Sure, go on apply modern criminal code definitions to this as if that matters. Newflash, it doesn’t. Use of the term abduction doesn’t carry any damned implications based on our understanding.

At no point have I implied that it was illegal, and abduction does necessarily mean illegal. My contention is that describing the abduction of boys as mere conscription is an attempt at sanitization and minimalizes the reality of what the ottomans were doing.

The OP got a bee in his bonnet about how these people were described in a general survey of ottoman history and essentially tried to make it out like it was no big thing that these kids were taken to be raised by the state and forcibly converted.

The fact that history is replete with such injustices doesn’t fucking matter. The fact that this was legal and considered normal for the period doesn’t fucking matter.

Whats next? Dismissing the Armenia genocide as no big thing? Oh I know! The slave trade really wasn’t such a crime. Slavery was normal and legal in africa, wasn’t it? Or are you going to try to tell me that those people weren’t abducted and dragged away to be forced into labour and conversion?

The fact that everyone is so dammed set on acting as if my calling it abduction is some gross miscarriage of understanding is bloody ridiculous.

Its not nitpicking its “being correct?” Fuck off.