The Left's Mascots and Slavery

No, we didn't abolish slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation

The only kind of slavery that our lefty friends want to talk about is the North American plantation slavery that flourished from the mid 17th century to the mid 19th century.

We are talking about permanent, inherited chattel slavery of African slaves that was legislated in Virginia in 1661 and eliminated in the American Civil War in 1861-65.

Like any good little boy, I have lived most of my life accepting the Narrative on slavery. That it was racist. That is was about the dehumanization of West Africans. That White People did it.

I suppose the moment at which I began to break out of the Narrative was when I read in The Year 1000 by Casey and Danziger which told me that peasants in England in the year 1000 could voluntarily sign up for slavery.

And that reminds me of another Narrative, that back in the Old Days, most people were serfs in the feudal system: pratically slaves, when you think about it. But then came the modern era, and serfdom was no more, except in backward countries like Tsarist Russia. Only, we were told at the same time, the serfdom of the Middle Ages was replaced by the virtual slavery of the factory worker in the industrial age, not to mention the exploitation of “owe my soul to the company store.”

Clearly, the intellectuals’ cure for the wage-slavery of industrial capitalism, socialism and/or communism, was a solution that Made Things Worse. Indeed, I call Soviet Russia and Maoist China the biggest slave states in all history.

But whatabout the welfare state where 30-50 percent of GDP is paid in taxes to the government and then handed out in government spending? Is that not serfdom in all but name where the lives of ordinary people are severely controlled by the ruling class operating the levers of power, and the way you get to be first in line is by voting for Democrats?

And is not welfare, a replay of the year 1000’s “head for food,” a form of slavery?

And whatabout today’s educated class, that spends its childhood at government school, that spends its youth in professional servitude as residents, interns, tenure-track teachers, before getting a curacy the ruling class with a pension if you behave yourself? Is that kind of life not a kind of involuntary servitude?

So, when I apply the Three Layers concept to society, with Thomas Sowell’s notion of The Anointed, the Benighted, and the Mascots, what are the Mascots of the ruling class but voluntary slaves? Any better than the three layers of Viking society, with Earls, Peasants, and Thralls, or slaves?

What are blacks but slaves of the ruling class, voting Democrat in return for scraps from the lordly table?

What are feminists but slaves of the ruling class, clamoring for abortion to relieve themselves of the stress of “careers” and sexual “freedom?”

What are gays and transgenders but the modern equivalent of the Janissary slave soldiers of the Ottoman empire?

So, I think that, in many ways, you are a slave if you are a member of the ruling class and also if you are a Mascot of the ruling class.

You are a slave if you are a member of the ruling class, because you’d better toe the line to retain your privilege, pal, if you know what’s good for you.

The only person that lives in freedom is the ordinary commoner that is not that interested in power, and not too trussed up by the ordinary oppressions of the ruling class.

Put it this way. You can be a slave if you are a conquest slave. You can be a slave if you are a voluntary slave. You can be a slave to your access to power.

I still haven’t come up with a word to describe all this, symbolize the whole philosophy that has enslaved us all in the current totalitarian woke regime. But I will.