Even if you think of a slave not as a human being but as, say, a working dog, or even a nice tool...

As has been clearly evidenced by this thread, a lot of people are ignorant of slavery in any form outside of the one practised in the American south.

>Have an Elf slave
>Don't beat her

Is something...wrong with me?

If you fuck her - and you surely do - it's almost the same thing.

What if she was the one who asked first?
What if gentle loving kisses are involved?

> If Alfred was a slave,
He wasn't. Moreover, the character lives in a society that roundly condemns both slavery and the sort of treatment associated with it.
> would it change anything?
Yes, because a number of underlying aspects of the society that he lives in would need to change in order for him to be a slave.

> Slaves can be loyal and caring
Never said otherwise. Just that the slave owner will perceive them as lazy bums. That was one of the things that allowed the institution to persist. The engrained belief among slave owners that their slaves were lazy bums who *needed* to be enslaved for the sake of everyone involved. It was wrong, both morally and factually, but that is what they believed and that is how they justified slavery to themselves and to other members of their society.

The righteous indignation towards slavery is based off the assumption that people deserve freedom and respect. While an admirable ethical standpoint, it's hardly representative of the most of human history, including most of the modern world.

In medieval societies pretty much all the lower class people had no freedom to move, either socially or geographically but they weren't slaves.

A lot of forms of slavery were even worse. Just look at the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, or the silver mines in Spanish controlled South America.

The idea that slavery as an institution doesn't inherently lead to abuse is a fantasy. The imbalance of power in the relationship naturally fosters horrible mistreatment.

>So why do slaves, who are are capable of empathy, speech, and everything that make us human get treated worse than a mechanic's favorite wrench?

They aren't. Slaves were often treated well, better than freemen; and at a minimum had economic security and even healthcare plan equivalents of the time.

"Slavery is horrible" is a mix of horror stories and propaganda from the American civil war and general ignorance about global history.

I came here for a comfy board not to feel the urge to slaughter the human race

Many slave owners don't think they're mistreating them. They may even see it as charitable, that they give someone food and shelter in return for some basic tasks. And if they're treated a bit roughly at times, well, that's just how it's always been. You have to be stern but fair or the lower classes will fall into sloth and gluttony and all that you know.

At other times attachment may be stave doff y keeping your distance, and having a high turnover. You don't really interact with your slaves, the foreman does. Or the capo. It might not be slavery at all, just an employment contract that happens to be in your favour.

But they're still denying them having a life of their own.

theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-story/524490/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark is one take on it.

I don't disagree with you. Some were far, far worse, and all involved their abuses. But so many people in this thread are making very specific assumptions about how things worked which are rooted in US slavery rather than looking at the breadth of it.

>Many slave owners don't think they're mistreating them. They may even see it as charitable, that they give someone food and shelter in return for some basic tasks. And if they're treated a bit roughly at times, well, that's just how it's always been. You have to be stern but fair or the lower classes will fall into sloth and gluttony and all that you know.

How is it different from interaction between nobles and lower class freemen? As long as there is a hierarchy of classes in society, this interaction will exist.

People who don't into history think that noblesse oblige didn't exist between the owner/slave classes.

Sometimes it didn't - usually it did.

Although it's worse being clear that there were always exceptions. Decent slaveowners even in the worst cultures, absolute monsters even in the 'best' (as much as you can call any kind of slavery best).

You fucked up.

Oh boy, here come the slavery apologists. Riddle me this: if in these so-called benevolent slave societies slaves had it so good, why was it that there was always some way for a master to legally commit violence against a slave, or why there were slave runaways and rebellions in all of these societies.
inb4
>the slaves didn't know how good they had it!

Tell you what. If you believe this, I'm offering you a chance to be my slave. I promise I'll be real good to you.

Go back to Mississippi

Nobody is saying any slave owning society was in any way good. But even when talking about something as vile as slavery, a degree of nuance is necessary. Some slave owning cultures were significantly less abusive than others. 'Better' does not mean 'good'.

>what is tax evasion
>what is eminent domain

Wave your gold-fringed Admiralty flag a bit harder m8.

Serfs weren't much better off than slaves. About the only difference was that the "owner" wasn't physically around them so much, leaving them more to their own devices and beating them less.

What the fuck are you even going on about?

The moral of the story is that classless society is the only moral society. If achieving a classless society means letting a necromancer kill the king and turn everyone into equal zombies, so be it.

But even then you'll have the necromancer on top, probably beating the zombies around whenever he feels they've failed him.

Slavery was not a tool of oppression for the vast majority of cultures and history, contrary to the zeitgeist these days about it. Freedom as an ideal is a funny joke when applied to places and eras where there was no such thing as having the option to choose your lifestyle because if you weren't out there farming every single day, you wouldn't have enough food for the winter.

Entering into slavery was a means of ensuring your family would have food to eat because your master had an obligation to ensure you are not malnourished. Furthermore, slaves had numerous important rights to property, safety, and family that were recognized in Greece, Rome, Persia, Egypt, even the otherwise barbaric and brutal caliphates. In certain city-states in Greece, like Sparta, slaves made up as much as 90% of the population. And every single one of those slaves were valued as vital farmers, doctors, educators, carpenters, and what have you.

The slavery of the colonial era was marked by particularly severe cruelty due to a variety of economic and social motivations; Slaves were cheap as hell, easy to replace, and not of the same race as the owner. Moreover, as time passed and industrialization allowed great swathes of the population to pursue less laborious careers, the abundance of food and basic necessities led to a gradual shift in the general public's attitudes towards such things as freedom which had always been regarded as a great ideal to strive towards, even if it was hardly practical.

It was not long after that slavery was abolished in most of Europe, and soon, the US as well. Now we live in a world where the mere idea of being beholden to others for anything, even something as superficial as financial debt, is seen as a horrific thing. To not be in control of one's own life is terrifying to most first world citizens, even though such an idea is laughable as it presumes we have the capacity to control the events and people around us to any meaningful degree.

Can't rule the zombies if you kill yourself after necromancing them.

As usual, capitalism is the real villain xD

Nah, the real villain is all the assholes that treat the rest of the world like dogshit and try to justify it with b-but I'm just a successful capitalist I dindu nuffin

As someone who was once a stupid young liberal, and is now an older better educated liberal, capitalism gets a really bad fucking rap.

If you actually look at the principles behind it, it makes a fuckton of sense, and a huge number of the abuses and bullshit that people blame it is actively against the ideals of the philosophy.

Capitalism isn't the problem, it's greedy fuckwits and people without integrity hiding behind it as a justification without actually holding to its principles.

>a dog could never overthrow you and take your place
That's what they want us to think.

You talk as if there was no choice other than slavery. Given the existence of masters and free persons, the only funny joke here is you.

>In certain city-states in Greece, like Sparta, slaves made up as much as 90% of the population. And every single one of those slaves were valued as vital farmers, doctors, educators, carpenters, and what have you.
I'm going to stop you right there. The helots of Sparta were treated like human garbage and the whole reasoning behind Sparta's super militaristic society in the first place was so that they would always be strong enough to stop a slave revolt.

Actual fact, the pyramids were build by regular people. Working on the pyramids gave you tax benefits.

I can't quite explain how sad and angry that makes me.

And that's why you feel you should be allowed to own slaves, yeah?

Also the idea that every slave was like "thank fuck I voluntarily entered into this" "at least I don't have to think for myself" "the beatings are bad, but freedom is really laughable when you think hard about it".

There were also periods during Egypt where farmers/surfs were required by the state to work on the pyramids for several weeks / months out of the year as a part of a labor tax.

The dog cost more.

Because I can easily replace a slave like I can repalce a wrench.

>I'll act smug by replying to points nobody else is actually making!

Maybe if it was a super rare breed or some shit, but slaves were expensive as hell in most periods of history.

Especially if the slave had valuable skills or could teach children.

>Oh boy, here come the slavery apologists. Riddle me this: if in these so-called benevolent slave societies slaves had it so good, why was it that there was always some way for a master to legally commit violence against a slave,

Masters needed legal power to discipline their slaves, or else they would have no power to enforce their orders whatsoever. Moreover, there would be no way for them to enforce quality control over their slaves' work. And of course, lastly they would not be able to punish them for crimes they commit, which are the master's responsibility and the master was always liable for what his slave did.

But in most slave-owning societies, very strict standards were held regarding the severity of discipline to the severity of the failing, as not only were slaves expensive to own, thus necessitating care when handling them, slaves also tended to know their masters personally as there were few cases resembling the efficient, brutal, machine-like plantations of the US South during slavery. Owners who treated slaves with unjustified cruelty were usually punished by the state which was all too happy to intervene and confiscate slaves if they could be sold to a more responsible owner and the state could pocket the earnings.

>or why there were slave runaways and rebellions in all of these societies.

That's a fairly loaded question. Why does any society have murders and rapes? Slave-owning societies did keep very good track of things like runaway slaves and rebellions, so we can actually look at their records to determine causes and such. Runaways and rebellions were rather uncommon in Greece and Rome, for example, as slaves did in fact earn wages and own private property. They could even save their money to buy their own freedom, and the freedom of friends or family, but there were large numbers of well-to-do slaves who certainly had the funds to buy their own freedom (like the Greek scholar slaves who taught Roman nobility) yet never did.

the mistreatment of slaves en Europe comes form the Renascence in which the salve owner rarely even seen there slaves. how ever this was the exception even in Europe where most slaves were surfs and enjoyed some freedoms (wern't quite yet expendable and needed to defend the lord's land)

>slave
>earned money
>owned property
>could become free

I know there are more types of slavery than American South slavery, but I feel like we need to define what qualifies a slave at this point. This literally just sounds like an indentured butler. Or anyone who's ever signed a contract.

Nah, they were generally pretty cheap and most dogs that weren't curs would have fetched more than most slaves.

>So why do slaves, who are are capable of empathy, speech, and everything that make us human get treated worse than a mechanic's favorite wrench?
they are too similar to their owners as most of the time the label is the only difference
so the line between master and the slaves is easy to blure out without a strong negative bias

>Runaways and rebellions were rather uncommon in Greece and Rome, for example, as slaves did in fact earn wages and own private property.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The vast majority of Roman slaves during the Republic were in agricultural or mining work, and they had absolutely zero rights whatsoever. Just look up the Servile Wars - three large-scale revolts all within the span of 100 years.

Just about any philosophy or economic system could be great if people just followed its principles.

Or any slave owning society that wasn't attributed to the new world.

Because other types of labor regimes like salary, wage, lease or in-kind payments just didn't exist at all, no sir, so slavery was the only possible way for a society to function.

Oh wait, that's not the case, and the point you make that violence is inherent to slavery and the power of slave owners is, in fact, only proving my point.

As to your other points, see
.

Maybe not the second one I quoted. That was by mistake.

Capitalism is the reason we are currently in such a period of prosperity that I can waste my day arguing about historical slavery versus the exaggerated superstitions about it on an anime image board right now.

For the vast majority of individuals there was no such thing as another choice. The vast majority of arable land was owned by the merchants or the nobility and purchasing any required funds, which required a trade, which required funds to apprentice, which required a trade; to acquire sustenance, the impoverished had little choice but to either live as beggars or become slaves. Like it or not, slaves had considerably more dignity and privileges than beggars. The freemen were typically merchants and tradesmen like smiths and were a very small proportion of the population in all of these societies.

They were hardly treated like 'garbage,' and that's all just a popular myth about the city anyways. Sparta spent more time at war with Athens and other city-states than concerned about its own civil affairs.

Ad hominems and strawmen are the last resort of the uneducated. Beatings were never permitted in these societies without adequate justification, not even in the caliphates where very minor offenses did typically result in brutal reprisals from the master.

If you dehumanize the slave it's easier on the owner, who's opinion is the only one that matters. If you do not dehumanize them, you have to live with the knowledge that you own another feeling, thinking, empathetic human being. That mental toll is huge, therefore, treating a slave worse than a dog is a better idea unless they are a pleasure slave of sorts you wish to have some companionship with.

That's kind of the point though, isn't it? There's far more variety to what being a slave entailed than the type practiced in the US south and Caribbean. Take the Hebrews, for example; their version of slavery was essentially an analogue to modern Welfare in terms of what the master was supposed to provide, and slaves could really only be held for seven years, at which point all debts were forgiven.

But no, the only type of slavery that ever gets shown is the plantation-slavery, or modern-day sex slavery.

So do slaves. Look at what happened with the so-called 'house niggers'. Plenty of cases of black slaves who grew attached to their masters and felt genuine compassion for them. They had plenty of chances to get their revenge, and were regularly in position where they could kill or injure their captors (such as shaving them), yet they didn't.

>Capitalism is the reason we are currently in such a period of prosperity that I can waste my day arguing about historical slavery versus the exaggerated superstitions about it on an anime image board right now.

That's not a point in favor of capitalism lmao. Humanity never should have climbed down a tree and picked up a tool.

>even the best treated slaves in history still weren't in a particularly enviable position.

Yes they certainly were. Being a privileged, educated slave (likely working as an accountant, librarian, educator, etc) in a patrician Roman house was almost certainly better than being a plebeian in a squalid housing complex. Cicero had a slave he later freed and they were great friends until he died.

I'd say a shitty commoner was just as liable, if not more liable, to get subjected to some sort of unfair punishment than a well treated slave.

An average slave versus an average plebeian is obviously another thing entirely, but the best treated got by just fine.

Of course, it's easier to do this if they look discernibly different in culture of physiology.

>They were hardly treated like 'garbage,' and that's all just a popular myth about the city anyways.
It wasn't a popular myth, it was actually the truth as attested to by many scholars of the time. as for their treatment, it speaks for itself:
Helots were ritually mistreated, humiliated and even slaughtered: every autumn the Spartans would declare war on the helots so they could be killed by a member of the Crypteia without fear of repercussion.
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helots

>the conditions of slave societies force people to become slaves
>therefore slavery is good

Seems like you missed a few steps there.

He didn't miss any steps, you added one.

And they're still wrong in regards to american slavery, since owning black slaves compared to white ones ("indentured servants") was insanely expensive. Rich people can't beat up their expensive slaves for kicks if they want to use them to flaunt their wealth. It'd be like driving around in a ferrari covered in bird poop. That's why whips were used in the first place; it minimized the amount of bruising and physical damage.

Let's all keep in mind that a slave costs about as much as a car.

What, so the oint is that slavery existed? Yes, slavery existed, and all apologia can do about it is try to squirm around to say bullshit like it's not as bad as we think that slaves could be beaten and killed, masters had to have a minor reason; or even if 99% of slaves lived awful lives, a few were well treated and that makes it all okay.

holy shit ubuntawuru, how did you manage to get the cables into your hut without burning the fucking thing down

>zeitgeist
What

in which time period?

>What, so the oint is that slavery existed?
The point is that not all slavery was Turbonigger Plantation Beatdown 3000 Turbo Edition Featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry series, but apparently your brain only has binary toggles so it can't understand anything between 'literally the worst' and 'literally the best'

All of them.

Everyone except for upper echelons of society lived awful lives, generally speaking.

> by many scholars of the time.
Athenian scholars who had a vested interest in portraying Sparta is absurdly evil. The reality is that the treatment of slaves in Sparta varied as widely as the treatment of people in any society. There were people who were highly valued and treated well just as there were fairly useless people who weren't treated particularly well. None of that is inherent to slavery, that's just how human societies work. If you don't have some valuable trait to distinguish you from the rest of the population, no one will give you the time of day. Acting like that's something monstrous is absurd, you're applying modern standards of behavior to societies in which those standards didn't exist.

"There are as many kinds of slavery as there are stars in the sky" - Mike Tyson

Yes, the vast majority of slaves were simple laborers. But you are unequivocally wrong if you claim they had no rights. Moreover, no matter how you try to misrepresent it, 100 years is an incredibly long time, and the Servile Wars are hardly representative of the entirety of Greco-Roman slave history.

As a matter of fact, yes, those labor regimes were quite rare in comparison to slavery for obvious reasons. They became far more common in the medieval era. Being a freeman laborer offered no benefits whatsoever in comparison to slavery - you did not get a roof over your head and your family's head, you did not get your food provided for you, and you did not earn much more than any slave would earn doing the same labor. If you were to be a freeman, you had to have a trade that could support you and your family entirely all on your own, like smithing. Many freemen were forced to sell themselves into slavery due to falling upon hard times and falling too deep into debt.

>Oh wait, that's not the case, and the point you make that violence is inherent to slavery and the power of slave owners is, in fact, only proving my point.

Sorry, should they have turned in their slaves to the law for disobeying them? Have them thrown into prison, where they would be... raped, beaten, and starved? Have an arm chopped off and exiled? Oh that's right, there was no modern law enforcement system in these societies. Just like there was no abundance of food. And disciplining a slave only rarely entered the realm of true, actual violence for all the reasons I've already pointed out.

Who argued that, dumbfuck? You're the one being the apologist, and the original reply here isn't saying "yes, slavery is awful, but etc etc apologia", it's trying to justify a slave society.

Well, that's simply untrue.
erenow.com/modern/atlanticslavetrade1440-1870/43.html

Examining it in context and discussing the reasons why it existed, and the advantages it provided, is 'justifying' it? So we should completely ignore history and just react based on our emotions and modern values rather than trying to understand?

If you fuck her until she mindbreaks then it's okay through.

you don't have to teach a hammer to like nails to do it's job and know its place

>and that's all just a popular myth about the city anyways

Why is it that slavery enthusiasts never have a solid grip on history, despite their claims of realism and rationalism? Sparta's practice of ritually torturing and slaughtering slaves is well-documented.

Can you cite your sources on that? If nothing else, that just seems ridiculously inefficient.

>Who argued that, dumbfuck?

The dumb nigger who posted certainly seemed to be arguing it, what with the whole >I'm gonna greentext a conclusion you didn't make into my summary of your post

Hey, fuckface, slavery existed, obviously the conditions for it existed. You can obviously analyze slavery while simultaneously condemning it, you don't need to start spouting apologia for it.

Only for certain slaveries.

Hell it's not slavery but I was reading about Louis the Sun King and the French of the 17th century and one point was how servants had both a worse time and a better time than servants of Victorian England. To quote:

>To those of us who can remember the glacial contact between employer and employed in too many English households of yesterday (Book is written 1953 so think Downtown Abbey or Downington Abbey or whatever it is for yesterday) it is difficult to visualize the situation of a domestic servant in 17th century France. Scolded, kicked, beaten, but with a liberty of speech which would not have been tolerated 200 years later, the domestic's was then a rougher but a more human life, in which it was never forgotten on either side that the servant was one of the family. To our ideas, startlingly so at times. There were fewer haughtier men in France than Duc de La Rochefoucauld but he thought nothing of sitting down to a game of chess with one of his footmen, and in more extraordinary still, his sister was married to one of the Rochefoucauld footmen, the celebrated Gourville; and the marriage, though never acknolwedged, was an open secret both in the family and society.
>St Simon, rather unexpectedly, speaks with approval of the Duchess D'orleans chambermaid, who was "familiar, like all good old servants" and did not mince her words in reproving the Duke himself when she thought he deserved it. Nor need we waste much indignation on the habit of beating servants, for it was a pleasure which was safer to discuss than to practice; The princess D'harcourt was much given to it until she engaged a new maid, a strong country girl unaccustomed to beatings, and not caring much for the novelty: without more ado the maid knocked eher mistress down and gave her such a thrashing as had not come her way since she left the schoolroom. And society was so amused that the princess did not dare to seek revenge.

So you don't see the whole trying to justify a slave society thing as trying to say that slavery is good, huh? Let's start out on the right foot then: say that slavery was an awful institution. Whether it was a "necessary" one is then an empirical question you can fuck around with. But, by the way, protip: it wasn't.

It goes on to describe the patrimonial kind of relationship to servants.

"Dont, he (academian author) imagine that by employing a multitude of servants you are showing charity, and don't make the excuse that you are helping to reduce unemployment. What you are doing is to save a number of idlers from the necessity of earning their bread usefully". More stuff about having to make sure your servants are good church-going folk, that "The God fearing master never forgets that he stands in the place of a father to his servants and prefers to beat, rather than to dismiss them".

That is servitude, not slavery, but it still points to the relationship of master and servant usually being more complex than sheer rapacious brutality. It mentions similar in the case of the rural countryside where the poorer noble (looked down upon by his peers hanging out at Versailles) are often more at home roughhousing with his footmen and peasants than among the hoity toity.

Generally Industrialized or commercial slavery (latifundum, Plantation, mines) is the most miserable existence imaginable. House slavery as a man is decent to cool, house slavery as a woman is decent in a pre-modern sense but terrible in a modern sense because you are at risk of being the master's sexual plaything. Being a high education slave or white/asiatic slave warrior is dope as fuck. Being a black slave warrior is nto so cool.

>pointing out to amerifat retards that historical slavery wasn't 100% niggers on plantations is saying that slavery is good

I don't know why that user was even trying, you dipshits clearly can't be reached.

>Athenian scholars who had a vested interest in portraying Sparta is absurdly evil.
All the evidence agrees that they had the right idea, even if some of their depictions were hyperbolic.
The rest of your argument is pointless to respond to, so I won't even bother.

>Yes, the vast majority of slaves were simple laborers. But you are unequivocally wrong if you claim they had no rights.
Once again, you have no idea what you're talking about. Roman slaves had no legal rights whatsoever during the Republic.
>Moreover, no matter how you try to misrepresent it, 100 years is an incredibly long time
It's actually an incredibly short period of time, especially within context of the thousand years Rome was around.
>and the Servile Wars are hardly representative of the entirety of Greco-Roman slave history.
Considering that the wars lead to the institution of a few rights for slaves, I would say they are the ultimate representation of how shittily the slaves were treated and the backlash from it.

Given how you seem to be overreacting and calling literally any comment on the contextual advantages of slavery as 'apologia', I'm not sure what more there is to say.

Oh no. People were not forced to become slaves, and freemen could absolutely stay free until their dying breath as they held the corpses of their wives and children in their arms, three skeletons with bloated bellies and flies dancing on their flesh.

Slavery was a step up from total poverty, which many freemen fell into due to misfortune or debt or both. To be a slave was to have a place in society, a protected place where if you did your job you would be taken care of, even if it was as another man's property. At the time, slavery served an important purpose as a safety net for the poor. There was no time to think about a better way and no room for idealism when survival was always item one on everyone's agenda.

The slavery of the colonial era on the other hand was a much more sinister, vile mechanism. Rather than being a safety net, men and women were being dragged into it from their homes in Africa. By other Africans, mostly, which made it even more disgusting. It was a time in which the civilized world had plenty and prospered more than ever before, and yet slavery was turned to as it became easier and cheaper than ever before. Contrary to the arguments made by the slaveowners of the time, it was absolutely not necessary at this time; indentured servitude was a concurrent institution that would have served much better in its place. The plantations of the US South and the Caribbean colonies were a failure of the morality of the time period in every possible way.

But it is foolish to equate that era of slavery with any prior time, because it is simply that irrevocably twisted and inhuman.

>I can't read: the post
Roman slavery was unjustified and awful, face it.

>Oh no. People were not forced to become slaves
I don't even know how to respond to a statement this stupid.
Colonial America was not the only place and time in the world where slavery was involuntary, that's why slavery is a different term from servant in the first place.

>the conditions in which slave owners own the vast majority of land and therefore push people into slavery
>because they don't have land
>slave masters were totally providing an important safety net guys

EVERY TIME.

What are Mamelukes?
What are Janissaries?

Seriously OP, you're a fucking retard. Slaves weren't always treated the same. In many muslim cultures the elite warriors came from a specific slave caste. They were often bound to protect the sultan/state and were treated better than most freemen (with some exceptions): including formal education, food, housing, administrative benefits, unique privileges, etc. Mamlukes even had their own sultanate in Egypt (that is a member of the slave warrior caste became the Sultan).