Fear of the Horizon

National Review Online ^ | September 13, 2006 | John Derbyshire

[Dumb_Ox]

Fear of the Horizon Barbary brutality.

By John Derbyshire

Presented with the word “slavery,” what comes to your mind? If you are an American, it is surely the race slavery that was a feature of life here for 250 years, that continued through the early decades of the Republic in some states, and that caused divisions that led to the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in our history.

That is as it should be. We naturally think of our own country first. Slavery, however, has been a feature of life in many societies all over the world, from the most ancient times down to the present day. There is hardly a place that has not been touched by it; hardly an ethny* that has not been subjected to this greatest of all indignities at one time or other. It was the memory of seeing English children in the slave market at Rome that inspired Gregory the Great to set about the conversion of the English; and I used to tease my Irish Republican friends — back when such things were still relevant, I mean, before they all got jobs trading financial futures — with the historical fact that in early-medieval Ireland, “British slave girl” was a unit of currency, equivalent to three cows.

We all sort of know this stuff in a piecemeal way, but now and then you read something that makes it vivid to you. I’ve had just that experience the last couple of days, reading Robert Davis’s 2003 book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters. The book is an account of the enslavement of untold numbers of European Christians by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast, that stretch of the North African shoreline currently under the sovereignty of Algeria, Tunisia, and western Libya.

[KoRn]

I would say that someone in China making 75 cents per day while feeding the Chinese government and large companies is a form of slavery.