Wages of War: Slavery

Part 2 Wages of War: Slavery

Slavery is the cancer that has already destroyed America. Slavery, like abortion, poverty and avarice diminishes human dignity so fundamentally as to kill it just as any incurable cancer kills a healthy body. In psychological ways, slavery is worse than abortion. At least the unborn are never aware they were murdered to satisfy the whim of their mother, the result of a rape, or an act of incest. A slave, on the other hand, is mentally murdered every moment of every day in bondage. Slavery is one of the wages of war.

And even if the slave is liberated from chains physically, the mental chains remain till death. This legacy of resentment, bitterness and hate for their masters is the legacy of the slave class. It can never be erased or forgotten. Asking the freed slave to show mercy, forgiveness, reconciliation and acceptance to the slave-holder approaches the limits of human virtue. Yet many former slaves have done just that. Many more never can. And who can blame them?

As President Kennedy told a national TV audience on June 11, 1963 the legacy of slavery lives on infecting soul of both former slave’s decedents, and masters:

“The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”

There was a lot of push-back to Part One: Abortion in this series WAGES OF WAR. Thank you for that. Acceptance of these views is not required, only their hearing. Many could still not connect the dots. Yet the dots are clear and bright to the classically trained mind. If a mother can kill the human being (person or not) in her womb for any arbitrary or capricious reason, then any of us can kill any other human being for any arbitrary or capricious reason or, even better, for no reason at all. In this, you have the sufficient condition for any war. All you need to do is make the value of any human life an arbitrary and capricious matter of whim. Dehumanize your fetus, your slave, your enemy or your comatose granny and all can be summarily killed. Consider for a moment the odd things about the history of slavery.

The word ‘slave’ comes from a Byzantine Greek term the “sklabos” which was the name for the Slavic people since the Vikings used to capture the Slavs and sell them to the Romans as slaves. The term only dates back as far as 580 AD as the Latin word “servus” was more commonly used before that for all kinds of servants – chained or unchained.

Slavery arrives with civilization in villages, towns, and cities. War is the main method of supply. In early civilizations when a town falls to a hostile army, it is normal to take into slavery those inhabitants who will make useful workers and to kill the rest. Albert Speer, Hitler’s Armaments and Munitions Minister, raised slave-labor to a demonic science killing hundreds of thousands of Nazi conquered people by forcing them into slave labor. Over five million slave laborers were brought to Germany during WW II.

It’s a myth to think that slavery has been abolished. Today, there are over 14 million slaves in India alone and 27 million documented worldwide. Three-quarters of this number are female, over half are children. There are more people in slavery now than at any time in human history. The very first slave owner in the American colonies, Anthony Johnson (1600-1670), was himself a black man from Angola. His slave, John Casor was also a black African.

Curiously, slavery was not made illegal in the UK until 2010 and Mississippi did not ratify the 13 Amendment abolishing slavery until 2013. The Christian Bible makes no condemnation of slavery. Jesus Christ never admonishes slave owners. The New Testament only records Christ’s admonitions for the way slaves were treated, not for being slaves in the first place. While the Catholic Church has repeatedly condemned slavery, Pope Nicholas V, in 1452, did grant papal permission to the Kings of Spain and Portugal to hunt down the pagan Saracens and “…reduce their persons into perpetual slavery.” Pope Paul III reaffirmed Catholic anti-slavery in 1537. (source: http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/colonization-and-settlement-1585-1763/origins-slavery )

Buying black slaves from black African and Arab slave vendors was easy for white Americans. Most buyers never had to even get off their ships. African brothers and sisters already had the slaves in chains lined up on the docks, sorted by age, gender and skills when the ships dropped anchor. Little remembered by historians is the fact that between 1530 and 1780 over a million Europeans were sold as slaves in North America. Most of them were Caucasian. (source: http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/slavery )

It’s somewhat bemusing today that our Facebook generation seems more interested in transgender use of public toilets and locker rooms than ISIS resurrecting sex-slavery on a massive scale. Apparently, the modern mind sees adolescent snickering on a moral par with sexual torture and murder of teenage slaves at the hands of deranged Islamists. It raises the question as to who among us is more deranged. Would that we could be agnostic about our modern lack of moral priorities based on moral facts! Yes, there are moral facts. Only those determined to be blind cannot see them. That being the case slavery continues its cancerous decay of the human spirit as one of the wages of war.

Pope Francis, visits America this month. Any bets on what topics the Pontiff will opine? Are climate change, same-sex coupling, grace for divorced Catholics, forgiveness for abortionists, and pan-socialism of a greater spiritual concern than the dehumanization of 27 million slaves as one of the wages of war? Film at 11!

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