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posted by mrpg on Friday October 19 2018, @02:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the or-suffering-it dept.

Phys.org:

When we think of slavery, many of us think of historical or so-called "traditional forms" of slavery – and of the 12m people ripped from their West African homes and shipped across the Atlantic for a lifetime in the plantations of the Americas.

But slavery is not just something that happened in the past –- the modern day estimate for the number of men, women and children forced into labour worldwide exceeds 40m. Today's global slave trade is so lucrative that it nets traffickers more than US$150 billion each year.

The article asserts that much of today's slavery is being driven by the demand for electronic goods.


[Edit: fixed ILO links]

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 19 2018, @03:38PM (9 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 19 2018, @03:38PM (#750963) Journal

    I had my own questions about "traditional slavery". It's important to understand that the US did NOT practice slavery as it was recognized throughout the world. In virtually all other societies, a slave was a slave, for life at most. His/her children didn't become slaves automatically. Slaves were mostly recognized as humans, and accorded at least meager respect as humans. Especially in Islam, all a slave had to do to escape slavery in perpetuity was to convert to Islam. Refuse to convert, and you were screwed for forever. Native American and many other societies rewarded faithful service with acceptance into the tribe. The Jews had their Jubilee. The English had their bond servants, whose servitude was limited to a definite point in time.

    Slavery in the US was especially oppressive, and not "traditional" at all.

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  • (Score: 2) by schad on Friday October 19 2018, @05:31PM (4 children)

    by schad (2398) on Friday October 19 2018, @05:31PM (#751039)

    "Slavery" is an umbrella term that means you're forced to work against your wishes. There are additionally several types of slavery. "Chattel" and "traditional" are synonyms for each other, and they do indeed refer to the flavor we had in the US. Other types include indentured servitude, serfdom, and forced marriage.

    Chattel slavery has been pretty much the same everywhere it's been practiced, and it has been practiced in most parts of the world. (Probably all parts; slavery predates written human history.) I think what's throwing you is that past cultures often practiced multiple kinds of slavery at the same time. An educated Greek man enslaved and sent home to tutor the children of rich aristocrats did not have the same life as the million Gallic slaves Julius Caesar brought back with him to Rome.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by ikanreed on Friday October 19 2018, @05:43PM (3 children)

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 19 2018, @05:43PM (#751049) Journal

      That's very close to but not quite true.

      Chattel slavery as practiced in the United States(and some of the other colonial Americas, Brazil and Cuba e..g) was perhaps uniquely barbaric. It was pretty historically unprecedented to ban teaching literacy to slaves in the historical Ottoman, Asian or medival and ancient European varieties of institutionalized slavery. It was also extremely uncommon to have "slave patrols" to gather and return slaves who escaped. It was frequently the case that protections against excessive physical abuse or murder of slaves were encoded in the law. There was about an 80/20 split on freeing children of slaves versus keeping them, but surprise, we ended up on the side that was vile and shitty. Some small percentage of slaves even had mandatory leave and minimal pay, but it'd be dishonest of me to pretend that was the norm.

      Things that were common in every variety of slavery, though: raping slaves, hard manual labor, being forced into the local religion(though, as others noted, this freed you in Islamic slavery), dispassionate lack of care for basic needs.

      • (Score: 1, Flamebait) by VLM on Friday October 19 2018, @08:12PM (2 children)

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 19 2018, @08:12PM (#751129)

        It was pretty historically unprecedented to ban teaching literacy to slaves

        The irony is despite immense staggering levels of social pressure from non-black sources, around 40% of blacks refuse to participate in education and won't graduate high school. Insert anecdote about leading horses to water vs drinking, such that seen from contemporary perspective this is more of a "stop wasting money" argument. Its tragic to whip and beat a white child to stop them from learning to read, but also consider that in the current year the truancy police can't whip and beat black kids enough to get them to attend school long enough to get a "participation trophy" diploma, you kinda have to use a multicultural perspective when analyzing this stuff. To this day, "book store owner" is not a realistic career path in historically black neighborhoods, with minor exception for leftist gentrification regions.

        Also everyone knows the straw dog thats always proposed that there were never any rules in slavery, although a few moments with google show that as you'd expect of a literate euro culture there were in fact tons of laws about slavery; slaves were relatively expensive and valuable property and property attracts laws like flies. Admittedly like all laws ever passed in every culture on the planet, the exact level of enforcement was unclear. And like many laws taken out of historical context, those ancient laws would not be acceptable in the current year; although that's hardly unique to slave law and as such "proves" very little about slavery.

        Another slavery apology straw dogging topic not discussed enough is clearly today any african living in white countries has a staggeringly higher quality of life than those africans still living in Africa, but this was also the situation in the pre-civil war era despite how awful slavery was compared to being white. Yes the quality of life was awful in the south USA, but the quality of life in Africa was even unimaginably worse. The Africans and Jews running the slave business back in Africa were much more ruthless than the average regulated plantation owner, despite how horrible plantation life was.

        The reality of slavery is it was more of a failed immigration policy than anything else.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 20 2018, @04:47AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 20 2018, @04:47AM (#751275)

          The reality of slavery is it was more of a failed immigration policy than anything else.

          Apparently your stupid levels are also too high, I hear they are getting close to brain transplants so maybe you'll get lucky. Failed immigration policy, lolol wtaf?

        • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday October 21 2018, @12:12AM

          by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Sunday October 21 2018, @12:12AM (#751524) Journal

          So what are you saying, VLM? Because this post reads like a gussied-up, lipstick-on-a-pig way of saying "Black people were better off as slaves and should be made slaves again." Only you'd pronounce "black people" with two Gs in it. Who the fuck do you think you're fooling?

          --
          I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
  • (Score: 2) by legont on Friday October 19 2018, @07:24PM (2 children)

    by legont (4179) on Friday October 19 2018, @07:24PM (#751101)

    Furthermore, in classical Rome case a slave could buy himself out. There was in fact a common scam to get Roman citizenship with all associated social protection. Say a Greek or a Jew would sell himself to slavery to a Roman citizen and later on buy himself out with a little premium. Then he would bring his family.

    The current American system is not much different and arguably less humane.

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Friday October 19 2018, @11:26PM (1 child)

      by istartedi (123) on Friday October 19 2018, @11:26PM (#751201) Journal

      Some American slaves bought themselves out too. It wasn't a right though. Your master had to agree to set aside a portion of what you earned for him, account for it, and then sign your papers or something. Because slavery was race-based, there was always the risk of somebody kidnapping you or otherwise refusing to recognize the papers and pulling you back in. It wasn't a foolproof way out, but it happened.

      I'm less familiar with the circumstances under which Roman slaves bought themselves out. Was it a right, or likewise at the whim of a master as in the US?

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 27 2018, @12:25AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 27 2018, @12:25AM (#754308)

        Most of what later became 'traditional slavery' in the US was originally indentured servitude (albeit abused to keep them in defacto chattel slavery) from the 16th to 18th centuries. It wasn't really until the few decades predating the revolutionary war that chattel slavery became the norm during political conflicts between the colonies over indentured servitude, which lead to the chattel slavery decree.

        I can't remember the citations for this right now, but indentured servitude was the norm and the abolishment of it is what lead to the compromise of chattel slavery but only against africans and native americans who hadn't accepted Christ. Everything after that is the history you know, but not the backstory of what lead to it.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @09:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @09:17PM (#751155)

    So what if the slave converts to Islam and gets set free? He has already been castrated. This is why Saudi Arabia is not mostly black African.