Replies

How can slavery be condemned when it can hardly be defined?

In a way, it is like prostitution, where two legal acts, sex and exchanging money, are combined to create an illegal act.

Every part of slavery could be involuntary or voluntary, despised or enjoyed, cruel or kind, exploitative or generous, negative or positive. It can be like prison, or it can be like employment.

Slaves are not exclusively unpaid, some are paid handsomely. Nor are slaves defined by their masters, as even other slaves may be their overseers or masters.

Ambrose Bierce defined “marriage” as: n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.

There is even a philosophy for slavery, as a form of proto-socialism. That holds slavery up as being the ideal state of the vast majority of mankind. The slave as free to lead a life unburdened by responsibility beyond following orders. Provided the necessities of life in exchange for servitude.

See George Fitzhugh’s book, “Cannibals All!: Or Slaves Without Masters”.

Mastery can be very different from Tyranny. A skilled and expert First Sergeant may be beloved by “his” privates, who are, in effect, his servants, even unto death.

And it has been noted that a tyrant cannot function without the willing cooperation of his slaves. If the slaves resist the tyrant, he must use so much of his strength to control them, that he is drained.

With so many dynamics, how can slavery be condemned? Easily!

The state and government know slavery well, because they maintain a monopoly over it. They can draft citizens as soldiers, and send criminals to prison, and confine the mentally ill and communicably diseased. They can take the wealth of their citizens through taxes. And most certainly, government can and will use force to get its way.

Children are legally slaves to both their parents and the state, and can be deprived of their civil liberties with the stroke of a pen. In effect, they are chattels.

Yet the government, and the citizenry, know slavery when they see it, and are not persuaded by rhetoric.

“Each year, an estimated 14,500 to 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into the United States. The number of U.S. citizens trafficked within the country each year is even higher, with an estimated 200,000 American children at risk for trafficking into the sex industry. (U.S. Department of Justice. 2004. Report to Congress from Attorney General John Ashcroft on U.S. Government Efforts to Combat Trafficking in Persons in Fiscal Year 2003. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice.)”