Here’s a nerdy question that packs a powerful political punch: What is the etymology of “slave”? Few people know the answer and that’s just the way leftists like it, because the answer derails one of their central projects. And the answer is this: The word “slave” is derived from the word “Slav,” because the pagans of Eastern Europe were once routinely enslaved by the Christians of Western Europe. So routinely that the name of the nation became the word for the status.
Fair skin and beauty
It’s easy to see how this history derails one of the central projects of the left: to assign all villainy to Whites and all victimhood to non-Whites. Blacks are not unique in being violently seized and cruelly enslaved. Whites from Eastern Europe suffered the same fate. So did Whites from Western Europe. One of the most famous stories of early British history is — or used to be — that of how Pope Gregory the Great (540–604 AD) saw a group of beautiful children with fair skin at a slave-market in Rome. He asked what tribe they were from and was told that they were Angli, “Angles.” He replied: Non Angli, sed angeli, si forent Christiani — “Not Angles, but angels, if they were Christian.” Later in history, the fair skin and beauty of Whites were prized by the Muslim slavers who raided coastal settlements everywhere from Italy to Iceland. Muslims also obtained White slaves from greedy and unscrupulous Jewish slave-traders, as Andrew Joyce has described at the Occidental Observer.
Muslims enslaved Blacks in even greater numbers. And Muslims still enslave Blacks. But none of that history — the etymology of “slave,” the continuing Muslim enslavement of Blacks — helps the leftist project of assigning all villainy to Whites and all victimhood to non-Whites. So leftists do their best to ignore and censor it. As the liberal author Jeremy Black noted in his book Slavery: A New Global History (2011): “[The] period of Mamluk rule [in Muslim Egypt] was roughly equivalent in length to that of slavery in the USA, and it is an interesting sign of relative concerns that the attention devoted to slavery in the Mamluk empire and the USA is as a drop of water compared to an ocean.” (ch. 1, p. 33)
Jeremy Black is right: it is interesting. For example, it’s an interesting example of the left’s doublethink. One of the core principles of leftism is that we’re all the same under the skin. Blacks and Whites, men and women, gays and straights are all equally competent and capable and cognitively gifted. Only chance and historical contingency explain why a Polish woman called Marie Curie working in France made such seminal contributions to physics rather than a Shona woman called Timukudzei Machingaidze working in Zimbabwe.
High achievements and heinous atrocities
But the leftist principle of isohypodermatism — “sameness under the skin” — is used only to excuse non-Whites for their failure, never to exculpate Whites for their felony. On leftist principles, it’s also only chance and historical contingency that explain why Whites enslaved Blacks rather than vice versa. If we’re all the same under the skin and Blacks are capable of the same high achievements as Whites — as leftism insists they are — it inexorably follows that Blacks are also capable of the same heinous atrocities as Whites. At least, it follows by the laws of logic, but not by the strategies of leftism. However loudly leftists proclaim that they have principles, they are always and only pursuing power. They proclaim equality and pursue hierarchy, with themselves at the top and their enemies at the bottom. Among their chief enemies are ordinary Whites and Christians, whom they want to thrust to the bottom of society, far below non-Whites and non-Christians.
As I pointed out in “The Logic of Leftist Lies,” when leftists talk about “white supremacy” and the need to smash it, they really mean “white autonomy” and the need to strip ordinary Whites of freedom and enslave them. At the heart of this hidden leftist project is belief in the innate evil of Whites. Of course, this implicit belief in White evil contradicts the explicit leftist principle of equality and sameness-under-the-skin, but so what? A frogfish camouflages itself as a clump of seaweed, which contradicts its true identity as a voracious predator. This is because a frogfish needs to fool those it wants to eat, just as the left need to fool those they want to enslave.
“White people are cannibals”
And high-ranking leftists do sometimes abandon pretence and openly say that Whites are innately evil. Think of the egomaniac Jewess Susan Sontag (1933–2004) and her claim that “The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.” Where Jews like Sontag have led, the non-Whites imported by Jews into the West have eagerly followed. This story, reproduced at American Renaissance, is about a White being righteously condemned by non-Whites for his innate evil:
A former Seattle city employee has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging he was a victim of anti-White discrimination due to a “racially hostile work environment.” … As part of his RSJI [Race and Social Justice Initiative] training, the lawsuit alleges, Diemert was required to attend a two-day workshop in 2019 called “Undoing Institutional Racism,” during which facilitators declared, “white people are like the devil,” “racism is in white people’s DNA,” and “white people are cannibals.” … “Mr. Diemert’s colleagues used their work emails to berate and entertain violence against him, referring to him as ‘some a—hole,’ the ‘reincarnation of the people that shot native Americans from trains, rounded up jews for the camps, hunted down gypsies in Europe and runaway slaves in America,’ noting that it was not worth addressing his concerns because he would ‘just come back with more stupidity,’ and that someone should ‘get a guy to swing by when Josh is in the restroom and beat him bloody,’” the lawsuit alleges. (Seattle City Employee Sues Over Anti-White Discrimination, ‘Racially Hostile Work Environment,’ Fox News, 29th November 2022)
Remember: like the sexual enslavement of White girls in Rotherham and elsewhere, this is what is happening when Whites are still the majority of the population. If Whites don’t resist, much worse will follow as they slide inexorably towards being a minority of the population. What can we expect from non-Whites who believe that “white people are like the devil,” that “racism is in white people’s DNA,” and that “white people are cannibals”? Those statements utterly contradict the loudly proclaimed egalitarianism of the left but are being made by people whom leftists seek to set above Whites in their hierarchy of virtue and vice. Under leftism, non-Whites are innately virtuous and at the top of the hierarchy, while Whites are innately vicious and at the bottom of the hierarchy. There will be no nonsense about “minority rights” when Whites are the minority.
Triumph of the Villains
Instead, Whites will be punished for their success and their soaring achievements. After all, for leftists those achievements represent only the Triumph of the Villains, because Whites have stolen everything and invented nothing. The White West rose to unjust supremacy by enslaving and exploiting non-Whites. Or so leftists and their non-White footsoldiers believe. In reality, as I pointed out in “The Pale Male Paradox,” the invention of the screw does far more to explain the supremacy of the West than the enslavement of Blacks. If slavery were the key to success, one of the leading nations in the modern world would be Ethiopia, because until recent times slavery “was everywhere” in Ethiopia. And it wasn’t just everywhere: “It was the backbone of labour; it was the source of everything. It was not only landlords and the court of the emperor keeping slaves, but also rich peasants. If you had money, you had [slaves].”
Those quotes come from Ahmed Hassan, a “professor of history at Addis Ababa University” who’s talking about Blacks enslaving other Blacks without any White involvement or encouragement. Indeed, the article quoting him explicitly notes that Ethiopia was “the only African country to have successfully resisted European colonisation.” And where did the article itself appear? Was it in some web of white supremacy like American Renaissance or at some hub of heresy like the Unz Review? Not at all: much to my surprise the article appeared in the Guardian. It was what I call a Guardianista Goosestep — an eruption of hate-fact amid the general anti-White dishonesty and pro-Black deceit of the newspaper.
Diversity + Proximity = War
Even more to my surprise, the article went further than admitting that Blacks could be villains. It also admitted that diversity is weakness rather than strength. It didn’t explicitly quote Chateau Heartiste and say that “Diversity + Proximity = War.” But it might as well have done. Here is some of the article, so you can see the hate-facts and hate-history for yourself:
‘If you had money, you had slaves’: how Ethiopia is in denial about injustices of the past
Nothing hints at the dark past of the marketplace at Dalbo, a town in southern Ethiopia. Today, it is a thriving hub that draws farmers from the surrounding countryside each week, and doubles as a sports pitch on non-trading days. There are no plaques, monuments or inscriptions revealing that enslaved people were once sold here alongside livestock and cereals. Local people will often shut down the conversation when the subject is raised.
“They are hiding the story because they feel ashamed,” says Zerfe Argaw, who lives on a farmstead a few miles outside Dalbo. “It is seen as a closed subject; people don’t want to talk about it.” Zerfe is in her 50s, too young to have seen people being sold in the market, but she was told about the trade by older relatives. “I heard different stories,” she says. “Slave owners owned [entire] households as slaves and would sell whole families to buyers, including the children.” …
Histories of the country gloss over slavery and the subject rarely surfaces in public discourse. At the National Museum of Ethiopia in the capital, Addis Ababa, none of the exhibits deal with domestic slavery, while in Dalbo the chains once used to bind slaves have been melted down to make knives and farm implements. Little has been preserved. “Slavery is a controversial issue,” says Nigussu Mekonnen, a guide at the museum. “There is limited evidence and information about it.”
Most history is hotly contested in Ethiopia, a patchwork of 90 ethnic groups prone to outbreaks of inter-communal violence. The nation was forged through violent conquest in the late 19th century by Emperor Menelik II — whose empire was based on the culture of the northern highlands — and resentments from that era still smoulder. Later came famine, revolution and civil war. Today, the country is grappling with the fallout of a bloody civil war between the northern Tigray region and the federal government that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and a simmering insurgency marked by ethnic killings in Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest state.
“We tend to ignore certain kinds of history that would shape the negative image of the country,” says Kiya Gezahegne, an assistant professor in the social anthropology department at Addis Ababa University. Instead, official narratives focus on Ethiopia’s ancient Christian civilisation and its reputation as the only African country to have successfully resisted European colonisation.
“We are taught to be proud of our identity, and bringing in this narrative of slavery would be a challenge to that discourse,” says Kiya. Yet slavery was once widespread in Ethiopia. Stretching back centuries, slaves served as soldiers, domestic servants and labourers, who were put to work at royal courts, in churches and fields.
Many were born into servitude. Others were captured in raids and during wars, or sold into slavery after they failed to pay debts. Much of the trade was domestic, although Ethiopian slaves were also sold across the Red Sea to Arabia and Turkey, where they were prized as concubines and servants.
Historical data on the slave trade is patchy. Ahmed Hassen, a professor of history at Addis Ababa University, says the number of enslaved people ebbed and flowed, especially during times of war, but estimates that up to one-third of Ethiopians were enslaved at different points in history.
In some districts, the proportion was likely even higher. The sociologist Remo Chiatti calculates that 50 to 80% of people were slaves in parts of Wolaita, a southern kingdom centred on Dalbo that was absorbed into the Ethiopian empire in the 1890s. “Slavery was everywhere,” says Ahmed. “It was the backbone of labour; it was the source of everything. It was not only landlords and the court of the emperor keeping slaves, but also rich peasants. If you had money, you had them.” …
Today, the impact of slavery is [still] keenly felt. After abolition, many slaves became part of the families of their former masters, but in some areas the descendants of enslaved people are seen as impure and are marginalised, barred from participating in ceremonies such as funerals or marrying into other clans. In Addis Ababa, it is common to hear light-skinned highlanders refer to darker-skinned people from southern Ethiopia as “bariya” (slave). … The polarised environment has made it harder to discuss issues such as slavery. A teacher in Addis Ababa, who did not want to be named, says he grew up with “zero knowledge” that slavery was once so widespread.“People are too preoccupied with ethnic-based politics,” he says. “If you talk about slavery, you are accused of trying to divide your group.”
He says: “I see a lot of posts online about George Floyd, talking about how racist America is, and of course that’s an issue. But we also need to talk about inequality here. There are still ethnic groups looking down on others.” (‘If you had money, you had slaves’: how Ethiopia is in denial about injustices of the past, The Guardian, 18th January 2023)
The article is typically leftist in the way it tries to incite resentment, induce shame, and sit in judgment on history. But it isn’t at all leftist in the people and places it targets for those things. Rather than condemning Whites for the way they’ve treated Blacks, it’s condemning Blacks for the way they’ve treated other Blacks. And it’s also admitting that reality does not conform to leftist lies about diversity being strength. Ethiopia is “a patchwork of 90 ethnic groups prone to outbreaks of inter-communal violence.” And it “was forged through violent conquest in the late 19th century” by the Black Emperor Menelik II. And later it suffered “famine, revolution and civil war.”
A curse, not a strength
How on earth did those hate-facts get through the heresy-filter at the Guardian? I don’t know and I don’t expect it to happen often in future. But the article itself is enough. It explodes the leftist myth of White villainy and Black victimhood. In Ethiopia, Blacks were both villains and victims. But the article doesn’t actually use the word “Black” and that would be too broad a word in any case. Although the article is full of hate-facts and does constitute a genuine Guardianista Goosestep, it doesn’t reveal the full complexity of Ethiopian history and “inter-communal violence.” I would predict that the “90 ethnic groups” in Ethiopia are genetically distinct in highly important ways. The “light-skinned highlanders” from the north are likely more intelligent and more cognitively equipped for waging war than the “darker-skinned people” from the south.
Compare the mountain-dwelling Alawites of Syria, who have come to dominate the country despite being a despised and once-persecuted minority. Syria too has suffered “civil war” and “inter-communal violence,” because in Syria too diversity is not a strength but a curse. That article about Ethiopia in the Guardian couldn’t have put it in those words, but it did let the hateful truth emerge. Diversity is not strength and Blacks are not virtuous victims.
