Probable reasons, however, include the combination of high demand for slaves throughout the Islamic world, the defenselessness of the sedentary agricultural Slavs and others, and the existence of a relatively poor class of Crimean horsemen, who were led by a predatory elite that got rich by slave raiding.
Miles notes a pattern: "Jesus's involuntary defenselessness at the beginning of his life mirrors and anticipates his voluntary defenselessness at its end".
It turns out that the very size & defenselessness of the school of herring constitute a defense against a predator.
But if you want to effect a breach in that stolid edifice the human personality I think it helps to cultivate this Kierkegaardian sense of defenselessness.
The table becomes a bed — that great symbol of closeness, of defenselessness — and Marianne 1 curls up on it.
This novel is at its most powerful and frightening when it exaggerates that defenselessness, as when the father kicks down the door of the bathroom, fills the tub with cold water and shoves his disobedient boy beneath the surface while Ursula observes them with her rotting-cloth eyes.
From the book: Sitting on the porch alone, listening to them fixing supper, he felt again the indignation he had felt before, the sense of loss and the aloneness, the utter defenselessness that was each man's lot, sealed up in his bee cell from all the others in the world.
It remains one of the indelible books about Vietnam: the images coming out of the war suggested, to Merwin, the utter defenselessness of a traditional culture against the fury of modernity.
"But it's something?" He shrugged and opened his hands in a gesture of defenselessness, squinting in the smoke from the roll-up that wagged in his mouth.
It was their utter defenselessness and the accuracy of many of the attacks that broke their spirit.
Feelings of deep panic were eventually supplanted by one of utter defenselessness in which, I was certain, all dark information about my past could be gleaned.
