Slavery Dies Hard

We humans often delude ourselves with the idea of progress while
continuing to make the same mistakes. We developed advanced technology
and then fought the most destructive and cruel war in the history of
the world, the Second World War. We invented chemicals and drugs, but
not always the wisdom to use them. Our species became prosperous and
then destroyed its families. People, organizations and societies are
often inept at making the best decisions. Our wars, upheavals,
environmental problems and financial crises display the persistent
follies of the human species. "Madness is rare in individuals - but in
groups, parties, nations and ages it is the rule."1The longest
delusion of the twentieth century grew out of the idealistic desire to
stop the exploitation of labor, free oppressed workers and peasants,
abolish capitalism, stop wars and create a workers' paradise while the
state and religion gradually withered away. Instead of creating better
conditions, the Russian Revolution of 1917 ushered in massive
oppression, turmoil and famine. Within 40 years, the Soviet Union
under Lenin and Stalin created the largest system of slave labor in
history. Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn brilliantly described
this state slavery, including the personal selection of naked female
slave laborers as bedmates for Soviet Interior Ministry slave buyers
and their associates. Slaves of the Soviet state received far worse
treatment than did slaves in the Old South. For exposing the tragedy,
horror and cruelty of Soviet slave labor camps in books like One Day
in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn
won the Nobel Prize in 1970. Slave labor systems arose in other
communist nations, including Cambodia, Vietnam, Eastern European
communist regimes and Red China. Many millions of Chinese died in
forced labor camps under Mao, who numerically surpassed the slave
holdings of Stalin and Hitler.During a 12-year delusion, Nazi Germany
created millions of state slaves. Like the Soviets, the Nazis worked
"enemies of the people" as slaves and intentionally worked many to
death. The Germans executed those unfit to work early in the process.
For the Hebrew people, this was at least their third enslavement after
two earlier enslavements described in the Bible. Historians know more
about the Nazi slave labor system than we do the Soviet counterpart,
because the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, physically discovered their
work and death camps and learned much from Holocaust survivors, who
were then free to speak. While Stalin let up on mass arrests and
deportations during the Second World War, Hitler insanely killed more
workers during Germany's acute wartime labor shortage. Soviet and Nazi
slave laborers were abused as punishment for political, religious,
racial, military and ethnic status, not utilized efficiently or with
complete dedication to economic production. The Soviet, Nazi and Red
Chinese slave labor systems each enslaved over 10,000,000 people.
Twentieth century dictatorships did not value the lives of their state
slaves.Today, China incarcerates with or without trial some three to
five million dissidents, slackers and criminals in a vast network of
reform-through-labor or Laogai camps.2 Despite international
agreements barring prison-made goods from entering the United States,
products made by unpaid forced labor find their way here. Product
components made in Laogai camps pass undetected. Many internet sales
conducted in English link to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.3
According to the Laogai Research Foundation, prisons produce large
profits for the Chinese government.4The world abolished the
international slave trade once and now sees it resurrected under the
euphemistic name of "human trafficking." The International Labor
Organization estimates there are at least 12.3 million people in
forced labor, bonded labor and commercial sexual servitude worldwide.
By some estimates, there are 27 million enslaved people in the world.6
E. Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous, spent four years
visiting a dozen countries where this ugly species of modern day
slavery flourishes. More U.S. states now specifically prohibit human
trafficking. Prosecutions are on the increase in the United States and
elsewhere in the world. The U.S. State Department, through its Office
to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, now formally "names and
shames" other nations who practice and condone the modern day slavery
of human trafficking.8 While the United States points the finger of
blame at other nations regarding human trafficking, it keeps a record
number of its very own new age slaves.Slavery dies hard and re-appears
in different forms through time. That's because it's more than a
single institution. Societies develop from the equality of
hunter-gatherers to organized social stratification, inequality. Human
civilization always results in wealth and power differentials.
Disparities in political, legal, financial and military power allow
the strong to dominate or enslave the weak through various means and
for different reasons.Slavery and criminal punishment have many things
in common. Each keeps people in low social strata. Criminal punishment
in various cultures resulted in forms of slavery. In different Western
legal systems throughout history, the punishments used to control
slaves eventually made their way into criminal laws applicable to
everyone.9 Penal servitude and slavery were in some cultures
practically indistinguishable. Chattel slavery was usually milder than
galley slavery, penal servitude and convict leasing, because the
slaveholder had a direct investment in the life of the slave rather
than merely the use of labor for some years. A delusion of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, originating as a humanitarian
movement, was the idea that people would get better with time if
placed in cages or cells. This misconception brought about yet another
form of slavery, which is now more prevalent in the United States than
in any other country.We have not reached the final chapter of American
slavery. We abolished slavery, we thought, and then developed a new
form of slavery. Antebellum chattel slavery is gone, but new age
American slavery, mass incarceration, is much worse. We are not
accustomed to thinking of prisoners as "slaves," but in all the basic
ways, they are state slaves. Although not strictly chattel, prisoners
owe absolute obedience, have no physical freedom and little status,
enjoy few rights and remain subjugated or abused for many years, in
prison and after their release. The United States has gone from an
agrarian, paternalistic, personal form of private enterprise slavery
to the socialized, impersonal, institutional, mass state slavery
through incarceration inside hard surfaces, directed from Washington,
D.C. and 50 state capitals. The twisted world of modern mass
incarceration, state slavery, is new age slavery.10 New age slaves
deserve their bondage, but do not "work like slaves." In fact,
American prisoners are the largest group of full-ride welfare
recipients in the world today. And they are not being rehabilitated.
Change will come, because our economy and our prisons are at the
breaking point.The United States has 5% of the world's prisoner and
25% of the world's prisoners. We are supposed to be the land of
liberty.------------------
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and
Evil.
2 See, http://www.laogaimuseum.org.
3 Laogai Research
Foundation, Not For Sale: Advertising Forced Labor Products for
Illegal Export,
Feb. 2010 @ laogai.org.
4 See, Laogai Research
Foundation, http://www.laogai.org.
5 U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE, OFFICE
TO MONITOR AND COMBAT TRAFFICKING IN
PERSONS, "The Facts About Human
Trafficking for Forced Labor," June 3, 2008.
6 E. Benjamin Skinner, A
Crime So Monstrous - Face-to-Face with Modern Day Slavery, New
York:
Free Press, 2008, pg xv, citing Kevin Bales, Disposable People
(1999).
8 Id., pgs xvi, 42.
9 J. Thorsten Sellin, Slavery and the
Penal System, Elsevier, 1976, pgs 177-178.
10 Angela Y. Davis, Are
Prisons Obsolete?, Seven Stories Press, 2003. New age slavery has
also
been called "Amerikkka's New Slavery."