After the release of the ‘Easy Meat’ report (which I read and summarized in that link), some predicted that the country would reform its ways and kick out the slavers.
Instead, roughly nothing has happened, although it has been used for a good headline on a UKIP advertising campaign.
For this ad, many prestige publications attacked the party, rather than perhaps considering the problems in their society that lead to tens of thousands of girls being enslaved for profit (often enormous profit, exceeding £600,000 annually per girl).
While there has been some bureaucratic shuffling here and there, and a few concerned newspaper headlines, essentially nothing has been done, and in fact the original report has been largely ignored in favor of the soundbite-friendly ‘1,400’ number, and the localization to a single region when the original report substantiated complaints to the entire country and the broader region of Northern Europe.
Because this has been a long term pattern in the UK, we should not expect anything to change on a dime. In fact, we should expect the problem (which is only a problem for white Britons — for slavers, it’s a bonanza of profitable pleasure) to become considerably more acute, and more widespread over the next decade.
Since the UK has elected to pursue the enlightenment system of reformatory criminal justice, we should expect more Muslim entrepreneurs to respond to the enormous profits that even an idiot can scoop up in front of the playgrounds of UK schools for the cost of a six pack of lukewarm beer. The worst that the state can do is put a person into a brief vacation-type jail sentence, after which he is free to return to his former line of crooked employment.
When a single kidnapping can provide more money in a year than a typical British person is likely to earn in a lifetime, you’d be quite stupid, at least materially speaking, to enter any other business. Further, kidnappers seem to enjoy higher status than most other classes of UK businessman.
For one, to be of diverse descent is to automatically enjoy a protected status. For another, it creates no emissions, it’s a green business, it requires no factory equipment, and most of the front line workers are young women.
The country that piously abolished slavery is becoming incapable of condemning the enslavement of its own population. It has become so accustomed to being able to issue moral complaints about other societies without actually having to do anything themselves that, when a moral crisis appears, it has no capacity to act in a meaningful way. It can create bureaucratic task forces and place charities on watch lists, but to take decisive action has become politically unspeakable.
If we accept the proposition the women of a country are its future, we should translate that into the observation that the future of the United Kingdom is slavery.
The West, accustomed to being on top of the world, may soon find big parts of itself being seized and trundled off to foreign hoards. Having lost the will to live, to defend itself, having taken the reflexive pose of toleration without regard to what is to be tolerated, it is losing its freedom.
We should also consider, that historically speaking, for such things to happen is not beyond the pale, and is actually quite normal. For all of Europe to be free of Oriental despotism of all kinds is odd. What is normal is for big swaths of what we call European countries to be dominated by foreign invaders for centuries at a time. This was certainly the case until World War I decimated the Ottomans, and it was the case before the Ottomans made Constantinople their new capitol.
Also, it is not ‘the people’ who wake up and resist the invaders. It’s also not typically ‘one great man’ who emerges from ‘the people’ to push them back. Far more typical is for the aristocracy to make a good living selling their own people out to the invaders, whom they are too weak and weak-willed to resist.
When a people are broken, everyone is broken, from bottom to top, and whatever deliverance may be forthcoming typically comes from outside, and at a different time.
If the slavers were the principal evil they might be kicked out. Alas from my reading they’re just late-coming predators of opportunity. Aside from avoiding accusations of racism, the main reason why few cared was because girls routinely wandered off in these broken socialist towns of (all-white, all-indigenous) disintegrating families. The slavers never seem to have needed violence to get young girls to go along with groups of strangers. These lost girls were wandering the streets alone, avoiding their hated homes as usual.
In the original report, the writers try to paint many of the families as strong and intact by local standards… which indicates that the standard is quite low.
But yes, in most cases, they’re just ‘normal’ boyfriends who eventually turn out their partners. Because ‘normal’ is for girls to make independent decisions about love and sex, it’s a canny attack on the free-for-all system.
The slavers can be seen as an opportunistic infection, then, and one that can’t really be treated directly.
Oh Lord make haste to help us.
“The Lord helps those who help themselves.”
“For all of Europe to be free of Oriental despotism of all kinds is odd.”
It’s not always safe to generalize from before 1850 (or from before 1550, your choice). E.g., it’d be historically odd that we are free from fear of raiding and/or conquering pastoral nomads, except it’s not that odd at all considering the new tradeoffs flowing from dramatic improvement in gunpowder weapons and from the quieter but large improvements in agricultural productivity (and thus population density) and non-barbarian transport tech (even before the off-the-scale increases of motorized transport cost-effectiveness starting with railroads).
The military advantage of a state with lots of openness and meritocratic urban prosperity is much larger than it used to be on land. Indeed, until gunpowder it doesn’t seem to have been all that much of a consistent advantage except in places with unusually good natural barriers on the frontier. Today the advantage is very large, and seems considerably larger than the old efficiency advantage that smaller not-*too*-despotic states used to enjoy in classic naval warfare. (Someplace like Israel or the old South Africa punches above its weight in land warfare far harder than someplace like Portugal or Venice used to in naval warfare.) As long as that tech tendency persists, I don’t think you should expect great Oriental despotisms to dominate on land even as much as they historically dominated at sea, much less as much as they dominated inland.
The big exception I would make to that analysis is that we probably haven’t seen the last word on how to use modern technologies most effectively to impose despotism. It’s possible that someone will figure out how to make a despotism that’s far more efficient than the old models, which would trash my analysis above. But as long as the historical despotism/waste connection is reliable, the strong modern coupling between wealth and land military power is a serious headwind for despotism.
In ancient naval warfare you needed to buy ships to project power more than a few miles, and they were a daunting expense, and it was arguably tricky to run an effective navy without more meritocracy than is easy for a despotism. In modern high intensity land war, good luck projecting much power even one day’s light infantry march ahead of where you are able to contest air superiority, and despotism and effectiveness in mechanized warfare is arguably a poor fit.
(The Nazis did look effective, but it’s not clear their way was sustainable instead of a good job hotwiring very effective institutions built up under other rules: I’d be surprised if one generation into a victorious “thousand year” Reich the military would’ve still highly effective. And they won military competitions in an era when their rivals were trashing their institutions in dozens of important ways, including some weirdly unacknowledged ways. Ways like Britain before WW2 rediscovering the old pre-Glorious-Revolution princely state technique of redefining one’s gold debts as something else, something else that happens to completely shaft one’s war debtors. How surprising it was for those non-techie well-rounded movers and shakers and thinkers to rediscover how difficult it can be for such a princely state to borrow for war! If new despotisms get lucky enough about all their more liberal rivals consistently blowing off their own feet and other appendages in dozens of ways, then of course the despotisms can win. But the odds are that they will run into at some fraction of rivals that don’t.)
A similar analysis makes me skeptical of projections of long deep dark ages. We could of course create a long deep dark age by nuking so hard that only a dozen people were left. But by just shattering the institutions while leaving a sizable fraction of the population? I don’t think so. Any political entity that reinvents radiotelegraph, or firearms, or steamships (or even just oceangoing commerce in wooden sailing ships), or several other things will enjoy an unreasonably large force multiplier in squabbles with rivals, off the scale compared to anything that might have been rediscovered from Rome in the last dark ages. Modern tech makes it a lot harder to keep a good renaissance down.
And yet, Uncle Jamal can enslave an Englishman’s daughter with a 6-pack of sweet alco-pop, advanced technology available to the UK notwithstanding.
At a strategic level, the tech-advanced UK lost its war in Iraq, failing at almost all of its identified goals beyond toppling Saddam.
“Modern tech makes it a lot harder to keep a good renaissance down.”
I disagree with this. Great men are more important than great tools.
What’s funny is that is that we’re expecting something dramatic à la Fall of Rome; but the barbarians aren’t up to snuff. All relatively competent peoples have joined modernity*, so all recognizably foreign cultures are made of the dredges of the human genepool. They won’t take over because they are just too stupid; and their culture, while less degraded than ours, is not attractive enough to attract large amounts of white converts. If anything fair amount of NAMs abroad and in their countries are steadily adopting smartphones porn and twitter.
So this can go on forever until they take over demographically, if ever, or until we literally amuse ourselves to death, or at least amuse ourselves to not being able to keep the power stations running.
*Chinese and Russians are modern decadents for all purposes, and show no sign of improvement
Humans like drama and are drawn to climactic events. So, I wouldn’t rule it out.
In this particular case, it’s more of a long, slow, and loud fart that various committee spokespeople are trying to speak over and studiously ignore.
I know that it can’t go on forever; it’s just a question of how long until it ends.
A chilling article.
Yes, Peter Frost had some interesting posts on the other slave trade. Frost noted:
“Europe used to export slaves to the non-European world. Such a statement would astonish most people today, even among the university-educated. Surely, those slaves were few in number, certainly fewer than the African slaves taken across the Atlantic. And surely all of that happened long before the Atlantic slave trade.
Well, no and no. The numbers were huge. At the height of that trade, over 10,000 Eastern Europeans were enslaved each year between 1500 and 1650 for export to North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia … a total of 1.5 million. By comparison, the Americas received fewer than 300,000 African slaves before 1600 and another 1.5 million between 1600 and 1700 (Fisher, 1972; Kolodziejczyk, 2006). Western Europeans were likewise enslaved and taken abroad, mainly to North Africa. How many? More than 1 million between 1530 and 1780 (Davis, 2004).”
http://evoandproud.blogspot.co.nz/2013/07/the-other-slave-trade.html
“At a strategic level, the tech-advanced UK lost its war in Iraq, failing at almost all of its identified goals beyond toppling Saddam.”
If your objectives and politics are incoherent and contradictory, and the popularly-understood core is unrealistically ambitious, you can be “defeated” in the useful sense that you don’t achieve your objectives and go home. Nothing about that would have surprised John Churchill or Arthur Wellesley, and it was probably well understood by William the Conqueror and by the more thoughtful kind of victor in the American Revolution. These factors are important enough to trump the advantages of advanced or otherwise powerful forces on any given occasion. But even on those occasions it is often noteworthy that advanced countries have really impressive capabilities. Compare how the “war on poverty” and the like are largely an embarrassing failure on their own terms, in ways that would not surprise a thoughtful medieval alderman … but the alderman would probably be quite surprised and deeply impressed that the poor tend to be overweight. And that is indeed significant: the ability of advanced countries to produce food is absurdly off the scale compared to historical norms. Churchill or Wellesley would similarly have been surprised and impressed at various things about the failed campaigns in the middle east. The bad things they would notice are serious, but strongly tend to be old-fashioned temporary political fecklessness (and dumb personnel policies, or bad procurement, or several other things), while the good things tend to be really gobsmackingly large persistent increases in technical capability. (E.g., many of the old regularities from a book like _Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army_ remained reliably similar for their campaigns, but have become utterly unrecognizable today.)
Looking at Greece and Germany in 1928, both were feckless in various ways but only one had the technical capability to potentially be very militarily powerful very soon. The military weaknesses displayed by advanced countries in the middle east are Germany-1928-style military weaknesses.