Let's talk about what happened when the West "ended" the Barbary slave trade.

 https://x.com/nxt888/status/2058646157744840834

Sony Thăng

@nxt888

I'll do you one better. Let's talk about what happened when the West "ended" the Barbary slave trade. France invaded Algeria in 1830, partly justified as ending piracy and the slave trade. Over the following decades, French forces under Marshal Bugeaud conducted what historians now document as systematic mass atrocities: The enfumades, smoking entire communities to death in caves. Mass executions. Deliberate destruction of agriculture to starve resistance. Forced displacement of populations from their land. The French Foreign Legion, founded during the Algerian conquest, pioneered tactics of collective punishment and civilian targeting that became templates for colonial warfare across Africa and Asia. Alexis de Tocqueville, the same Tocqueville celebrated in Western political philosophy for his writing on democracy, visited Algeria and wrote that France should not be squeamish about the destruction of crops, the emptying of granaries, and the seizure of unarmed men, women, and children. He is still on the syllabus in Western universities as a "theorist of freedom." So the West ended the Barbary slave trade. And replaced it with 132 years of colonial extraction that killed over a million Algerians. You wanted me to do the Barbary slave trade. I did it all the way. Does it still do what you needed it to do?

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Wake me up when the Empire has fallen

@pictorex

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47m

Replying to @nxt888

Now do the Barbary slave trade. But you won’t.

6:27 AM · May 25, 2026

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