Hah, the people criticising slavery here would be the loudest people if instead of slavery it was mass-murder of captives instead because they don't understand that in ancient and medieval times they absolutely could not feed that many POWs, since that would empty the finances of a state immediately and also they could not release them as that would be foolish, since the POWs would either go back home and reinforce the enemy army again or simply become bandits and attack the former captor's state that way. So the captor state had two choices, kill them all or use them as slaves for labour. In ancient and medieval times especially in Europe manpower was very low because of the many wars, so slavery was an excellent way to supplement manpower in basically every single aspect of civilisation building. Like it or not, this was the truth in history from the pre-Roman times to close to the present.
At least these slaves had a sliver of hope as after a certain time they worked for they could earn their freedom, however this was not the case in other parts of the world, like the Middle-East, Africa and Asia...
SJWs tend to forget where the word cannibal comes from, yes it comes from the time Romans met the black africans and saw their practices of cannibalism, but this is not politically correct enough, so it gets hushed usually, since blacks nowadays can only be heroes and never criminals, however if aid to Africa were to be stopped and they would be left to their own devices again you can bet that it won't take much time for them to go back to their ancient practices of food sourcing, that is cannibalism!
In the Middle-East the situation was totally the reverse of the one in the US, it was Ottomans and Arabs who were enslaving white people there and the numbers far outweigh the number of blacks being imported to the US, since the time period was longer too!
Wars between Europe and the Middle-East was basically permanent, ever since islam started expanding from Arabia and whites were usually on the loosing side of this war, until islam was stopped by the kingdoms of France and Hungary respectively on each side of Europe.
France stopped them in the Appennine wars as everyone knows from Western history lessons, but they don't really teach how Hungary stopped them and how painful that was to our nation as that is not important to the West... This happened only in the XVI-th century (1552 if memory serves) for the first time after loosing more than half of our country and islam was only started being pushed out of Europe in the XVII-th century and finished only in the XX-th century when the West decided to open it's borders to islam, for whatever reasons, so the sacrifice of the Eastern nations was for nothing thanks to the West, but they are the ones who will regret it, since they never experienced what it means to live under muslim rule like us in the East...
So back to the slavery issue, muslims in medieval times were systematically enslaving white people from their conquered nations starting on the map from Greece and going up to Hungary and those slaves never had a chance to return home or ever be freed, since they were enslaved as children and the boys were raised as Jannissaries to fight for the Ottomans (many times against their ownbrothers and fathers, but since they were brainwashed, they didn't know that) and the girls were basically sold as sex slaves, hence the vast majority never lived to an old age, hell most of them didn't even reach adulthood, so tell me which was crueller? This is also part of the world's history no matter how much the left would like to make it go away...
Now you can remove my comment and ban me if you want as I know MD's moderators are leftists too, but this too is still reality and history, no matter what you do...