The national symbol

@Madhatter That might make sense. The unicorn seems to be medieval, so perhaps some of the Crusaders, trying to retake the Holy Land from the Islamic invaders, strayed into Africa?

@Madhatter right continent! Wrong species! Rhinoceros 🦏

FYI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caribou

.. not native to Africa.

@DeWayfarer Ah, my mistake.

@helensusanswift Europeans had no more right to the "Holy Land" than the Arabs did, although at least the Arabs were local.

@LeopoldBloom The Arabs invaded from Arabia, attacking the already Christian Holy Land. The Christians had been there for centuries before the Islamics invaded from the south. Before the Christians, of course, were the Jews. As it originated in the Holy Land, the Christian religion - like the Jewish - was very local.

@helensusanswift Christianity of course predated Islam by over 600 years. However, Islam, like Christianity, originated as a Jewish sect, and all three religions continue to view Jerusalem as a holy city. The fact that Christianity had spread in Europe did not give European Christians any more right than Muslim Arabs to control of the area.

The Crusades were also marked by brutal attacks by Christians on Jewish communities on their route to Palestine. While the treatment of Jews in the Medieval Arab world was not perfect, their treatment under Christendom was far worse.

@LeopoldBloom The area had been Christian for centuries before the Islamic invasion, which was my original point. The Crusaders were attempting to return the land to Christianity. Incidentally, once Outremer was founded, many Moslems chose to move there rather than stay in the Islamic areas, as the Christians were milder rulers with lower taxes.

@helensusanswift Neither Christians nor Muslims had a better claim to the area. It went to whoever was stronger at the time. As to the relative quality of life under Christian or Muslim rule in the Levant, I can't comment, so I'll take your word for it. However, the Convivencia in Spain was remarkable for its atmosphere of cooperation between Christians, Muslims, and Jews, which ended in 1492 with the expulsion of the Moors and Jews subjected to forced conversion.

@LeopoldBloom Before the Islamic invasion, the area was mixed Christian and Jewish, with the Christians in the majority. They were and are indigenous to the area, of course, and the few surviving Christians in, say, Bethlehem, are being squeezed out by the Islamics. When I was there last, they were pleading for help that western governments seem reluctant to give. Islamic rule in eastern Europe was noted for its repression of Christians, slavery of Christians and massacre of Christians. The same thing happened in Armenia of course, and Asia Minor when the Islamic Turks took over.

@helensusanswift The Muslim countries sure don't win any awards for civil rights. However, the treatment of Native Americans and Africans in the Americas by Christian Europeans was far worse than anything inflicted on Christians by Muslims.

[@HazelMotes. The Muslim countries still retain slavery and poor human rights, while Christianity eventually rectified most, if not all, of the abuses so called Christians inflicted. It was Christian pressure groups in Great Britain that ended the slave trade in 1807 - the first Empire in history to do such a thing, and Christianity that encouraged up to a third of the RN to be engaged in anti-slavery patrols across the world. As late as the 1930s, part of the British Army had anti-slavery patrols in parts of Africa. Once Great Britain withdrew from the 13 colonies, treatment of native peoples and slaves was down to others. It was partly because of the horrors of the Islamic slave states in North Africa that France invaded and colonised Algeria of course.

@helensusanswift There are probably more slaves in the world today than at any time in the past. There's a smartphone app called "Traffickam" that you can use to upload photos of hotel rooms when you stay in them. Since hotels are often used for sex trafficking, this allows the authorities to build a database and potentially identify the specific hotels and rooms where sex slaves are photographed, allowing their captors to be caught.

@LeopoldBloom Not only sex slaves; there are slave markets in Libya where African slaves are openly displayed, and I think in Lebanon (that may not be true at present). Slavery returned in some sub-Saharan African countries with the end of colonialism too, I believe- although I doubt it ever disappeared.
The world was moving towards decency for a while, but that movement seems to have ended as we slide into a new dark age.

@helensusanswift I lived in West Africa for several years, and met a few household slaves. These included children whose parents sent them to live with a wealthy family, to be housed and fed in return for housework. There were also slaves in various mines, although I never met any of those.

Here in the U.S., Black slavery in the form of convict leasing persisted in the South until the start of World War Two, when Franklin Roosevelt finally put a stop to it, to prevent the Axis powers from using it as a form of anti-American propaganda. This is well documented in court and prison records, but is not taught in American schools. However, this is the reason why there was no meaningful civil rights movement until the 1950s.

@LeopoldBloom Pretty shabby, eh? Slavery, to me, is abhorrent in any country. In Scotland, black slavery ended in the 1780s, and white slavery in 1799, about 15 years later.

@helensusanswift And we have people here saying that the most oppressed group in America is straight white men.

@LeopoldBloom They certainly are getting the blame for all the woes in the world, and no credit for anything they did right.

@helensusanswift It's more how they hold the majority of leadership positions in nearly every area of society, but that doesn't stop some of them from complaining anyway. The loss of special privileges can feel like oppression.

@LeopoldBloom There seems to be a PC agenda to blame white people for everything, and absolve all other people from all blame. It's really weird just now, as if we are heading for a cataclysmic collapse of society: a new Dark Ages.

@helensusanswift That's a common complaint from conservatives. However, PC works both ways. These are the same people who lose their minds if a store clerk says "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas." If that's not an example of PC, then nothing is, but everyone assumes that the demands for PC are only from left wingers.

"Blaming white people for everything" is a gross exaggeration. Systemic racism was taken for granted in this country for centuries, and now that it's been slowly dismantled just in the past few decades, white conservatives are suddenly sensitive to even the slightest hint that it might still exist.

One example would be the vast number of statues of Confederate leaders, that outnumber memorials to slavery maybe 1000 to one. Very few of these were erected right after the Civil War; nearly all of them were put up in the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, to send a message to Black Americans to remember their place. But calls to remove them are condemned as "erasing history," as if the record of the Civil War exists only in bronze monuments and nowhere else.

@LeopoldBloom I have never voted Conservative in my life.
No Confederate statues in this country at all, either.
But blaming white people seems to be endemic - from slavery to racism, both of which work both ways.

@helensusanswift I would hope that there aren't any Confederate statues in the UK, just as there are no statues of Oliver Cromwell in the US that I'm aware of. Although I remember a story a few months ago about a statue of a slave trader that was pulled down and tossed into the Thames.

"Blaming white people" is an oversimplification; the Irish and Welsh are as white as can be, and certainly didn't get much consideration for that throughout their history. The concept of intersectionalism can help explain this. Someone can be privileged in one area, and oppressed in another.

If someone says that institutional racism doesn't exist, I would ask them when it ended. I mean, what date.

@LeopoldBloom I am not sure of your point about the Irish or Welsh. I do not know about institutionalised racism in the USA either, but the PC people undoubtedly are blaming white folk for all the woes in the world, from slavery to racism - as I said. Yet it was the white people who were first to stop - or try to stop - slavery and white folk who are doing more to stop racism, too. Try to be a white farmer in black Africa now and see how you get on. Or the descendant of a slave in Nigeria.

@helensusanswift The Irish and Welsh have a history of oppression by the English. I have no idea if that's taught over there.

The idea that "white people are blamed for everything" is, at least in the U.S., coming from conservative crybabies who view the loss of special privileges as oppression. You can find evidence of this every day right here on SW.

I agree that the situation in Zimbabwe is pretty bad. Certainly, a white farmer today shouldn't be held responsible for the sins of his ancestors. However, it's not like the current situation deteriorated from sweetness and starlight in the past. What white people did in Africa in the past is indefensible. Before complaining about the current situation, it's important to acknowledge that and not dismiss it with "oh, but white people ended slavery."

And yes, I'm aware that slavery is going on in Africa and the Arab world today. That needs to be addressed honestly, and not used as a cudgel to excuse the actions of white people in the past.

@LeopoldBloom Or perhaps to hide the action of black people who were equally guilty - past and present?
The English were pretty ugly to all their neighbours, Welsh, Scots, Irish and French. That is pretty much acknowledged by most anyway. The city where I currently live was razed by invading English more than once, most notably in 1650, but we have a history of fighting back - as have the Irish and Welsh of course. Such is the reality of the situation.
I am not sure how British history is taught in the US - judging by the Americans I have met and worked with - not with any accuracy, for sure.

Not sure what you view as special privileges, though. Must be an American thing. The ordinary people here had to fight for everything from freedom from serfdom, to semi-decent housing and the right to vote. I won't bore you with hundrdeds of details, but most of us would scoff at the notion that we were privileged in any way. The idea is ludicrous. Presumably in the US all white folk were given a free pass to an easy life? I know that is not true and there are many government incentives to promote the very opposite.