Thread by @CCrowley100

1/ Why were we never taught this? Why is the story of slavery told only through the lens of White guilt?

The question lingers in every classroom, every textbook, every sanctioned account of the past.

In schools, in media, and in the official rituals of modern memory, slavery is not presented as a universal affliction, but as a uniquely White crime.

It is not portrayed as something native to the human condition, but as something unique to European history and identity, something for which all future generations must atone.

But slavery is older than Christendom. It is older than the modern West. It is older than any nation now standing. It is not a deviation from human nature, but an expression of it. The Assyrians practiced it. The Egyptians institutionalized it. The Persians and Indians codified it. African kingdoms enriched themselves by it. Muslim caliphates sustained whole economies on it. Slavery has existed since time immemorial, among all peoples and all cultures, not as an aberration but as a constant. The only historical distinction that belongs to Whites is that they abolished it.

What is never taught, what is actively erased, is that Whites were not only perpetrators of slavery but also its victims. In the seventeenth century, Whites were kidnapped from English port towns and Irish villages, shackled in ships, and sold in the West Indies. In 1627, over eighty percent of the 25,000 slaves in Barbados were White. The term “Barbadoesed” entered the English language to describe the practice of seizing the poor and sending them to die on Caribbean plantations. They were not apprentices. They were not settlers. They were slaves, often worked to death before they could complete the fraudulent terms of indenture.

Michael Hoffman’s “They Were White and They Were Slaves” documents this in relentless detail. English workhouses were emptied. Children were taken from city streets. Convicts and petty thieves were sentenced to a life of servitude under the pretense of justice. Political dissidents such as Jacobites, Irish rebels, and Scottish Highlanders were deported not to exile, but to bondage. The voyage across the Atlantic was brutal. Many never survived it. Those who did were put to work in the cane fields under a regime every bit as harsh as that endured by African slaves in later decades. Courts colluded with landowners to deny them release. Contracts were extended, punishments intensified, and many were deliberately driven to escape in order to justify lifetime servitude.

Further east, the trade in White slaves took on a different form but no less cruelty. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Muslim raiders, operating with the support of Ottoman authorities, descended on the coasts of Europe. Towns from Italy to Ireland were sacked. Ships were seized. Christian men were chained to the oars of galleys, women sold into harems, children taken and converted, destined for a life of service as janissaries in the armies of the Sultan. In “Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters”, Robert Davis estimates that more than one million Whites were enslaved by Barbary corsairs between 1500 and 1800.

This was not piracy in the modern sense. It was state-sponsored terror. It was strategic. It was religious. And it persisted for centuries. In North Africa, European slaves were castrated, tortured, starved, and beaten. Some were kept alive for ransom. Most were not. Giles Milton’s “White Gold” tells the story of Thomas Pellow, an eleven-year-old English boy who spent twenty-three years as the personal slave of the Sultan of Morocco. His ordeal was not unusual. It was part of a vast and forgotten system of human plunder that targeted Whites for profit and humiliation.

Yet we are never asked to remember this. It does not appear in films, textbooks, or school plays. It does not serve the narrative of permanent guilt. That narrative requires only one story: the transatlantic trade in African slaves, and the moral burden assigned to every White child because of it. Every other account, every other truth, must be buried.

But memory is not a weapon. It is a foundation. To erase this history is to sever a people from their past, to strip them of the right to remember what shaped them, and to make them vulnerable to moral extortion and permanent self-denial. This essay does not seek revenge. It does not seek apology. It seeks to remember what was deliberately forgotten. Because only in memory does justice begin.

2/ Slavery in the modern imagination conjures the image of the plantation. Cotton fields, overseers, and the Black slave in chains. This image is not inaccurate, but it is incomplete, and deliberately so. Behind it stands an older, more expansive architecture of bondage, one that bound Whites in systems no less dehumanizing and far more common than most are willing to admit.

In colonial America, servitude was not merely a stage of life or a contractual hardship. For many, it was a sentence. The term “indentured servant” has survived, but the brutality it concealed has not. These were not apprentices learning a trade. They were prisoners, often seized without consent, sold for profit, and treated with contempt by those who knew they would never answer for their crimes. In “White Cargo,” the depth of this exploitation is laid bare. Children as young as eight were bound to labor. Men were branded like livestock. Women were raped with impunity. The law offered no recourse. A runaway could be whipped, shackled, or simply have years added to their term. Few survived the seven years on paper, let alone the endless extensions imposed in practice.

The story did not end with labor. Many of these so-called servants were convicts, deported en masse by the English crown. Others were Irish, caught in the aftermath of Cromwell’s campaigns or the Jacobite rebellions. Still others were swept from the streets of London, sold by “spirits” and press gangs, or traded away by their families for survival. In “Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776,” Abbott Emerson Smith outlines the sheer scale of this system. Between 1607 and 1776, tens of thousands of Whites were forcibly relocated to serve the needs of empire, stripped of rights, kinship, and future. The legal distinction between servitude and slavery existed mostly on paper. In reality, it was a distinction of vocabulary, not condition.

This was not a marginal phenomenon. It was a transatlantic enterprise, tied into English economic life and colonial expansion. The plantations of Virginia and the sugar mills of Barbados operated on the same logic that would later apply to African slavery: reduce the laborer to a cost, extract everything of value, and replace the body when it breaks. In the early stages, that body was almost always White.

Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire constructed its own system, less bureaucratic but equally ruthless. In “The Forgotten Slave Trade,” Simon Webb reveals the organized abduction of European Christians by Muslim powers, not as random raiding but as imperial policy. Corsairs, operating under the protection of local rulers, prowled the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, taking entire villages captive. The devshirme system institutionalized the theft of children from the Balkans, converting them to Islam and raising them as janissaries. They became weapons of the state, torn from their families and trained to kill their own.

White slavery was not incidental. It was systemic. It was profitable. And it endured for centuries in silence. In North Africa, eunuch guards patrolled royal harems. Galley slaves rotted in the stench of their own waste, chained to benches until death. In England and the colonies, young boys died in coal mines, and women bore children only to see them sold into new terms of bondage. In both East and West, White bodies were consumed for labor, for war, and for breeding. The moral grammar of the modern world has no place for this history because it disrupts the carefully managed ledger of grievance and guilt.

But a ledger that omits half its entries is not a record of justice. It is a tool of control. And control, not truth, is the purpose of the modern slavery narrative.

3/ The past is not neutral, and in the modern world, history is used as a weapon, aimed primarily at Whites, the very people who conceived and codified the discipline of history itself. It is not recorded for the sake of truth, but shaped and deployed in the service of power. What is remembered and what is forgotten are never accidents. In the case of slavery, this is especially clear. The memory of Black slavery has become sacred, repeated in schools, museums, films, and national rituals. The memory of White slavery is treated as obscene. It is denied, suppressed, and buried. A handful of books may exist for those who search them out, but this history is not taught en masse to the public, not featured in major media, and not acknowledged by the institutions that claim to speak for history.

This is not a question of historical value but of political utility. In today’s moral economy, victimhood is currency. It grants access to influence, authority, and exemption. Groups that present themselves as historically wronged can claim compensation—material, cultural, and psychological—from those designated as historical oppressors. The narrative of Black victimization and White guilt is not sustained by truth, but by its usefulness in sustaining the ideological order.

Yet this narrative collapses when subjected to history. As Simon Webb shows in “The Forgotten Slave Trade,” White Europeans were enslaved by Muslims in far greater numbers, over a longer span of time, and with fewer surviving descendants to remember them. The Ottoman and Barbary systems of slavery were not only larger than acknowledged, they were more sadistic in method and longer tolerated by the global community. The Arab slave trade itself predates the transatlantic trade by centuries and outlasted it by decades. Slavery persisted in Muslim lands well into the twentieth century. And in sub-Saharan Africa, it never fully disappeared.

Michael Hoffman, in “They Were White and They Were Slaves,” makes the point even sharper. He documents how elite English and American voices, even during the height of Black slavery, reserved their worst treatment for Whites. The Irish were targeted for removal, not because they were foreign, but because they were expendable. English poor were cleared off the land, rounded up, and shipped abroad with the approval of aristocrats and industrialists who saw them as surplus. The rhetoric of “servitude” masked a reality of generational bondage. The law did not protect them. The system did not recognize them. And in many cases, their conditions were worse than those of Black slaves, who had market value and familial continuity. A White child in a mine or plantation was worth less than a mule. If he died, another could be taken in his place.

Despite this, the moral indictment remains singular. Only Whites are held responsible for slavery, as if they alone had practiced it. Only Blacks are granted permanent recognition as its victims, as if no others suffered. The asymmetry is not historical. It is strategic. It allows for a system in which collective guilt can be weaponized against one people, while collective innocence can be conferred upon another.

This inversion reaches beyond history. It distorts the present. In public discourse, even to mention White slavery is treated as subversive. To acknowledge it is to question the premise upon which modern guilt politics rests. That is why it must be buried. That is why remembrance is punished. Not because it is false, but because it is dangerous.

In truth, no other civilization in history ever abolished slavery. It was not guilt that compelled Whites to end the practice, but strength in its moral, cultural, and political forms, rooted in the deeper instincts of a people who valued order over cruelty and principle over profit. The British Navy hunted slavers across oceans. The Americans sent Marines to the shores of Tripoli. European powers, despite their internal divisions, imposed abolition on lands that had never questioned the legitimacy of slavery and would not have ended it on their own. This was not an act of moral collapse. It was an expression of civilizational will. And that, perhaps more than anything, is why it must be erased.

4/ A people cannot be shamed into submission unless they first forget who they are. To sever the thread of memory is to dismantle the foundations of pride, belonging, and resistance. In its place comes a moral mythology, one in which strength is treated as sin and the right to suffer belongs to others alone. This is not merely a distortion of the past but a political strategy in the present. It does not require overt censorship to succeed. It depends instead on consensus: on what textbooks exclude, on what films refuse to portray, on what silence allows to harden into belief.

When Whites are taught to remember only their power but never their pain, they are left without a moral vocabulary to explain themselves, much less defend themselves. They cannot speak of justice, because justice requires innocence. They cannot appeal to history, because their history has been reduced to a list of crimes. In this narrative, they are not the builders of civilization but its original sin. Everything they create is suspect. Everything they inherit must be surrendered. Their role is no longer to preserve but to atone.

Yet the reality of the past resists such simplification. The history of Whites is not a singular story of conquest. It is also a story of servitude, exile, and violation. It is the story of men and women who died in fields not as owners but as laborers, who perished in coal shafts and cane rows, who were sold across oceans, pressed into galleys, castrated in foreign courts, or reduced to breeding stock in lands not their own. These were convicts, peasants, orphans, political prisoners, broken not by war but by policy, and not remembered because their suffering cannot be used. Their very identity makes them inadmissible to modern accounts of pain. They were White, and thus invisible.

The forgetting of this past is not accidental. It is cultivated. Through omission and repetition, through inversion and shame, the civilization that once abolished slavery through moral effort and violent sacrifice is now portrayed as the engine of its invention. Those who broke the chains are remembered only as those who profited. The moral order is not expanded but reversed.

To sustain this illusion, the historical record must be selectively revised. The Quakers, praised as moral pioneers, are rarely remembered for freeing only their Black slaves while retaining their White ones. Charles Dickens, who gave voice to the suffering of Britain’s abandoned children, is remembered not for that but for a supposed indifference to distant injustice. Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” is honored for her outrage at slavery in the South, but her silence on the White servants in her own Northern household is never mentioned. Reform bills to protect young chimney sweeps failed in Parliament after the abolition of the African trade, not because no one knew, but because their suffering held no symbolic value.

These are not minor distortions. They are essential to maintaining a political order in which history becomes a weapon and memory becomes a tool of domination. They allow one people to inherit eternal grievance and another to inherit eternal guilt. They allow those who erase to pretend they are restoring. And they ensure that Whites have no ground left from which to speak, no past they are permitted to claim, no dead they are allowed to mourn.

But a people who cannot mourn their dead cannot speak in their name. And a people who cannot speak cannot defend themselves. And a people who cannot defend themselves cannot endure.

To remember is not to claim victimhood. It is not to replace one mythology with another. It is to restore what has been denied: the right to speak truth without shame, to recall suffering without permission, and to stand not as an accused but as a people. The abolition of slavery was not a universal moral awakening. It was the act of nations, of law, of European men who did what other civilizations refused to do. It was Whites who passed the laws, manned the ships, fought the battles, and imposed abolition across the world. The British Navy destroyed the corsairs. The Americans faced them on the shores of Tripoli. These same peoples, now condemned as moral pariahs, once carried abolition to the very edges of the Islamic world. That is not a legacy of guilt. It is a legacy of greatness.

And that is what must be remembered.

Not because we seek pity. Not because we demand reparation.

But because memory is the first act of defiance. Because history belongs to us, too. Because what was taken will be reclaimed.

Not in apology. In honor.

Not in shame. In blood.

A friend asked how he could support my work. If you've found value in what I write, here are two ways to back it:

Buy Me a Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/CCrowley100

Substack: chadcrowley.substack.com

Reply # 1: Quaker Radicalism

Quaker radicalism didn’t emerge in a vacuum. To understand their self-effacing universalism and obsessive moralism, especially their modern anti-White orientation, you must trace it back to the earliest religious and ethnocultural foundations of the American experiment.

David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed is indispensable here. He identifies four major British folkways that shaped early settlement patterns. Among them, the “Peaceable Kingdom” of the Delaware Valley, settled primarily by English Quakers and German Pietists, is the most telling. These were not the Calvinist frontiersmen of the backcountry or the Cavalier planters of the Tidewater South. They were radical Protestant utopians, driven by an inner light, a belief in human perfectibility, and a deep hostility to hierarchy, coercion, and blood loyalty. They rejected inherited social orders in favor of abstract moral conscience.

From the outset, this made the Quakers ideologically predisposed toward egalitarianism, not just in spirit, but in law, culture, and politics. They opposed slavery, but also discipline, war, and anything resembling natural rank. Their idea of peace was not the peace of order, but the peace of surrender. Their need for moral purity turned inward, and then gradually outward, projecting itself as a crusade against all distinctions. What began as pacifism became cultural disarmament. What began as religious dissent became pathological altruism.

This is why modern Quaker descendants, and those shaped by their ethos, have become icons of social justice fanaticism. Not because they consciously hate Whites, but because their tradition teaches them to dissolve boundaries, to blur identity, and to elevate abstract humanity over particular loyalty. They are compelled to bear witness, even when that means celebrating the erasure of their own kind. The homemade cake comes with a lecture on open borders. The smiling pacifist conceals a moral zealot. They are not rebels. They are believers, firm in a creed that sees identity as guilt and history as something to be corrected, not remembered.

What we call wokeness is simply the Quaker impulse without God, repurposed for the managerial state. The inner light becomes institutional guilt. The cake remains, but the country dissolves.

In this sense, contemporary Western liberalism is not a departure from Christianity, but its afterlife. It is Christian theology without Christ, universalism without transcendence, repentance without redemption. It preserves the moral absolutism, the zeal for the outcast, and the sacrificial posture of the Cross, but empties it of divinity. What remains is not faith, but an ethic: a restless, moralizing, borderless creed that cannot forgive, cannot forget, and cannot stop until the last distinction is erased.