The Great Forgetting

slave-market [1]

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Slave Market, 1866

1,500 words

By now, we should all know about the Muslim grooming gang scandal [2] which has been rocking England for decades. Peter McLoughlin wrote about it extensively in his invaluable volume Easy Meat [3], which should be required reading for anyone on the Alt Right. After exposing not only the Muslim sex offenders and their complicit communities but also the white Britons who let it all happen, McLoughlin then sets upon a novel tack in his book.

He describes how the European folk wisdom of Muslim atrocities and barbarism has slowly faded from memory. McLoughlin calls it “deliberate forgetting” and explains how the multiculturalists and other members of our leftist elite funnel pleasant fantasies about Islam into white minds made empty by this recently-acquired ignorance. Islam being a “religion of peace” is perhaps the most famous example. At the same time, these elites make sure that whites never forget the bad things their ancestors have committed in the past, especially against non-whites (e.g., African slavery in the New World, the Holocaust, etc.). Between ignorance and guilt, these elites have the lever and fulcrum with which to move the minds of millions into accepting their globalist plans to bring down the West.

But this wasn’t always so, and anyone who has studied the matter knows it to be true. Even up to the mid-twentieth century, most whites knew — or, really, remembered through their communal folk wisdom — the existential threat of Islam and the barbaric behavior of Muslims. It was common knowledge in fact. In English we have the expression “the coast is clear.” Why are we so concerned about coasts being clear? Because for centuries Muslim slave-raiders in their speedy corsairs would abduct white Christians along the coasts of Southern and Western Europe. According to Robert Davis in his indispensable Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, they took between 1 and 1.25 million white slaves from 1500 to 1800. That’s around 9 to 12 slaves per day.

In Spanish there’s an even more direct expression: “No hay Moros en la costa,” literally meaning “there are no Moors on the coast.” Given Spain’s proximity to the Muslim world and that Islam had controlled the Iberian peninsula for something like 700 years, I think the Spanish would know a thing or two about Moors showing up on the coast.

Another example is the word “turk.” My 1984 Webster’s II New Riverside University Dictionary defines “turk” thusly:

1. A native or inhabitant of Turkey. 2. A speaker of a Turkic language. 3. A Moslem. 4. A brutal or tyrannical person.

Note the fourth definition makes “turk” synonymous with brutality and tyranny. A great example which survived into 20th century popular culture can be found in the folk song “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” In it, a verse goes like this:

. . . where they hung the turk
who invented work
in the big rock candy mountain

If you search the lyrics on the internet you will find that they replaced “turk” with the shamelessly anachronistic “jerk.” But listen to an old recording, for example, Harry McClintock’s from 1928, and you’ll see that “turk” was the original lyric. Regardless, millions of English-speakers did not have to know anything about the Turkish attempts to conquer Europe or their involvement in the white slave trade to know that a turk is a bad person.

This didn’t come out of nowhere; rather out of direct European experiences with Muslims, either through war, trade, or piracy. Charles Martel knocked them out France in the eighth century. A bickering coalition of European navies defeated a Muslim armada in 1571 at Lepanto. King Jan Sobieski of Poland led the charge to break their siege of Vienna in 1683. And, of course, there were the Crusades. So, the Europeans knew quite well what the Muslims were capable of and were not shy in disseminating this knowledge to future generations.

The most famous example of this perhaps is the anonymous epic, The Song of Roland. According to M.S. Merwin who translated the work into English in the 1960s:

The poem apparently was already well known in 1096 when, at the Council of Clermont, Pop Urban II made use of it in his appeal to the chivalry of France to follow in the steps of Charlemagne and send an army against Islam.

The poem itself, despite at times ascribing honor to braver members of enemy, make it clear who the bad guys are. In stanza 170, a dying Roland catches a “Saracen” attempting to steal his sword and bashes him on the head with his ivory horn, killing him grotesquely. Roland then says:

Base pagan, what made you so rash as to seize me, whether by fair means or foul? Whoever hears the story will take you for a fool.

Popular folklore also contained stories of famous Europeans fighting against Islam. McLoughlin brings up perhaps the most famous: General “Chinese” Gordon who fought and subdued Muslim slave-traders in the Sudan in the late 19th century. Gordon was revered as a hero and nearly all British schoolchildren for a time were aware of his exploits. This means, by extension, that these schoolchildren were aware also of the widespread Muslim penchant for slavery.

By the 18th and 19th centuries, white slavery, especially that of white women, became a topic of fiction and literature in the English-speaking world. Raymond Raife’s, The Sheik’s White Slave (1895) is a prime example. The Algerine Captive (1797) by Royall Tyler also deals with the subject and is considered one of the earliest American novels. Volume three of Samuel Pepys’ Diary (1661) records his meeting of British slaves returning from Algiers. Further, there were scholarly efforts reporting the phenomenon. McLoughlin lists Charles Sumner’s White Slavery in the Barbary States (1853) but also mentions how Sean O’Callaghan’s The White Slave Trade (1965) documented the white slave trade as still going on in Muslim countries as late as the 1960s. Fortunately, there has also been a decent amount of scholarly attention on the subject in the 21st century (notably, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters [4] from 2003).

The enslavement of whites also made a great impression on white abolitionists in the 17th and 18th centuries. Knowing that they or their own countrymen could be made into slaves at any point granted them a sympathy and affinity for the black Africans victimized by the Atlantic Slave Trade. In 1680, Morgan Godwyn of Oxford wrote:

[If] some one of this island going for England should chance to be snapt up by an Algerine, or Corsaire of Barbary, and there to be set on Shore and Sold; Doth he thereupon become a Brute? If not, why should an African, (suppose of that or any other remote part) suffer a greater alteration than one of us?

In fact, as late as a century ago, the white slave trade in the Muslim world was so common that there were international treaties signed in 1904 and 1910 [5] calling for its suppression. Naturally, almost no Muslim nations signed.

McLoughlin’s most compelling proof of this Great Forgetting however comes as an art history lesson. He writes:

Yet the history of art shows us that across Europe in the 19th century, there were many painters who were depicting this trade in white slaves, particularly with white women as the sex slaves of Muslims. These paintings are now often characterised as being of the “Orientalist” genre (an implication these days that they were racist fantasies, falsely imposed on the Muslim world. Examples of such paintings dating from 1838 to 1925 can be found, and the nationalities of the artists included British, French, Swiss, Austrian, Polish, Greek, Russian, Italian, Czech. For 100 years there were artists across the continent of Europe who were memorialising the Islamic slave trade, particularly the trade in White European women for sexual slavery.

Here are a few of paintings selected in Easy Meat so you can see for yourselves:

  1. Sir William Allan, Slave Market, Constantinople (1838) https://ameralwarea.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/market-6269.jpg [6]
  2. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Slave Market (1866) https://www.wikiart.org/en/jean-leon-gerome/slave-market [7]
  3. Luigi Crosio, The Beautiful Slave http://www.artnet.com/artists/luigi-crosio/the-beautiful-slave-ZruNXCnIB8zU5QmQJCuTHA2 [8]
  4. Nikolaos Gyzis, The Slave Market (1875) https://www.wikiart.org/en/nikolaos/gyzis/the-slave-market-1875 [9]
  5. Vasily Vereshchagin, The Sale of the Child Slave (1872) https://www.wikiart.org/en/vasily-vereshchagin/the-sale-of-the-child-slave-1872?utm_source=returned&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=referral [10]
  6. John William Waterhouse, The Slave (1872) http://www.johnwilliamwaterhouse.net/The-Slave–1872.html [11]
  7. Maurycy Gottlieb, Cairo Slave Market (1877) https://www.wikiart.org/en/maurycy-gottlieb/cairo-slave-market-1877 [12]
  8. Giulio Rosati, Inspection of New Arrivals http://www.orientalism-in-art.org/Inspection-Of-The-New-Arrivals-large.html [13]
  9. Ernest Normand, Bitter Draught of Slavery (1885) http://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-bitter-draught-of-slavery-ernest-normand.html [14]
  10. Otto Pilny, Slave Market Presentation (1910) http://www.jansantiques.com/Images/Products/Ref_A1669xl.jpg [15]

It is clear that what once occupied a significant portion of European mind no longer does. We have indeed forgotten much of our thousand-year struggle with Islam. McLoughlin ascribes much of this to our multiculturalist elites who have been brainwashing young white minds with leftist cant for decades. Whites distracting themselves for nearly a century by the world wars and the Cold War had something to do with it as well, I’m sure. In either case, with Muslims by the millions now invading our homelands, both in Europe and in America, whites are becoming reacquainted with our old Islamic enemies. And, if the grooming gang scandal in England is any indication, they haven’t changed one bit.

Hopefully groundbreaking works like Easy Meat will help us un-forget what had been tragically forgotten during the 20th century. This will have to happen if we ever hope to reclaim our homelands for ourselves.