I'm pretty convinced that the only reason Rome isn't remembered primarily as the first great slave empire and its downfall celebrated as a world-historic liberation is that we still live under the hegemony of the second great slave empire (I mean Western Europe and North America as a whole here) which is totally unwilling to wrestle with the way its power was and continues to be drawn from the blood and sweat of enslaved people
- she/her
enthusiast enthusiast
offsite reposts: @nex3-reposts
clips & pics: @nex3-moments
Cohost utilities:
- Image grid generator
- Backloggd formatter
- Letterboxd formatter
- Timeline deduplicator
- Syntax highlighter
header photo by me
If we're truly going to take the (correct) position that enslaving human beings is one of the most deeply and irredeemably immoral acts regardless of context, we need to reckon with the reality that the cultures we consider foundational to "Western civilization" were deeply and structurally evil and represented a tremendous ethical regression from what came before. Slavery was a critical part of ancient Greece and Rome, and inseparable from the aspects of those cultures we lionize.
That's not to say there's nothing of value to learn from them or that all Western everything should be discarded as "corrupt", but rather that we must carefully work to disentangle the good from the bad and we must vehemently fight back against the narrative that those cultures represented clear "progress" from a "barbarian" past.
If we're truly going to take the (correct) position that enslaving human beings is one of the most deeply and irredeemably immoral acts regardless of context, we need to reckon with the reality that the cultures we consider foundational to "Western civilization" were deeply and structurally evil and represented a tremendous ethical regression from what came before. Slavery was a critical part of ancient Greece and Rome, and inseparable from the aspects of those cultures we lionize.
That's not to say there's nothing of value to learn from them or that all Western everything should be discarded as "corrupt", but rather that we must carefully work to disentangle the good from the bad and we must vehemently fight back against the narrative that those cultures represented clear "progress" from a "barbarian" past.
Pinned Tags