Douglas Murray - More Slaves Are Alive Today Than Ever In History

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments
Captions
we have 40 million slaves in the world today which is more than there were in the 19th century more slaves alive today than there were in the 19th century during slave trade 40 million you said alive today yeah i've met slaves i've met former slaves in africa and elsewhere people are born as slaves a mass escaped this is not an abstract point i'm making i think that us um beating ourselves up over over a trade which our own country got rid of two centuries ago and if anyone should be proud got rid of and um and so on there is a significant likelihood we are not dealing with for instance slavery today because we're so obsessed with going over again an issue that was closed two centuries ago and you know it brings to mind a phrase of nietzsche's in the genealogy of morals these are people who there's a type of person who who who tears that wounds long clothes and then shrieks about the pain they feel um we're dealing with a lot of those people at the moment they do not themselves feel pain from the slave trade they not feel pain from colonialism they have decided to rip at a long closed wound and then cry in order to win something whether it's pity or money or reparations or something everybody would have their own view on it but um i i refused to go along with this idea that as i say if everybody decided to take upon themselves exactly the amount of as i say it's a horrible idea hereditary sin but exactly the proportion of hereditary sin that their own society was accorded then that would be one thing it's quite another thing when only one group of people and that white westerners are expected to be responsible for everything that anyone who looked even remotely like them in the past did uh big um and everybody else is not i mean the obvious example to give is is a point of volt hair made in the 18th century it says said somewhere the only thing by the way voltaire now is one of the many figures who's been torn down literally in paris his statue has been now removed by the authorities in paris on the great rationalist thinkers of french society his statue was attacked so many times by people throwing red painted it that it's now removed and you can't find it embarrassed nobody knows quite where voltaire is today um but now part of the allegation is him that he profited through shares in some slave companies they forgot to forget by the way the voltaire also wrote in candide one of the great great um um attacks on slavery but voltaire says in his own day he says well the only thing the only thing worse than what the europeans have done uh to the africans is what africans have done to their fellow africans is what africans have done to their brothers and sisters we know uh from the the few memoirs we had have of uh people who were slaves in this period people like equiano or lauda equiano the most amazing man who was end up so british and uh was baptized in westminster became a free man uh had most extraordinary life a man was well worth reading we know from him that friends and many many others of course that uh he was he was stolen by his neighbors in africa uh in the 1700's they um a neighboring village they came and they snatched them at night that's what they were people snatches and these africans uh stole their neighbors and um and sold them and um now what is the moral responsibility of the descendants of the people stealers um if white westerners have take some guilt then i would like guilt uh from africans as well uh what do you do about african americans who are descended both from slavers and slaves um what's their guilt hereditary wise they cash out at zero they would they would come out at yes exactly the balance sheet you end up you know there um uh if you uh uh one when i was researching the slavery section of this book um i got into the very interesting story of the other slave or the other major slave trade of the time of the time whilst the transatlantic slave trade was going on which was the arab slave trade and the arabs had a huge slave trade that went on for much longer than the western one the transatlantic one it's thought that maybe 10 11 uh 10 or 11 million people were transported across the atlantic during the height of the during the whole of the period of this slave trade it's an appalling thing it was a it was a unbelievably horrible trade which people at the time most people at the time didn't think was wrong because people in the past thought differently from us and almost well all civilizations sadly at that point they'd all engaged in slavery everyone did slave labor how were the pyramids built you know the the pharaohs didn't do it themselves they didn't pay a fair day's labor wages to the people who who hauled the stones for miles uh the acropolis in athens was not built by stones dragged up there by arsenal willing employees yeah i went to a uh i went to a church in florence that was nearly 2 000 years old and it overlooks downtown florence and the tour guide was explaining to us i'm like thinking this building's nearly two thousand and it's been built up over time but still the foundations are two thousand years old and a lot of the the frontage of it is over a thousand years old and i said well how is it that people from so long ago were able to make a building which has stood the test of time he said well you don't have the cost of labor yes yes that's right that's right well i'll come on to that in a second because it's a very that's a very important point um but just to finish that thought on the the the arab slave trade was was about um 50 more people in total uh during the same period so if 10 to 11 million or so were taken across the atlantic in the transatlantic slave trade it's thought maybe as many as 18 million from where to were taken from africa to what we now call the middle east uh arab countries arabia by the arabs the arabs traded as the europeans did in slaves from africa now you may wonder why therefore are there not um more black people in the middle east and there's an answer which was this was actually a genocide they um the arabs deliberately or castrated every single male so any uh any african male they took uh to the arab countries was castrated in order there would be no more black people um now does that have a legacy to date be sure it does if you go to qatar various of the gulf states you'll find that they basically have a slave labor class today the filipinos and others who are brought in and have effectively slave conditions i've seen it myself dubai is the same dubai uh nobody like fifa cares about this uh but this is the case today uh in um in saudi arabia and other arab countries the word for a black person abid plural abid is slave they still call black people slaves my friend ayan who's born in somalia spent a bit of time in in saudi arabia she was growing up and they were black because they were in somalia and they were suddenly blacker than the people in saudi arabia and they were always called a beard slaves so so my point is not in any way to at all diminish what the european slave trade was what the transatlantic slave trade was but it is very very strange to live in an era where it is presumed that only the west was engaged in such a thing and only we for the rest of time must repay a debt which it appears can never be paid down um and that brings me to what you were just saying about uh what was going on in uh countries foreign at the time i mean didn't you say that the life expectancy of a worker in lancashire yeah england was exactly half of that of a slave yeah working at the time the average the average man in the north of england working in a male you know a mine they died in their late 30s so i'm sorry but yes this is different from being a slave but it's not so wildly different that we are able to talk about those people in the north of england as benefiting from privilege these were not privileged people these were not privileged people these these people did not have very many life choices of themselves and here's one of the main points to make about all this is the past was pretty much hell for pretty much everyone i mean even kings died and princes died of diseases which you'd now cure by a shot of penicillin [Music] but the poor who was almost everyone they were not privileged people and the idea that we have to recast all the ancestors of people who happen to be white as oppressors and the ancestors of everyone who happens to be black solely as oppressed is an incredibly simplistic game and it's unfair and that's one of the main problems about it is it's just deeply unfair and when you find an unfair game like that you should ask yourself why are we allowing this game to be played like this by people who literally declare themselves sheriff what's happening people if you enjoyed that then press here for the full unedited episode and don't forget to subscribe peace
Info
Channel: Chris Williamson
Views: 136,326
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: modern wisdom, podcast, chris williamson
Id: mTaRew8uDZU
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)
Published: Tue May 03 2022
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.