A very well-argued post from Dallas Catholic that brings up certain topics we have been discussing recently on CP&S. (Warning: some strong language in the video below.)
History takes many strange turns. A relatively poor circa 1580 Elizabethan England, casting about for means to compete with Spain’s enormous wealth mined out of massive New World colonies, seized upon what seemed like a hideous get rich quick scheme put forth by the amoral pirates Drake and Hawkins – capturing natives along the west coast of Africa, hauling them in hellish conditions across the Atlantic to the New World colonies, and selling them at a tidy profit. On the return trip, they would bring valuable commodities from the West Indies and other western hemisphere locales for sale at lucrative prices in English and Dutch markets, before heading south to gather more slaves. Even though local Spanish authorities took a very dim view of this practice initially, capturing and executing the crews of several English pirate-slave ships, the terrible practice eventually took hold and spread throughout the new world (and was taken up by other nations, especially the Portuguese). In fact, the practice grew so lucrative that it played a major role in encouraging English settlement of North America, since it was thought that extremely cheap labor to grow cash crops like sugar and tobacco would be easily available through the North Atlantic slave trade. The Europeans bought their slaves from West African slave dealers who were as often as not muslim.
Of course, there were always opponents to this barbarous practice, in England and elsewhere. Spain’s kings and the Holy See fought against the practice with varying degrees of intensity and varying degrees of success over the next 200 years. But it was in England, gripped by one of its periodic bouts of (most often) disordered religious fervor, that eventually became the prime champion of abolition of the international slave trade. Even disorders can produce happy outcomes, at times. In 1807, after years of effort by Wilberforce and others, Parliament passed the Abolishment of the Slave Trade act. Fortuitously for the world, England was approaching the zenith of her power, especially in the Royal Navy, which served as might and main to interdict the slave trade throughout the world and drastically reduce this practice. Thus those who had done the most to help popularize mass enslavement across continents, did the most to eradicate the practice.
150 years later, as Western Civilization, uncoupled from the Christian moorings which helped precipitate two of the most horrific wars the world had ever seen, passed from zenith into rapid decline, the practice of slavery had been all but extinguished. It still existed somewhat in Africa, particularly among some of the most backwards and isolated muslim sects along the transitional zone between Saharan Africa and tropical Africa. Slaves were mostly acquired through tribal warfare in small numbers, and shipped in small numbers to the Arabian peninsula. The African muslim slave trade merely continued a practice that had been maintained, uninterrupted, for 3000 years or more. Contrary to Christendom, islam had never formally forsaken slavery as contrary to the dignity of the human person created in God’s image, because islam has no comprehension of that image.
But that was 60 years ago. That was before the de-Christianized West, morally lost and full of self-loathing, withdrew its moral authority from the world stage, replacing moral substance with amoral harlotry exported via satellite dish and internet. Islam has, in much of the world, rushed in to fill this vacuum. The most radical forms of islam are growing the fastest, and these are the most comfortable with reducing other people to chattel and using them for the satisfaction of all manner of prurient desires. In doing this, islam is only repeating what it has always done. Indeed, for much of its history, from its satanic birth in the 630s up until well into the 19th century of Grace, islam primarily preyed upon Christian regions as its source of slaves. Barbary pirates were making slave raids on Cornwall as late as the 1710s.
And so today, thanks to the western intervention that ousted Gaddafi in 2011, the slave markets in Libya, under ISIS watchful eye, are booming again. Indeed, there is more slavery afoot in the world than at anytime since the late 19th century, and all the trends are headed in the wrong direction, and it has almost entirely to do with the trademarked “religion of peace,” islam:
The US has engaged in regime change in at least 4 Mideast countries going back to 1979. In every single case, what came out of the US intervention was drastically worse than what came before, especially for the local Christian minorities. Carter’s weakness and waffling paved the way for regime change in Iran, and we’ve had nearly 40 years of terror and extremism as a result. Iraq is a battleground, a made up nation with no real reason to exist anymore, and its ancient Christian populations have been decimated. Libya is now dominated by ISIS and is a completely failed state. We’re doing our best to drive Assad out of Syria and lay the groundwork for a new Caliphate, apparently, with millions more Christians, at least half of them Catholic, at dire risk. Even Trump now seems to have fallen into this neo-con world government mindset with regard to Assad, all on the basis of a chemical attack that either never happened, or was committed by the radical islamist rebels themselves.
Where we have absolutely no idea what we’re doing, I think it best we stay the heck out.