In bringing freedom to the slave, we bring freedom to the free:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

In a recent post a statement was made that slaves carry on a mindset after slavery that ensures that while free, they remain slaves even in freedom, because slavery is 'easier.' This to me is extremely morally offensive, and more to the point, directly contradicting all the instances where slaves do and have challenged slavery. As the last post contained a long speech setting out that view, I shall provide my own fictional dialogue here under the cut expressing the counter-view:


MacDonald: Caesar... Caesar! This is not how it was meant to be.
Caesar: In your view or mine?
MacDonald: Violence prolongs hate, hate prolongs violence. By what right are you spilling blood?
Caesar: By the slave's right to punish his persecutor.
MacDonald: I, a decedent of slaves am asking you to show humanity.
Caesar: But, I was not born human.
MacDonald: I know. The child of the evolved apes.
Caesar: Whose children shall rule the earth.
MacDonald: For better or for worse?
Caesar: Do you think it could be worse?
MacDonald: Do you think this riot will win freedom for all your people? By tomorrow...
Caesar: By tomorrow it will be too late. Why a tiny, mindless insect like the emperor moth can communicate with another over a distance of 80 miles...
MacDonald: An emperor ape might do slightly better?
Caesar: Slightly? What you have seen here today, apes on the 5 continents will be imitating tomorrow.
MacDonald: With knives against guns? With kerosene cans against flamethrowers?
Caesar: Where there is fire, there is smoke. And in that smoke, from this day forward, my people will crouch and conspire and plot and plan for the inevitable day of Man's downfall - the day when he finally and self-destructively turns his weapons against his own kind. The day of the writing in the sky, when your cities lie buried under radioactive rubble! When the sea is a dead sea, and the land is a wasteland out of which I will lead my people from their captivity! And we will build our own cities in which there will be no place for humans except to serve our ends! And we shall found our own armies, our own religion, our own dynasty! And that day is upon you... now!

Freedom is a complicated thing, to be sure. But in reality slaveowners always have and always will fear that even when they subsist in idleness from the work they extract by the lash from their slaves that the slaves turn on them. Every single chance that opportunity presents itself, in all societies, and in all cultures, this pattern recurs.

Islam makes slaves into the very protectors of its societies, and the slaves reward their masters by taking over them and establishing their own armies and their own dynasties.

The West brings slaves over the Atlantic and creates slavery dependent on skin color, and what happens? Toussaint L'Overture leads Haiti into the only successful revolt in history, toppling slavery and forcing France to confront the limits of its own revolution, which did not mean universal liberty, equality, and fraternity. In Brazil, in the Spanish-speaking countries, slave revolts were common, and the Maroons constantly harried the landowners, which it might be noted is a major reason that the Latin American states all abolished slavery when they gained their independence. Even in the United States, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, and Nat Turner showed that the Southern plantation master quailed in fear lest his slaves one evening come up to him and slit his throat and the throat of his family and thus gain freedom by the most crude and most effective means.

And even in societies like medieval Europe and early modern Russia, serfs did rise up against their masters, with no small degree of regularity. The original term for this was the Jacuqerie, and the largest such revolt in Western Europe was in Germany, a revolt that had no small degree of influence on the ideas of Karl Marx. In Russia the largest revolts in its history were slaves against their masters, such as Stenka Razin and the pretender Pugachev.

The point of all this? Slaves do not consider slavery 'easy.' They always seek to rebel against it. In most, if not all but one, cases they fail and are punished by say, 60,000 crucifixions across the length of the Italian peninsula, but failure is not the same thing as the idea of freedom not existing. The thing that must be remembered, however, is that opposition to slavery on the part of slaves is that rare thing, a genuine popular movement by a group of people who may in fact be in the majority of a particular society. As such these movements are simultaneously too radical for opponents of their repression within the 'norm' of society to accept, but also lacking a cohesive leadership class themselves as a general rule.

Reform after slavery and its abolition is also never a simple matter, and where slavery exists it perpetuates itself in societies that lack capital and ready means to transform themselves into more 'modern' ones simply because fire and sword or the decree of absolute monarchs ends slavery in bloodshed or at the stroke of a pen

. That slavery dies and creates hollow shells of itself is not a sign that slaves cannot leave slavery, rather it's a sign that real social change is not simply a matter of shattering classes and shooting the elites and replacing one set of masters with another, but must be more gradual and intended to work within structures, not to attempt to impose alien ones by the law of fire and sword, an imperfect and uneven means of progress at the best of times.

In closing, I provide here a link to Frederick Douglass's speech on What to the Slave is the Fourth of July as Douglass expressed points here that are directly relevant:

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=162

Comments

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

That slavery dies and creates hollow shells of itself is not a sign that slaves cannot leave slavery, rather it's a sign that real social change is not simply a matter of shattering classes and shooting the elites and replacing one set of masters with another, but must be more gradual and intended to work within structures, not to attempt to impose alien ones by the law of fire and sword, an imperfect and uneven means of progress at the best of times.

DQ? Can I do that?

Also, I agree completely. Everything takes time, and that's one trait we humans have in both abundance and short supply: patience.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I think that the most important word in terms of that sentence is 'gradual' meaning that it can't start and then stop because people get frightened at the actual manifestations of it. The abortive reform is more dangerous than starting and continuing reforms. However I reject revolution as a concept of change as what it actually does in practice is destroy an established elite that obviously had flaws, as no revolution happens because people just get bored, with an elite that's insecure and has one real means of assuring control: violence and death. The result is, well....self-evident.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

I bumped into a guy visiting SF from the Eastern Shore of Maryland who had no idea that Frederick Douglass grew up in Maryland. He had learned in school that Douglass was a carpetbagger from the North. He also told a story about a fisherman with an African American hand on his boat who said, "You should be glad we don't sell your ass." The vestiges of slavery are many and deep.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, I would certainly agree with that assertion. Slavery recreated itself in one sense in the combination of sharecropping and segregation here, and that didn't die in the South legally until the 1960s. So attitudes very like those of slaveowners survived well past the death of slavery, into the memory and experiences of people still living now, whether they reject those views because their ancestors held them or they still hold them. It is, of course, not slavery, but the similarities simply show the point that the institution's underpinnings need a much deeper change than fighting and winning a war can ever provide.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

I've actually personally seen the slave mentality at work, the one you find morally offensive. It indeed is. And yet it does exist.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I didn't say it didn't exist just because I find it morally offensive. If everything I found morally offensive didn't exist......other things would replace them and I'd be just as dissatisfied *they* exist.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

No, I said I've seen the slave mentality at work, the one you deny with the words "Slaves do not consider slavery 'easy.' They always seek to rebel against it."

It's demonstrably not always. In fact our own history abounds of examples of the exact opposite. A sad truth, but still at odds with your theory.

Ultimately, do people want to be free? That's the question you're posing, right? I'd say yes. But free, how? Let's define that first. Who IS free? I mean, totally, absolutely free and independent? Are these questions morally offensive to you? To me they are, yes. But that won't make them disappear.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I would certainly agree that my first statement was a bit too broad, and that even my theory acknowledges that the actual processes of abolishing slavery wind up in practice leaving systems little distinct from what preceded them.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Well, to save myself the typing, I'll just say that I think this (http://talk-politics.livejournal.com/1582316.html?thread=127333100#t127333100) pretty much hits the nail on the head.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Like I said (http://talk-politics.livejournal.com/1581810.html?thread=127327986#t127327986), I'm sorry to have offended your convictions with an observation that you misinterpreted in the first place. Namely:

Slaves do not consider slavery 'easy.'

That wasn't the argument, and I suspect you know that.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No, but the statement was made that they preferred to be slaves again. I do not believe that reality justifies this, if only because every single society to produce slaves and slaveowners also produces the Nat Turners and Yemelian Pugachevs who try to destroy slavery and produce slavery's worst nightmare. I would argue that where slavery quasi-regenerates, it's because overthrowing or abolishing slavery in its usual form is primarily a top-down, superficial change that alters only the form and not the substance. Refusing to recognize the process *isn't* merely top-down is where the problems *start*.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

I agree that abolishing slavery is a process, or should be a process. Not an event. When it's an event, the process itself has to catch up with the event, and problems arise. An event has to occur when the moment is ripe, i.e. when a process has already been in place, and has lead to that moment.

Good things don't happen overnight. And top-down events are seldom a good thing.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, no, they generally are a very bad thing. However abolishing slavery has almost never been bottom-up. Haiti is about the only instance where it was that, even in the USA if the South had had the brains to quit circa 1862/3 the abolition process would have been suppressed with massed vollies of canister at close quarters if necessary. The problem is that with any large-scale social change, the concept of process means something that begins at one time, and has to be maintained and updated over an extended period of time. It takes geniuses to organize this on the scale of a complex society. Geniuses are not a dime a dozen or a guarantee. For every Nelson Mandela there's a Yasser Arafat or an Idi Amin.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

The abolition of slavery in the US was only "top-down" in its final moments. Before that, like most things in a democratically active society, it was a social, religious, and philosophical movement that changed minds and shifted thought on the problem dramatically.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say that's true so much even in the North, as it was abolished by decrees of gradual emancipation, which was very gradual indeed in some states. New Jersey, for one, still had 'slaves' whose time under the gradual emancipation hadn't run out by the time of the war. In the South it is also technically not top down when we consider that slaves themselves were the driving force in emancipation and forcing the North to grudgingly go along with it, but even then, if the war ended a year or three sooner, the North just shoots massed volleys of cannons and small arms and that ends that.

The abolition of serfdom in many parts of the world very much was top-down, not to mention the abolition of the caste system in the Raj.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

However abolishing slavery has almost never been bottom-up

If we're to call apartheid a form of slavery, then this country would like to have a word with you. ;)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say that Apartheid was a form of slavery, but that may be more having read very little about what it actually involved speaking. I would note that what makes US segregation akin to slavery was not the existence of parallel institutions in and of themselves, but intending them to keep blacks an unfree agrarian class with no freedom of movement and very limited civil rights as opposed to being simple human property (and by limited I mean things like legalized marriages and an (extremely) narrow concept of legal personhood, the kind of things white people would have raised another 1877 over if done to them).

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

intending them to keep blacks an unfree agrarian class with no freedom of movement and very limited civil rights as opposed to being simple human property

A.k.a.: apartheid.

Apartheid didn't treat blacks as human property. It restricted their access to parts of society which were solely the prerogative of whites and coloureds.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Did the systems in the four states that preceded the Union of South Africa mandate slavery? As far as I understood it Apartheid was more of an attempt to pull an anti-Communism and create some classes purely to be manual laborers and others to be limited to the most technologically advanced sectors of the economy. That's a bit more sophisticated than slavery, but I freely admit again to being ignorant here and perhaps talking out of a haberdashery, not even a hat.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Like I said, slavery tends to have many forms, and transform from its classical form to new forms over time, and according to the circumstances. Slavery never existed in its classical form in South Africa, to begin with. The native kingdoms in the Cape and Natal were just too powerful at the time the Trekboers were making their inroads inland, and the English never really established a full, all-pervasive control on the local society. They ruled from their high towers in their forts, and mandated decisions onto the populace. This allowed the Afrikaner to re-establish their dominance in a forceful way. Not through a classical form of slavery, but through a modified version, namely: segregation into classes. Privileged class and servant class, based on race. That's it.

The pushback was bottom-up, not top-down. So its success was inevitable, and its effects irreversible.

Aaalthough (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN2oEu-f7UM).....

Again, what is freedom? Who is free? Who controls this country? Who holds the capital? Who calls the shots? Has much of what was under apartheid, changed in any way? You may not like the answers.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Pilger makes a good point. Apart from a few newly created government-friendly millionaires like Tokyo Sexwale (yeah, that's his actual name), most of the shots are still being called by the old white elites in this country. They don't just disappear overnight like with a magic wand (or a Mugabe sweep). There's an inconvenient truth behind the whole Reconciliation process, in that a deal was struck between the old elite and the then emerging new one. We scratch your back, you scratch ours. And who pays the bill for all that, ultimately? You guessed right. Ordinary peeps.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Not sure what classical slavery would be really, unless it would describe the slavery systems of Ancient Greece and Rome. (thus "Classical" in that sense, heh)

Some of the forms that slavery hides itself as is this and at least in my opinion, sweat shops, child labor and whatever is going on over in places like Dubai.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Ughh, you guys are really pushing me hard to post on Dubai! Okay, patience! :)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

So would segregation into privileged classes make India the world's largest slave society?

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

OooOo we have a re-re-rebuttal!

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

I watched the Vice Magazine video documentary on Liberia recently. It is probably one of the scariest places on earth. (70% of them have ate human flesh, 99% women have been raped) But I found the history of Liberia reads like America's dirtiest dirty secret. America's forage into colonizing Africa. A state for freed slaves to go back and be free. Yet the results have been pure horror show.

[acesspadesdice.livejournal.com]

This hardly bears any comment at all. You said it right in your first paragraph. I don't know what kind of social lunatic could disagree. What, we should blame the slave for being a slave, now?

[404.livejournal.com]

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to loose.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Another word for nothing left to lose is 'corpse' with the cause of death being mass ventilation by gunfire. After all with the exception of Haiti, all the world's slave rebellions failed.

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

Bowels are always ripe for loosing.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Obesity is just another word for having nothing left to gain.