Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Support the Wilberforce!


Many people find it hard to believe that slavery still exists. Whether it's bonded slavery with men, women and children toiling on plantations, in rice mills, brick kilns and many other industries; or, the deplorable and prevalent trade in humans to serve as sex slaves, slavery is flourishing in many parts of the world. It is still every bit as ugly as it was 200 years ago and it must end.

“In the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass and some other former slaves and abolitionists understandably objected when people extended the term ‘slavery’ to factory workers and other groups who, even if brutally exploited, were not deprived of membership in a family and did not pass on to their children an inherited status as private property. Scholars, reformers, and diplomats still debate the inclusiveness pf the term ‘slave.’ The issue has become more complex given the fact that inmates of the Soviet gulags or Nazi concentration camps were totally expendable in the eyes of the authorities. Chattel slaves [i.e. regarded as an object of personal property; owned] at least represented a valuable investment, an investment of rising value in much of the New World, but that slightly protective aspect of chattel slavery was absent from twentieth-century “state slavery” and does not apply to many millions of bonded and coerced workers in today’s so-called developing world.

Learn more about the Wilberforce!

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