Crackers.

[eynon81]

[eynon81]

[The Dharma Bum]

The Middle Eastern slave trade didn't have anything at all to do with the transatlantic slave trade. Completely different times, places, and peoples. Also racism wasn't a component of slavery in the Islamic culture.

The difference is that the European slave trade marked the first time slaves were thought of as something other human beings. Slaves in other times had obligations and responsibilities like other members of society. The west mechanized slavery and thus compounded the crime. This the same same thing that made the Nazis so horrible, which was a complete disregard for human life in the pursuit of mechanized mass production.

Modern racism is the remnant of the set of justifications that psychologically prepared people of that time to do participate in what they were doing to enhance production. Unfortunately that set of justification is tied into the basis of our cultural beliefs and is going to take a good deal of time to eradicate completely.

[eynon81]

[eynon81]

[Lobster]

Xenophobia in chinese history is way more endemic than you make it seem. The pushback against central asiatic people like tibetans and "eastern turks" (i.e: Uighurs) was almost entirely based on race. Or that despite being completely accultured to chinese civilization and not having any cultural links whatsoever to their steppe past (which was pretty tenuous to begin with, as the jurchen were way more settled than their mongol relatives) the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty was portrayed as an act of rebellion against "foreign" domination. Not to mention the way northern chinese looked down on southern chinese as uncivilized barbarians and commented negatively in their historical records on matters such as their darker skin colour. The idea that "white"=noble and rich was present in China and India long before european contact, and for the same reasons (labourers being exposed to the sun, elite class not deigning to partake in "peasant" duties as a sign of superiority).
The chinese were colonialists, despite the constant refrain of being a country closed in on itself. That only became true for a very short time when they were being dominated by european navies. Their strategy was more in the russian style, annex a piece of land and it's people near your borders and drown them in immigrants until their ethnicity and culture is nothing more than a minority. A strategy that is still commonly in use. The resurgence of xenophobia in the 17th century was practically a tradition in chinese history, not a unique occurance brought on by contact with europeans.

As for slavery:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Mauritania
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news ... man-rights

These things are always portrayed as "time-honoured traditions" by their practitioners. They are legacies of a past that is endemic to humanity as a whole. I don't frankly see much moral difference between oldschool xenophobia and the more modern variants.

[eynon81]

[The Comrade]

[eynon81]

[The Comrade]

who needs junk when you have allah?