Slavery and Moral Sentiments

Rome

Here’s an excerpt from David Brion Davis’ Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World about slavery in Ancient Rome.

He notes that antebellum Southerners were familiar with Roman law, which sanctioned slavery, and liked to style themselves as modern day Catos on their plantations:

“Bradley most vividly illustrates the Roman slave’s status of animality in an analysis of Apuleius’ mid-second-century C.E. novel, The Golden Ass, or Metamorphoses. In this story a prosperous, well-born, and well-educated young man, Lucius, becomes suddenly transformed into a four-footed ass or donkey – “a paradigmatic illustration of the animalization of the slave in real life.” Since Lucius retains his rational human identity but is unable to speak or complain as he is flogged, “set to the drudgery of turning a mill,” and even sexually exploited, he symbolizes the plight of the dehumanized human, yearning for ways to resist but also learning that “once slaves were set on the level of beasts all need to cater to their human sensibilities were removed.” Ironically, the author Apuleius was himself a slaveowner, and his account of one man’s temporary bestilization was meant as comedy, not a call for abolitionist action.”

Such was the world before the moral character of Europeans was rotted by evangelical Christianity and Enlightenment liberal republican ideology in the late seventeenth/early nineteenth century and imposed on the Occident as a whole under two centuries of British and American hegemony.

Davis notes that the Romans were unperturbed about pouring molten lead down the throats of slaves who raped free virgins or forcing slaves to fight to death in gladiator spectator sports or crucifying rebellious slaves.

In the 21st century, Whites are arraigned before the moral code of the modern secular liberal who has only recently invented a number of fictitious sins (racism, sexism, nativism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc.) to assail and indict the White majority and to justify his own dominatiion.

The pretentious modern liberal should be laughed at like Lucius in The Golden Ass.

About Hunter Wallace 12380 Articles
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50 Comments

  1. Good read,

    Now for something a little off topic:

    “Schools beat the drum for equity [and PB&J’s are racist!]”

    “[Principal] Verenice Gutierrez picks up on the subtle language of racism every day.

    Take the peanut butter sandwich, a seemingly innocent example a teacher used in a lesson last school year.

    “What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?” says Gutierrez, principal at Harvey Scott K-8 School, a diverse school of 500 students in Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood.”…

    “hrough intensive staff trainings, frequent staff meetings, classroom observations and other initiatives, the premise is that if educators can understand their own “white privilege,” then they can change their teaching practices to boost minority students’ performance.”…

    “Fifty percent of the students at Scott [school] are Hispanic; another 15 percent are black and 9 percent are Asian. Eighty-five percent are eligible for free or reduced-price meals.”…

    “Gutierrez [authorized] last year to start up a lunch-time drum class for black and Latino boys once a week. This year, it’ll expand to two classes a week, to accommodate new boys as well as those with experience.

    At least one parent has a problem with the the class, saying it amounts to “blatant discrimination and equity of women, Asians, whites and Native Americans.””…

    “Gutierrez denies that any students were turned away from the drum corps, and vehemently rejects any suggestion that it is discrimination to offer a club catering to minority boys.

    “When white people do it, it is not a problem, but if it’s for kids of color, then it’s a problem?” says Gutierrez, 40, an El Paso, Texas, native whose parents were Mexican immigrants. “Break it down for me. That’s your white privilege, and your whiteness.””…

    “Our focus school and our Superintendent’s mandate that we improve education for students of color, particularly Black and Brown boys”…

    “… Oregon’s Department of Education just last month identified Scott as a “focus school,” one that performs among the state’s lowest 15 percent.”…

    Read it all here:
    http://portlandtribune.com/pt-rss/9-news/114604-schools-beat-the-drum-for-equity

    Read the comments in the article, people are waking up in liberal-land

  2. “Davis notes that the Romans were unperturbed about pouring molten lead down the throats of slaves…”

    Afterwards, if the slave couldn’t shit it out, the Roman would kick him and shout: “Get the lead out!”

  3. The only people I want to see enslaved are white liberals. They’re the most natural slaves on earth. Hell, God may judge us for NOT enslaving them all this time.

    They can be our Helots. We could raid liberaltopias for slaves with impunity, after all, they fucking disarmed themselves WILLINGLY years ago.

    A beautiful, fitting end to cultural Marxism, no? You got a slave-morality: become a fucking slave.

  4. The books end with Lucius indicted into Isis worship. I can’t tell of that’s a joke too.
    What say ye on Isis worship? Yay or neigh?

  5. That the propriety of slavery was generally, if not entirely, unquestioned in the ancient world is hardly news, Mr. Wallace. To anyone who grew up in the old, white America and was paying attention in the schoolyards of his childhood, it is also not news that a great many whites are indifferent to cruelty and even find it amusing. Their brainlessness is of a piece with their shortsightedness, which has brought whites to their present desperate pass. Don’t encourage it.

  6. The schoolyards of the 1950’s were hardly more brutal than those of today. They were less so. Teachers could still knock heads when the need arose.

  7. Some people truly need to be brutalized. The fact that we didnt brutalize the left back in the 50s and 60s is *why* we are in the state we are in today. The slaves run the plantation now.

  8. funny how the city fag equates traditionally masculinity, in this case an indifference to cruelty done on outsider groups as brainless when in reality a concern for it is womanish and weak. That’s what is killing is, White men who have internalized woman morality and confuse weakness with goodness

  9. Well Rudel – Art Deco is Art Dandy, with me.

    I also adore the sensous and vageuly sinister sensibilities of the Belle Epoque era…

    http://images.search.yahoo.com/images/view;_ylt=A0PDoS.d.U9QDT4A6AyJzbkF;_ylu=X3oDMTBlMTQ4cGxyBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDaW1n?back=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.search.yahoo.com%2Fsearch%2Fimages%3Fp%3Dbelle%2Bepoque%2Barchitecture%26n%3D30%26ei%3Dutf-8%26fr%3Dyfp-t-701-1%26tab%3Dorganic%26ri%3D61&w=1089&h=1000&imgurl=www.evamenz.com%2Fimages%2Fpicture%2Foriginal%2FLaBelleEpoque_9_1.jpg&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.evamenz.com%2Finstallations%2F24&size=225.9+KB&name=La+Belle+Epoque+Eva+Menz+Design+Crystal+chandelier+Private+residence&p=belle+epoque+architecture&oid=0aecf2e7c22c5373e67f5d2ba6087f98&fr2=&fr=yfp-t-701-1&tt=La%2BBelle%2BEpoque%2BEva%2BMenz%2BDesign%2BCrystal%2Bchandelier%2BPrivate%2Bresidence&b=61&ni=72&no=61&ts=&tab=organic&sigr=117dji7kj&sigb=13nk8uol0&sigi=11t4mtfhf&.crumb=5.ase646Wer

  10. “funny how the city fag equates traditionally masculinity, in this case an indifference to cruelty done on outsider groups as brainless when in reality a concern for it is womanish and weak. That’s what is killing is, White men who have internalized woman morality and confuse weakness with goodness”

    It if weren’t for city fags, you big ol’ Stonelifter, you, the alphabet and punctuation you’re not quite capable of using wouldn’t even exist — nor would the internet that is enabling you to broadcast your defects. Want to act like a white man? Learn to recognize your betters.

  11. Didn’t really care for Starship Trooper’s much, but I absolutely loved this scene

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7Yrw7QNx1U

    Total common sense teacher unlike the wimpy “Mr Van Driesens” filling the occupation today. I’ve always cringed at the “I’m not a white supremacist, I’m a ‘separatist'” groupthink on most racial sites today. I always preferred the adventurous whites who went out into the world and conquered it and set up a racial hierarchy to some weenie who wants to hide out in Idaho and just let who continents resources and raw materials lay fallow under the feet of Neanderthals. God forbid anyone actually go out in the world and interact with the inhabitants in various locals, they might actually get to know reality.

  12. Good Study? Is that the Italian translation? Good direction? Hmmm. It’s a nearly dead language either way.

    Anyway, you add nothing here Bonny lad. The Fiat ads are quite clever though.

  13. “If it wasn’t for country boys, you city fags would all starve to death.

    Learn to recognize your betters.”

    You’re right, Mr. H. Somebody has to keep those farm animals sexually content.

  14. “I also adore the sensous and vageuly sinister sensibilities of the Belle Epoque era…”

    That beautiful chandelier is actually timelessly modern.

    I certainly admire many of the artifacts of Art Nouveau and in popular painting prefer the Aryan goddesses http://tinyurl.com/8umotv9 of Waterhouse to those of Bouguereau, but a lot of the art and literature of the period is a bit too fruity, as overdone as Rococo, and/or downright decadent (eg. Aubrey Beardsley, Huygens, etc.) for my taste.

    It was all swept away with much of the rest of European civilization by the suicidal genocide of the best of the White race during The Great War.

  15. “Didn’t really care for Starship Trooper’s much, but I absolutely loved this scene”

    Dina Meyer is so much hotter than Denise Richards it isn’t even close.

  16. “The books end with Lucius indicted into Isis worship. I can’t tell of that’s a joke too.
    What say ye on Isis worship? Yay or neigh?”

    Beats the hell out of yankee negro worship any day. What perversion! Yankees worshipping farm animals is completely absurd.

    Art Nouveau goddess for Rudel.
    Alphonse Mucha, The Moon and the Stars, 1902,
    http://www.muchafoundation.org/gallery/browse-works/object/156

    BRA cannot create art as great as Mucha or any other Art Nouveau artist. BRA is the culture of ugly negroes who can neither comprehend nor appreciate beauty. BRA culture is anti-culture and is completely without significance. BRA is anti-civilization. We live in the dark ages.

    Compared to us the ancient pagans were the most enlightened men who ever lived.

    Deo Vindice

  17. Since when is negro farm animal worshipping Bonacorsi anyone’s better? Stonelifter’s bird dog has higher standards. Probably gets laid more often, too.

    No Bonacorsi, getting sodomized by a negro does not count as getting laid. No matter how much you like it.

    Deo Vindice

  18. I’m afraid I’ll have to agree with (John Bonaccorsi, Philadelphia) on the slavery issue. My forefathers owned slaves but my present disposition on the matter is the same as the bumper sticker, ” If I’d have known then what I know now I’d have picked my own damn cotton”.

  19. Eric Hale says:
    September 12, 2012 at 2:12 am

    The only people I want to see enslaved are white liberals. They’re the most natural slaves on earth. Hell, God may judge us for NOT enslaving them all this time.

    They can be our Helots. We could raid liberaltopias for slaves with impunity, after all, they fucking disarmed themselves WILLINGLY years ago.

    A beautiful, fitting end to cultural Marxism, no? You got a slave-morality: become a fucking slave.

    Yes! Yes! Yes!

  20. “Art Nouveau goddess for Rudel.
    Alphonse Mucha, The Moon and the Stars, 1902”

    God Almighty, do I looooove white women! They are the whole point to this whole miserable planet are they not?

  21. It’s not the voting patterns of rural White men who lead us to this mess, john b.

    Perhaps we wouldn’t have the internet, but we wouldn’t have freedom for negros, citizenship for negros, laws that elevate negros above White men, feminism and it’s resulting mess, open borders, environmental laws which destroyed our manufacturing base, a debate on queer marriage etc.

    Those are gifts from yankee, city boys. Your claim to superiority is damn foolish. It’s not my version of morality or intellect that is gutting our race but yours.

  22. Generally I tend to find it’s Jewish people who joke about beastiality and inbreeding.
    Whites get the butt end of the joke however it’s mainly a fantasy in the mind of the pornographer. Both the act and the identity of the actor. Most potnographers are from a particular cultural background. Eventually “Yonatan Ben Cohen” will let the veil slip.

  23. Back to the post topic: Is our view of slavery developed from, and our civilisation founded on the moral sentiments of the “Golden Ass” and the PAGAN Greeks and Romans, or the teaching of the Christ of the New Testament?

  24. “Such was the world before the moral character of Europeans was rotted (…) Romans were unperturbed about pouring molten lead down the throats of slaves who raped free virgins or forcing slaves to fight to death in gladiator spectator sports or crucifying rebellious slaves.” Christianity weakened the morality of the Romans?

  25. The author’s father was a pulp writer, living in NY in the 1930s.

    Why take the voice of someone s/a David Brion Davis, such a Northeast Establishment writer, so seriously?

    Idk— HW, if you love the South, why not attempt to use Southern sources more? To give real Southerners a voice, rather than concentrate on this romanizing trend to “acclimate” the current southerners to the u.s. romanization? (in the upper south, they are surely anglo-celt and wasp, historically, there’s no denying it).

    Here’s another from the writer: David Brion Davis

    “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” in From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture, Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 137-154.

    You quote people who have no heart for the South, sometimes, no care for it, whatsoever, and offer them as truth, without doing the Southern thing (examine their family background and consider their loyalties and they are not to the South).

  26. In other words, according to the above, if a Southern Wasp wishes to assert their real heritage, it is “subversion.”

    If the Southern Wasp feels their culture is something other than just slavery, slavery, slavery, they must be quickly shut up—-slavery is what establishment writers such as Davis want “southerners” to boil down to, for many reasons: the “southern wasp” can be defamed, which makes taking their wealth through taxation/tithe statism easier for taxation freeloaders in the “new economy” of usury, and the Southern wasp can be blamed for all of world slavery to boot, while creating the climate where the average citizen is indoctrinated to see slavery as evil. This sets them up for Genocide and also hides the “crimes” of the Spanish and Portuguese in particular, (the biggest offenders), even as they use their infiltrated positions in government (in a previously wasp country) to open the border to their own old ex-slaves.

    Nice work if you can get it, right?

    Davis seems to see American and White real identity as “subversion.”

  27. @ Denise “We need to get our Berserker on..”

    Maybe you truly have to be Norse for that.

    The u.s. is more about catholics reliving their old glory-days muslim crusades, and jews indoctrinating ex-protestants into zionism (crusades) for their own ends. The Northern euros who secretly don’t give a shit about either group (and do have some real norse among them) can’t decide how to react and just keep trying to move. But now their back doors are being blocked off and they are stuck.

    The idea they’re supposed to accept, is that the black and brown menace is so bad now that Northern europeans should just thank their lucky stars that they can be with other whites, (since everything is about to become Newark) and so they should get over the fact that they no longer have a country to live in and run the way they would run things.

    In the u.s., there’s not really anything FOR a berserker, really.

  28. “Generally I tend to find it’s Jewish people who joke about beastiality and inbreeding.
    Whites get the butt end of the joke however it’s mainly a fantasy in the mind of the pornographer. Both the act and the identity of the actor. Most potnographers are from a particular cultural background. Eventually ‘Yonatan Ben Cohen’ will let the veil slip.”

    You’re right, John, that the bestiality joke didn’t come naturally to me; it was my best attempt at silencing the sort of white who refers to city fags. As I observed long ago, such whites generally can’t be silenced. If you think it good that they congregate at this blog, you’re no friend of the white race.

  29. @ Bonnacoursi (or however he spells it)

    “You’re right, Mr. H. Somebody has to keep those farm animals sexually content….”

    Why do people sometimes say it’s Jews who are obsessed with body functions? Back in reality, even before Constantine decided Jesus was merely for a socialization to back his own empire and world conquest, the pre-christian Romans started the crotch grabbing they attribute to hispanics today, (and from whom the blacks seem to have picked it up)
    http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2008/03/cant_touch_this.html

  30. 313Chris says:
    You country boys are the reason there are niggers in this country in the first place….”

    Oh Please. Like Emma Lazarus’s dad, who even got called up by the Negro Labor Board for abusiveness of his slaves, on his Louisiana plantation, even as he maintained a place on Fifth Avenue. His dairy (toxic milk) did in a number of nyc infants also, btw.

    And yet they hang his openly zionist daughter’s poem about America “being for everybody” on that ny statue the French sent over, and that the Americans had left out there in the water.

    Make a “country boy” out of Emma and her daddy, lol

  31. “….You’re right, John, that the bestiality joke didn’t come naturally to me; it was my best attempt at silencing the sort of white….”

    Idk, seemed to flow pretty well.

  32. “Another anti-White White raging at all the Whites she doesn’t like, but absolutely loves the kind of Whites driving the train of our destruction. You are fag john b, which is why the harpy loves you so much. Any which way you want to cut it, you and your womanish feelings about things is one of the White race’s main problems. You think your better because you’re city bred, and all that makes you is pretentious ass. The kind of Whites you disapprove are the same kind of Whites jews and leftist hate the mos. I wonder why that is? Easy answer, you are one of them”

    Exhibit A in the Jews’ case that whites are animals.

  33. “God Almighty, do I looooove white women! They are the whole point to this whole miserable planet are they not?”

    My sentiments exactly.

    Deo Vindice

  34. John B. has a greater affinity for people who wash their hair in cow urine than for white people. His sensibilities are not unlike those of David B.Davis, who trots out the tired liberal sentiment about the “animalization of slaves,” which has the situtation exactly backwards to reality.

    The enslavement of the animalistic by their own nature is a better description of the broader implications of Lucius’ transformation and closer to what Apuleius was really expressing in the story.

    The animalistic are already enslaved by their passions and appetites and therefore unable to govern themselves. Their enslavement by another is no real loss of liberty, since they are unable to properly direct their lives in the first place.

    Slavery in America did not “brutalize” the negro as liberals claim, as even the most cursory glance at the state of life in Africa will immediately reveal. African slavery was and remains a fundamental expression of the animalistic nature of negroes. Negroes are brutal, violent, and vicious by nature.

    Of course for yankee liberals like John B. and others of his ilk, it is far more important to slander and ridicule other whites than to speak the truth about negroes. The “wrong sort of white people” are far worse to him than animalistic savages.

    Look how he pleads the case of the inbred Jews making their slanderous and erroneous claims of white inbreeding. Why is it there are no diseases that result from inbreeding among white Southerners, yet East European Jewish population is ridden with diseases such as Tay Sachs?

    Such facts are not important to people like John B., who has already decided that he is better than other white people because he holds the “correct opinions.” What a tool.

    Deo Vindice

  35. Liberals can gun up when they have to and I’ve met more than a few rather well armed ones. It may be harder than you think.

    Besides we need them to add the trappings of civilization. The problem with us Conservatives is few of us are creative even within the imposed limits of our civilization. Someone out there needs to provide the belle epoch for us.

    Kept in check that lot can be quite valuable.

    As for Starship Troopers, the book is better as Verhoven part of the hard Left did not get the message Heinlein was trying to make.

    On that clip I can’t blame Rico there for not getting any work done with those two hotties flirting with him. I couldn’t either.

    Dina Meyer incidentally has been on CBS a few times is milf-tastic and usually plays freaks these days I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers either.

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