Full transcript: Modern politics is full of gaslighting. Every day, massive media and political institutions both downplay and exaggerate certain aspects of world history. This is old news for those of us who critique the modern world. Everyone knows that the stories presented on various topics are warped to an unrecognisable degree. Even so, the lengths to which the global media has gone to try to erase Irish slaves still astounds me. The idea of an Irish slave is a myth conjured by ‘white supremacists', according to Google searches. Of course, many of these writers are descended from groups who directly benefited from the mass exploitation of the Irish, but let's ignore that. I'll set a ground rule before addressing this. I will not consider ‘Indentured Servitude' a form of slavery. This barbaric practise would be considered slavery by most people, but not by my mostly Anglo interlocutors. Apparently, the dreadful fate of an indentured servant was not inherited by one's children, the axial claim by which makes it not slavery, and that the term had a limitation on duration for the most part. Never mind that the practise would have deprived those children of their homeland and culture. For the Irish Times writers, such a loss is trivial, and thus ‘Indentured Servitude' cannot be considered slavery. That's fine. I don't need to mention the plight of the Irish in America. Or in J.M. Or AU. While I believe this handicap imposed on me by our so-called ‘intellectual' class is unjustified and largely borne out of anti-European hatred, I can live with it. So, without further ado, let us briefly review Irish slave history. Irish slaves have existed since the birth of the Irish identity. The daer fuidhir were a slave caste in Celtic Ireland. These people had no right to arms or compensation if a family member was murdered. These slaves were often sold to work in Roman Britain. The daer fuidhir caste wasn't unavoidable, and families could move up the caste system. So maybe our beloved ‘intellectuals' won't call this a form of slavery. Slavery in Ireland peaked with the Vikings. This warlike foreign force favoured their thralls, slaves taken from their victims. Dublin was a major international and domestic trading hub for Gaelic slaves. Slavery was so widespread in the Norse world that Irish slaves contributed significantly to Scandinavian DNA. This is especially true for Iceland, where the average Icelander's DNA is 30% Gaelic. A thrall's life was brutal, to say the least. Slave abuse, both physical and psychological, was common. In fact, it appears that, upon their master’s death, thralls were often ritually sacrificed in order to follow their master into the afterlife. Arab explorer and theologian Ibn Fadlan describes one such sacrifice in gruesome detail, writing that a female slave was raped by multiple men, stabbed, and finally throttled, before burning with her master and the rest of his grave goods. While such 3rd party accounts of indigenous traditions should always be looked upon with a certain degree of scepticism, the archaeological record strongly supports Ibn Fadlan’s account. It is rather common to find beheaded bodies alongside sans any grave goods alongside the remains of an important Viking. However, perhaps the plight of the thrall occurred too long ago for the ‘intellectuals’ in our society to actually count it as relevant to our discussion. If such is the case, then I will turn our attention towards the Barbary slave trade. From the early 16th to late 18th century, Barbary corsairs were a near constant threat on European shorelines. These pirates primarily traded in slaves, capturing unsuspecting people in coastal villages and selling them in their base cities of Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis. White slaves were of particular value to these pirates, with caucasian females often fetching far higher prices within the Ottoman trade compared to women of other backgrounds. Historians estimate that up to 1.25 million people of European descent were abducted and sold into slavery by these pirates. The Sack of Baltimore in West Cork is perhaps the most famous of these Barbary raids. Barbary pirates led by Murat Reis the Younger abducted the entire population of mostly Protestant settlers in one night. By the 18th century, Baltimore had been abandoned. The Barbary slave trade was a small part of the Ottoman Empire's larger slave trade. For the Ottoman Empire, slavery was a real foundation. Slaves included labourers, concubines, and even bureaucrats. The Ottoman Empire's military famously consisted of slave converts, taken from non-muslim families as boys and moulded into the Empire's most elite soldiers... [Unable to fit the rest here, sorry]

Dr Leana Wen