[ExI] History of Slavery

[Lee Corbin]

Fred writes

> My understanding is that in Buddhist teachings slavery is usually
> considered to be not in accord with the "Right Means of Livelihood"
> teaching in the  Eightfold path.  See:
> http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/bud-ser1.html
> ...
> history.  My point is not that the first opposition to slavery necessary
> came from either India or Greece rather that we need to be very careful
> about these kinds of questions and also the interpretation and
> application of the results.

Yes, the peculiar English & Quaker opposition may only have been
the first completely effective questioning of the rightness of slavery.

>> So much for their demonization of the West.
> 
> And can we please drop these overly broad usages of "the left said this"
> or "the right said that".  This is the Extropian discussion list and I
> suggest we all aim for a higher level of discourse.   Overly broad
> statements about "the left" and "their demonization of the West" is the
> sort of overblown rhetoric I would expect from Fox News; not on an
> Extropian list.

Oh, all right.  :-)     My superficial and over-polarizing statement
doesn't hold a candle to Sowell's description anyway:

He writes on page 134

     In short, where European and European-offshoot societies
     held direct and effective power in the nineteenth century,
     slavery was simply abolished. But where theWestern world's
     power and influence were mediated, reduced or otherwise
     operated only indirectly, there non-Western peoples were
     able to fight a long war of attrition and evasion in defense of
     slavery----a war which they had, however, largely lost by 
     the middle of the twentieth century, but which they had not yet
     wholly lost even at the beginning of the third millennium, when
     vestiges of slavery remained in parts of Africa.

     Despite all this, those with an instrumental view of history have
     managed to turn things upside down and present slavery as an
     evil of "our society" or the the white race or of Western civilization.
     One could as well do the same with murder or cancer, simply
     by ignoring these evils in other societities and incessantly
     denouncing their presence in the West. Yet what was peculiar
     about the West was not that it participated in the worldwide
     evil of slavery, but that it later abolished that evilt, no only in
     Western societies but also in other societies subjectot Western
     control or influence.

Lee