Slavs, Slaves, and Slavery

Have you ever had one of those etymological epiphanies? You know, where two words you had never thought of together are discovered to be related? Maybe you noticed “literally” and “literature” with their related meanings for the first time?

These types of discoveries are entertaining, but there is one linkage that should be shouted from the rooftops. What relation merits such attention? The words “Slav” and” slave”. Specifically, the Latin root for “slave” also had a direct relation to the “Slavic” peoples.

Moreover, this linkage between the people group and the term for forced servitude is not only related in English but also in Arabic and several other languages.

This derivation came from the fact that for centuries, the Slavic peoples were the most readily available source of slave labor for Easterners and Westerners alike.

On slavery more generally, the PC narrative is that slavery was the fault of Westerners. Your professor will never say this outright, but just take a glance at your Afro-Studies Department courses at your college and you are very unlikely to find accounts of the North African Barbary slave traders.

However, I promise you that there will be no shortage of course on European slavers. This is one of the biggest intentional oversights and cover-ups propagated in modern academia. To discuss one of the most ubiquitous human evils as if it was the distinctive province of one civilization is shockingly dishonest. Here are just a few facts to give you some perspective:

• Slavery occurred in virtually every observed society in which it was viable, but Arabic world was the unequivocal leader in sheer volume of slaves captured and sold.
• More Sub-Saharan Africans were sold to the Islamic world than to Europe and the Western Hemisphere combined.
• There were more Europeans enslaved by North Africans than there were Sub-Saharan Africans enslaved and sent to the Western hemisphere

Have you ever heard that in one of the interminably inane seminars on “race and slavery”? No. Because the left cannot bear to lose its bludgeoning tool of choice as it seeks to disfigure Western Civilization. The West did its share of evil, but it was also the only place where a significant movement arose to abolish slavery. If any civilization has a right to claim any moral high ground on this matter it is most certainly the one which almost single handily fought to destroy it.