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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

US slavery was different than most historical and present day forms of forced labor. Slavery was called the “peculiar institution” because it was unique in the condition of slavery being inherited.

As for feminism, the western world spent trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives trying to bring gender equality to Afghanistan. Truly the western world would be better off using soft power to create a more equal world instead of bombing people in to a culture of tolerance.

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How do you know that only US slavery was "different" in the "condition of slavery being inherited"? Have you investigated all other forms of slavery all over the world? Especially since there are more people in slavery now than ever before?

==As for feminism, the western world spent trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives trying to bring gender equality to Afghanistan.==

Are you claiming that the purpose of the Afghanistan war was to promote feminism? I don't remember that sales pitch. It's certainly one way to make a useless war sound noble.

That was not the purpose of the Afghanistan war, but it did happen incidentally.

> As for feminism, the western world spent trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives trying to bring gender equality to Afghanistan.

Was that why we were there? Was it really?

It was called the "peculiar institution" because (by then) it was peculiar to one portion of the country.

What the hell are you talking about? There's nothing unique about that to the US. I would argue slavery in the US was far less brutal than that of the ancient Arab world and Rome

> I would argue slavery in the US was far less brutal than that of the ancient Arab world and Rome

And your evidence to support that is..?

There were essentially no limits to the brutality that could be inflected on a slave in the US, so any brutality that you find in the ancient world is easily matched by a brutality inflected in the US.

I don't know about the ancient Arab world but Roman slavery wasn't race based, wasn't generational, slaves could buy their freedom, and eventually slaves gained some forms of legal protection. Oh and it was almost 2000 years ago.

Same in the Arab world/Middle East.

Slaves in the Arab/Ottoman world could purchase their freedom, were not enslaved by race (rather as POWs), their children were free, had some legal protection, and had the potential for upward mobility (in rare cases slaves that became viziers, ministers, or kings). Also Arab society post-Islam highly encouraged freeing slaves (considered a major virtue/source of reward/form of penance).

May be more accurate to say slavery in the US was less brutal than slavery in the French Caribbean or Spanish Argentina.

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