There are more human slaves today than at any time in history.
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2026
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The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow goes into how some Native Americans had slaves, and how/why other tribes refused to have them, though the whole book is an interesting and worthwhile read.
Why are you trying to argue with cited sources against right-wing flood-the-zone strategy? Give them references to counter or contextualize history and they'll just come up with twenty more claims to bury you. Don't let them make claims without providing their own sources, then mock them when their source turns out to be a Fox opinion show or worse.
Yeah pretty much this smells like an infowar casualty
Slavery is hardly new, novel or confined to a single group of people. Slavery has been pretty common through out human history. So much so that we have archeological evidence of it back to Sumer. The real answer to someone bringing up slavery in other contexts is, "so what?" Yes, some native American tribes had slaves, that does not less the impact that slavery had on African people kidnapped and dragged to the Americas as slaves. Nor does it lessen the impact that a century of discrimination has wrought on Black Americans.
Honestly, it sounds like you have fallen into the Myth of the Noble Savage. Humans suck, we have always sucked, and that has been true across cultures. Every once in a while, we figure out how to suck less. But that tends to be rare, fragile and fleeting. Also, it's often a lie and we just hide our suckage.
I live in east Africa and for some reason people here have a focus on western slave trade and seem to mostly ignore middle eastern slave trade that's still active to this day. There's a strong anti-west focus and somehow bad things done by anyone else mostly gets ignored or if it is brought up then the conversation quickly shifts to what western powers have done. It's almost as if it can't be spoken about.
What is going on in the Middle Eastern countries is horrific and it really does get far less attention than it should. At the same time, it does pale in comparison to the scale and scope of the slave trade in the Americas. The US in particular also demonstrated an amazing level of hypocrisy in both having and keeping slavery for so long. When your entire country is premised on the phrase:
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.
And then you turn around and have slaves and institutionalize that they only count as 3/5 of a person. And also have a rebellion fighting to keep those slaves. It rather sticks out.
All that said. The fact that we treat modern dictatorships and slavers like our closest friends is utterly reprehensible. I really look forward to the day we can shift most energy production and transportation off fossil fuels. Those dictators will find themselves without friends and a ready source of wealth.
To continually focus on what happened a century and a half ago in a totally different region of Africa than east Africa and to simultaneously be unable to speak about what is happening currently here feels like the conversation is being guided. Like if one speaks about the inhumane practices of the mines in Congo which are 80% owned by Chinese companies the conversation immediately shifts to something that happened in the past and/or some other region of Africa. It's like we can't even communicate about anyone having bad behavior in Africa except for America or an EU country. Clearly no country is anyone's friend and for sure no one is friends with any African country. Just look at the media coverage of Gaza vs the coverage of the concurrent genocides in Africa, namely Sudan and Ethiopia. It's absolute crickets in the global news. That's to say Africa is just a fun talking point for people to feel better and not actually a place people care about.