The Shooting Gallery: Police Violence MEGATHREAD

[The Minsky Moment]

I'm quite certain that people in Muslim majority countries have torn down statutes before, for various reasons. If Muslims in those countries want to tear down statues of prominent slavers, I doubt American or European leftists would complain.

The fact that American and European leftists are not travelling to Muslim majority countries to tear down statues there does not seem to me evidence of hypocrisy or inconsistency.

[The Brain]

Has that god-awful Ronaldo bust come down yet?

[Oexmelin]

The only way they do matter is to try and keep in bay the hopefully still minority activists/"historians" who consider and advertise the terrible slaver societies of the East like the Ottomans and the Mongols as some kind of a multicultural melting pot paradise where everyone was equal.

I don't know of any professional historian who ever prop up the Ottoman, or the Mongol Empire as idyllic polities. Things may be different for conservative historians in Erdogan's Turkey, who really promotes the study of the Ottoman Empire for his own propaganda reasons. 

Actual discussions of the Ottoman Empire as a place of tolerance means just that: tolerance, in the early modern sense.

[Tamas]

The only way they do matter is to try and keep in bay the hopefully still minority activists/"historians" who consider and advertise the terrible slaver societies of the East like the Ottomans and the Mongols as some kind of a multicultural melting pot paradise where everyone was equal.

I don't know of any professional historian who ever prop up the Ottoman, or the Mongol Empire as idyllic polities. Things may be different for conservative historians in Erdogan's Turkey, who really promotes the study of the Ottoman Empire for his own propaganda reasons. 

Actual discussions of the Ottoman Empire as a place of tolerance means just that: tolerance, in the early modern sense.

What is that early modern stance? I am asking as a descendant of a people whose population got more than decimated by Ottoman tolerance over a century, and who were regularly and by the tens if not the hundreds of thousands got toleranced away into Ottoman slavery.

I do not like relativising away the sins of slavery.

[Duque de Bragança]

Has that god-awful Ronaldo bust come down yet?

There is a new one, but not in Madeira.



OTOH, the Cristovão Colombo statue in Madeira, where he lived for quite a while, still stands. 

PS: the first sculptor said one can't please everyone, yet he pretty much managed to do the opposite.
After checking, there are at least one in Madeira, one in the Azores, plus one in mainland Portugal, that is Cuba (!), Alentejo. 
Probably shown in the Manoel de Oliveira about him "Cristovão Colombo, o Enigma".

[Admiral Yi]

I don't understand your point about guilt.

Some people argue that the US/white people owe a debt to descendants of slaves for the sins of slavery and the sins of Jim Crow, if not in money terms then in at least in terms of feelings of responsibility and guilt.  I say that responsibility should be extended to include black African slavers.  And, incidentally, narrowed down in the US to include only those who benefited from, participated in, and fought for slavery, and participated and supported Jim Crow, and exclude those who shed blood to end it.  Which, coincidentally, as a descendent on my father's side of Scotch-Irish indentured servants who settled in the north, leaves me completely off the hook.

Muslim slavery is different only in that those taken included white Europeans. Justice is supposed to be blind and principles are supposed to be universal.

[The Brain]

Has that god-awful Ronaldo bust come down yet?

There is a new one, but not in Madeira.



OTOH, the Cristovão Colombo statue in Madeira, where he lived for quite a while, still stands. 

PS: the first sculptor said one can't please everyone, yet he pretty much managed to do the opposite.

Thanks.

[Admiral Yi]

Dude does have a freakishly long neck.

[Oexmelin]

What is that early modern stance? I am asking as a descendant of a people whose population got more than decimated by Ottoman tolerance over a century, and who were regularly and by the tens if not the hundreds of thousands got toleranced away into Ottoman slavery.

I do not like relativising away the sins of slavery.

Tolerance in the early modern era is that some groups are granted the status of corporate bodies that are allowed collective representation, certain rights (again, in the early modern sense), and therefore a certain right to autonomous existence. In short, if you pay your dues, and pay your respects, that's fine, and you are largely left to your own devices. This is why, for instance, many Jews in Revolutionary France actually lamented the end of their corporate bodies, which nevertheless enshrined certain forms of discrimination. The emancipation of Jews by the Revolution meant an end to their collective representations.

No one in the right mind would hold that early modern polities were not violent, and could unleash devastating violence. The point is to understand how that violence may be different, or similar, to what was happening elsewhere, at the time. A wide variety of conditions are subsumed under the word "slavery", and its evils are inevitably going to be felt much more keenly in societies that have stark, absolute definitions of freedom, than in societies where individual freedom is a fleeting, elusive condition that actually concern very few people.

In that regard, Atlantic chattel slavery represented an innovation for the time, and largely contributed to the emergence of racism as an ideology - in ways that the Indian Ocean trade, or the razzia-based captivity of the Mediterranean, or the "flower wars" of Meso-America, did not. 

As a historian living in North America, I think that the sort of racism that emerged out of the large-scale experience of Atlantic chattel slavery shapes much more powerfully our world than, say, the razzia-based Mediterranean slave and ransom trade. I am sure some of the historical memory of the Barbary and Maltese Corsairs still lingers in how, say, European people see Muslims, and I am sure there is, in the very real racism towards Africans in the Gulf country, some remnants from the Indian Ocean trade. But racialization got its boost from that specific form of slavery that was practiced around the Atlantic World.

The thing is: people who bring up the other slave trades rarely do so in the name of historical accuracy. They do so as a political point to project back onto contemporary polities to either absolve contemporary polities from taking any meaningful or substantive action, or to deflect attention to other, preferred targets. I just wish they would be honest in their aims.

[Tamas]

As a historian living in North America, I think that the sort of racism that emerged out of the large-scale experience of Atlantic chattel slavery shapes much more powerfully our world than, say, the razzia-based Mediterranean slave and ransom trade.

In other words, as a North American historian, you think that North American style slavery had a much more profound effect on the world than Eurasian style slavery. Splendid.

[Valmy]

By the way did anybody read the amazing article Syt posted earlier? I mean not to hijack the statue thread or anything.

[Oexmelin]

Some people argue that the US/white people owe a debt to descendants of slaves for the sins of slavery and the sins of Jim Crow, if not in money terms then in at least in terms of feelings of responsibility and guilt.  I say that responsibility should be extended to include black African slavers.  And, incidentally, narrowed down in the US to include only those who benefited from, participated in, and fought for slavery, and participated and supported Jim Crow, and exclude those who shed blood to end it.  Which, coincidentally, as a descendent on my father's side of Scotch-Irish indentured servants who settled in the north, leaves me completely off the hook.

I think that's why the christian language of guilt is not helpful. I am happy to talk about sin, because, at least, in the Christian tradition, it's also universal.

The US, as a polity - that is, as an actual State - was indeed complicit in the maintaining of a system of racial inequality that has had considerable consequences upon a large proportion of people it now claims to be its citizens. Because race is something no single individual controls, "guilt", if you insist, is inevitably shared. Your ancestors may not have directly participated in the slave trade, but they benefited necessarily from advantages granted white people, and denied black people (or Indigenous people). The list of these advantages is well-known - from immunity from prosecution for violence committed, to the worth of testimonies, to access to education, etc. etc. These advantages have been perpetuated for centuries, continue to be, and have compounded themselves to the extent that the current population of black Americans still, by most quantifiable measure, does exceptionally poorly when compared to white.

Is this a problem? I believe it is. I believe the source of that problem lies precisely in that "original sin". It's not like, say, the Roman Empire, which obviously no longer exist: the US is still there, and it still claims to be the same polity that existed since 1783. My personal guilt, or responsibility, or that of my ancestors, is ultimately irrelevant. It is, and ought to be, a show of solidarity for the current, existing polity of the United States, to repair that historical injustice that *has still considerable consequences to this day*. Because you are a citizen of the United States, you are inevitably bound by this injustice. It has nothing to do with guilt. The same way that, for historical reasons, the US bound itself to France and the UK, and to their fate, and when it declared war on Germany, sent Americans to die for France and the UK regardless of their personal preferences, or their individual ancestry.

[Oexmelin]

In other words, as a North American historian, you think that North American style slavery had a much more profound effect on the world than Eurasian style slavery. Splendid.

As a North American historian who has team-taught classes about freedom and slavery with colleagues working on the Ottoman Empire and China, yes. It's absolutely a point I would argue. Conversely, early-modern Chinese imperialism may have had a more profound effect on the world than early-modern European imperialism. Neither means that slavery in Persia, or warfare in the Andes was great or benign. 

A useful distinction, in the history of slavery, is between "societies with slaves" and "slave societies". The first are societies where slavery existed. The second, where slavery structured the very polity itself. None of the East Asian societies that I know of structured themselves around the institution of slavery the way that, say, Jamaica did. The Ottoman Empire, and its Janissaries, is perhaps the most hybrid case.

[Admiral Yi]

That's a reasonable way to put it Ucks.

[Oexmelin]

That's a reasonable way to put it Ucks.