In that post I responded to, you said some extremely abhorrent, downright ignorant things about slavery. I can go through them all if you want, but I’d rather not, because it’s been explained before, ad nauseum, by better debaters than me.
But now you say that you sometimes feel regrets toward the condition of slaves in the Empire. Now, ask just about any Amarr or Matari here: I’m one of the most tolerant Matari on this forum when it comes to the dissociation between duty and sentiment regarding slavery. But I don’t see how your two stances—ignorance of slaves’ conditions versus regret for the same—equate. I don’t think you can say “slaves are the freest of peeps” and “I feel for slaves sometimes, really” with the same mouth.
If you’d like to clarify just what it is about slavery that you feel regret or compassion towards, I would be glad to hear it.
That we did… Long before when we had known the longest era of peace any empire has known, before the Amarr came to enlighten us on how to “be civil” in some absentee diety’s image.
Yeah, it’s probably* true that we did enslave each other. That’s not the issue I take with Lord Avarr’s use of it in this topic. I take two issues with it, actually:
the fact that we engaged in slavery ourselves is, in terms of debate, a weak argument to make when responding to a claim that we had never known Amarr-style slavery before, and
aside from being structurally weak, it’s also not an equivalent claim to make, because the forms of slavery our ancestors practiced was nothing compared to what the Amarr did to us.
The tribes warred with each other, certainly. Took over land, and took slaves as a result of those wars, probably. That’s nothing compared to decimating entire continents, subjugating us for thousands of years, and effectively erasing much of our culture and history, all in the name of “reclaiming” us for some god we’ve never seen.
*Considering how little solid evidence and how poor recordkeeping we have from those times, I find it difficult to accept any statement as broad as “we enslaved each other” as an absolute. There’s no context or nuance there, which leads to such statements being misused in just this manner.
Except that was not the claim that was made. The original claim was that only the Caldari had never practiced any form of slavery (which is generally acknowledged as true). The counter claim was not that the Minmatar had never known Amarr-style slavery before, but that they had not had any sort of concept of slavery before, which, according to the experts in the field, is well supported by the available evidence (which, admittedly, is unfortunately less than we would like, as a direct result of the actions of my people).
Never was there a claim by any party that slavery as practiced by pre-Day of Darkness Minmatar was equivalent to that of the slavery practiced by the Amarr. Certainly it seems unlikely that it was, and even if it had been, that certainly would in no way justify the treatment of your people by my people.
My statement was not, in fact, intended to make any point. It was simply to correct a factual inaccuracy, because two people not only to get into an unneeded and not particularly on-topic, but to be wrong when doing so, and I found this annoying.
As a liberated slave, I would like to say that this statement is full of absolute cow droppings. A herd of a million cows pooping for a million years will produce less crap than that one statement.
This might come down to interpretation of context. When anyone makes that comment about only the Caldari not practicing slavery, it’s almost always as an excuse for Amarr slavery, and we Minmatar don’t tend to think of any Matari slavery as being equivalent. In fact, we don’t think of it at all. So the “Amarr-style” is an inherent concept (I only differentiated here because it was part of my point). As in, when we talk about slavery, we mean the sort that comes bundled with oppression and devastation. And as far as I have ever been taught, our ancestors didn’t practice that. We didn’t have that concept.
