It's Juneteenth. Let's Talk Slavery

you have no idea

I was to Jefferson’s Monticello and Washington’s Mr. Vernon last week, and let me tell you: you are not allowed to say “slaves” any more. The approved term is “enslaved people” if you know what is good for you.

But since it’s Juneteenth, the day in 1865 that certain “enslaved people” in Texas learned that they had been freed, let’s talk about slavery.

This is not the first time I have written about slavery.

What do the kids think?

[M]any (perhaps most) American kids graduate high school believing, falsely, that slavery happened only in America.

Gee. I wonder how that happened, dear liberal friends.

In fact, slavery has been normal down the ages, until it became scandalous, probably because of Protestant Christians in the 18th century. But slavery was ubiquitous before that. The Jews were sent in slavery to Egypt. The Romans routinely paraded the slaves they had captured in their Triumphs. The Venetians ran a trade for centuries of buying pretty Circassian girls in the port of Kaffa and then selling them in the harems of the Middle East. And how did those girls show up in Kaffa? Their families had sold them into slavery.

As for the African slave trade, it is said that the slaves sent to North America were the lucky ones. It was much more expensive to get the slaves all the way from West Africa to Virginia than to sail them across to Brazil. And so slaves in Brazil were treated as being expendable, because there was more where that came from.

Of course, slavery didn’t end with Juneteenth. The greatest slave states in all history were the Soviet Union and Maoist China in the 20th century. And if you ask me the modern welfare state is a kind of slave state, where people are allowed to surrender themselves to the state in return for welfare and housing. In the Year 1000 in England you could do the same thing and ask your feudal lord if you could become a slave and put the responsibility of feeding you on his head.

Then there is the question of the draft. Is a young man drafted to become a soldier for the duration of the world war a free man or a slave?

Then there is the question of the US Civil War. was it really fought to free the slaves, or was it the industrializing Puritan North deciding to teach the aristocratic agrarian South a lesson?

One advantage of a war to free the slaves was that it did not become necessary for the US government to pay the slaveowners for the value of their slaves as happened in other countries when they freed the slaves.

Andz don’t get me started talking about the Vikings that sailed up the rivers of Britain, killed the men and captured the women and children and sold them into the slave market in Dublin, Ireland.

But then, what are we to say about the cartels that used to run people across the border into the US and treat them as virtual slaves. Until Trump came along.

And if you want to read some more about slavery read “Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Slavery.”