a life long thing. In the middle ages you have again slavery whenever big time conquering was going on. For arguments sake in the 9th century moving from west to east the expansion of the Christian faith created bigger wars which resulted in slavery for defeated people. Whenever you have a bigger conquering period, slavery is flourishing. In the 13th century there were the crusades but most were not too successful, so the conquering was limited to a few areas in Europe. Therefore you would have quite a long time in which slavery was distant to many people. But farmers were more and more going into serfdom for their lords. With the colonization you have again a period of conquering of vast territories and people. But also it depends how you classify as "slave". One of the classifications I heard was that it must be legal to buy and sell a human. If you use that, then what happened in WW2 in Europe with slave-labor would not fall into a "slavery" category, because legally you couldn't buy people, but they would have to work under horrible conditions by force. So the question really is who qualifies as slave and who doesn't. If for arguments sake it's the condition, than millions of farmers in Europe and Russia fall because of serfdom into a slavery category.
