[Spoilers Main] [This is a long one] Uncomfortable implications about slavery in Daenerys' Essos arc, and real-world history

I was thinking about this when reading another thread about Dany "making everything worse" in Slaver's Bay.

Disclaimer, I guess: This is not about the show. I did hate the moralizing tone the showrunners decided to take with Dany, but that's neither here nor there. This is about Martin's writing.

Martin often writes about being realistic. As a big student of real-life history, I don't think he succeeds at all (and often doesn't even try to do his homework), but in a looser sense I do think he's trying to write stories with real-life political implications. He often has difficulty advancing beyond generalities ("a good ruler heeds his advisors" "such as?" "such as being wise" "oh gee"), but the intent is there.

Now one thing that sticks out is that Slaver's Bay is cartoonishly evil, and Daenerys' crusade is cartoonishly good. I say these things on two counts:

There have been slave-using societies (Slavery's Bay is a mix of the American South with a North African / Barbary-Carthage aesthetic, IMO). Few of them have been as extremely fixated on slavery as the Slavery's Bay city-states; the American South is probably the only example in recent history. Of these, few have been very long-lived: actually turning slavery into your only workforce and source of income is not a way to prosper as a people. Slaver's Bay is basically the American South writ large as a millennial civilization that does nothing but evil slavery stuff. It's a caricature: this doesn't make it bad writing, but it's worth underlining, it's probably worse than most actual slaving civilizations, because there's virtually no silver lining to it. It exists to slave, and that's mostly that.

Then Dany's crusade is something that (in real-life history) mostly just doesn't happen, which is a war to free slaves. There have been many wars in history, for reasons that are usually about power, conquest, and extermination / genocide of the conquered, while not the standard, is certainly more common than we'd like.

Or to put it differently, on the off-hand chance I found a recorded, real-life "conqueror" who genuinely wanted to end slavery and violently did so, I'd cut them monstrous amounts of slack. I don't mean this would make them "good". War is bad. I'm just saying... of the dozens of the mostly meaningless casus belli for which war has been fought, actually ending slavery is a hilariously good one. This is beside the fact that nobody did it, because nobody cared. Literally 1,000s of years of human history rolled by with nobody lifting a finger to stop it, because it was as natural as poverty or the existence of armed violence to people. You don't stop the rain, you can't end slavery.

But let's face it, I won't find any such conquerors. The literally absurd number of historical warlords and sword-singers who made war to "spread my religion" aside, the number of people who actually made war to "end slavery" approaches zero. It didn't happen.

All this being said, everyone here (at least) agrees Dany's turn to madness and death is pre-determined, as is the "moral" of not using overwhelming violence to fix things.

Now, in isolation, this is a moral I would agree with. With actual history in mind, I'd agree most fixers of most problems with violence were less than good, or problematic, and often turned things for the worse. But ironically, the way Slaver's Bay is actually presented - with a larger-than-life slavery society, and an actual anti-slavery conqueror - I have a hard time taking this seriously. The entire thing is pushed so much to the extremes of what's realistic human behavior that I have a hard time imagining why this is an appropriate case for the "don't use violence" approach.

I think Martin overshot his metaphor for social evil, or didn't think the implications through.