AHC: More societies willing to address their own slavery in recent history

Some organizations (Walk Free is one) claim that there are great number of slaves in India still. Do you know the basis for the alleged continuance of slavery there? Racial, caste-based, religious-based, etc?


In short modern slavery is vulnerability based. Criminal gangs of traffickers typically target the poor (as they have kin with the fewest resources to effect recovery) and uneducated (as they are least likely to know they have rights let alone what they are) but any sufficiently displaced person can be vulnerable. They have little idea of who to turn to, maybe lack the local language and are not able to identify their captors relationship with the authorities meaning they are as often frightened of seeking help as of the situation they are in.

India has a particular problem as its wide disparity of regional languages means persons can be transported a relatively short distance to achieve the displacement effect however no where is immune not America not Britain (a recent case near where I live involved conscripted Chinese denied pay and held against their will, another case involved Ukrainians in Lincolnshire and so on), you have African women trafficked into prostitution in Spain and Brazil and other countries and so on and so forth.

It may be illegal but slavery is still alive and kicking.
 
The issue of a "moral high horse" isn't the issue. Without stooping to Muslim-bashing (which I don't subscribe to), there is in some quarters a view that slavery is not only justified by, but even an inherent part of, Islam.

Here is the notorious 2003 quote from Saleh Al-Fawzan's fatw (he was then a member of the Senior Council of Clerics, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious body): "Slavery is a part of Islam. Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long there is Islam."

Now, perhaps some believe that slavery is somehow "worse" if the particular justification is one thing rather than another. But I think this is a case of pursuing one's partisan views at the expense of the recognition that slavery is slavery.

Well I think it is in relation to the original question. We got a bit away from that, partially thanks to me, in arguing which kind of slavery was "worse" a cesspool of a question if ever there was one and best left at the wayside.

The reason I bring up the "high horse" is that it's the main reason, IMHO, that America's slave past is so much more investigated. When the Soviets mentioned "and you are lynching negroes" this had nothing whatsoever to do with black people. It was because America started criticizing the USSR's human rights record. When China releases a human rights report on the US, it's not because they're concerned on a moral level it's because of the presumption of the US in issuing human rights judgments on the rest of the world. I mean, what if one of us started issuing reports on the quality of other members posts? How would the other members react? Basic human nature leads one to want to knock others off a pedestal they place themselves on.

Even leaving aside whether the US is actually this way or if it's just perception, I think we can all agree that it is at least a widely held perception that the US claims moral superiority. People react to that the way people always have done, by trying to knock the US off its perceived pedestal. So the only way the Muslim world would start to investigate its slave past is if it was also on a widely perceived moral high horse and people felt the need to take potshots.
 
I agree with you in general.
But the analogy is a false one: there were no cops busting molesters before that.

It still rings remarkably hollow. After the British got rich off of it they abolished the slave trade and demanded that no one do it anymore. There's just a blatant hypocrisy there. Especially because semi-slavery conditions continued in the British empire for decades.
 
Even leaving aside whether the US is actually this way or if it's just perception, I think we can all agree that it is at least a widely held perception that the US claims moral superiority. People react to that the way people always have done, by trying to knock the US off its perceived pedestal. So the only way the Muslim world would start to investigate its slave past is if it was also on a widely perceived moral high horse and people felt the need to take potshots.

You're missing something very important: South African apartheid. People around the world are familiar with two episodes of racial discrimination and exploitation through legal exclusion: slavery and Jim Crow in the US, and apartheid in South Africa. South Africa never issued reports about other countries' human rights records.
 
In short modern slavery is vulnerability based. Criminal gangs of traffickers typically target the poor (as they have kin with the fewest resources to effect recovery) and uneducated (as they are least likely to know they have rights let alone what they are) but any sufficiently displaced person can be vulnerable. They have little idea of who to turn to, maybe lack the local language and are not able to identify their captors relationship with the authorities meaning they are as often frightened of seeking help as of the situation they are in.

India has a particular problem as its wide disparity of regional languages means persons can be transported a relatively short distance to achieve the displacement effect however no where is immune not America not Britain (a recent case near where I live involved conscripted Chinese denied pay and held against their will, another case involved Ukrainians in Lincolnshire and so on), you have African women trafficked into prostitution in Spain and Brazil and other countries and so on and so forth.

It may be illegal but slavery is still alive and kicking.

It's also worth noting that isn't that different than slavery throughout history. Slavery has always been vulnerability based. It's just changed somewhat how it works in a modern context where it has to be under the table.
 
The reason slavery is a greater issue in the US than the rest of the world is that there is a large population in the US that are the descendants of the enslaved. In other societies, those descendants either don't exist (castration of eunuchs) or the descendants are blended in with everyone else.

The US is also unique in that it promotes itself as a champion of democracy, liberty, and civil rights, so the discontinuity between that image and having slaves is obvious. Brazil also has lots of descendants of former slaves, but 1) Brazil doesn't constantly promote itself as a champion of liberty, and 2) early on it tried to obscure differences in race (which it did legally, but seems to have kept socially) while the US continued to insist on racial distinctions. So while there are Brazilians interested in addressing this aspect of their past, from what I understand it is not prominent - at least not as prominent in the US.

In Western civilization overall, the anti-slavery movement is based strongly on Christian humanist concepts, and it has a guilt culture. So while the West was at the forefront of the anti-slavery movement, its guilt culture also causes it to obsess over it.

If we compare to Muslim societies, we have almost none of this. First, there is no population obviously identifiable as descending from slaves. Male slaves were often castrated so they could leave no descendants. Female slaves, if they became pregnant was likely from their owners, and their children would likely not be kept in bondage but freed - especially in the long term. Being quickly assimilated into the population, such descendants would likely not want to emphasize their slave origins. That means there are not people within those societies reminding people of any historical injustice. Second, there is not the moral impetus against slavery in Muslim societies than there became in the West. The same strictures that promoted some better treatment of slaves are the same ones used to justify slavery as natural and legitimate. So Muslim societies aren't hung up about it. Lastly, most Muslim societies are still shame based and not guilt based. So even if they do disapprove of slavery, there is no psychological issues that require addressing it.

The issue isn't really why aren't other societies willing to address past slavery in their countries/culture. It is why is this really an issue in the US (and to a lesser extent, other Western cultures) at all today? It's an issue because it serves someone's current political agenda. It's not about the past. It's about the present.
 
It still rings remarkably hollow. After the British got rich off of it they abolished the slave trade and demanded that no one do it anymore. There's just a blatant hypocrisy there. Especially because semi-slavery conditions continued in the British empire for decades.

I'm no big fan of the British Empire, but I'm not willing to go this far. The push to abolish slavery was indeed ethics-driven; it wasn't simply a case of everyone getting together and deciding "We've gotten everything possible out of slavery, so let's get out now and pretend we're morally superior ".

Of course, that relatively early abolition HAS given some later Britons an excuse to push their history of slavery under a rug. But that's not the fault of those who originally secured abolition.

It is also true that the "coolie" system replaced slavery as a way to continue with exploitative labor. But this isn't unique -- the sharecropping system was largely this way (at least at first) in the American South, and Spanish colonials also found exploitative "substitutes" after slavery was officially outlawed, IIRC.

So while I agree that relatively early abolition doesn't earn the British Empire a Snowy Mantle of Purity (TM) and a pass on criticism of its history of slavery, it does deserve some credit.
 
If we compare to Muslim societies, we have almost none of this. First, there is no population obviously identifiable as descending from slaves. Male slaves were often castrated so they could leave no descendants. Female slaves, if they became pregnant was likely from their owners, and their children would likely not be kept in bondage but freed - especially in the long term. Being quickly assimilated into the population, such descendants would likely not want to emphasize their slave origins.

I've read that slaves were imported into Muslim lands at roughly a 2:1 female to male ratio. There was no real effort to create a self-sustaining slave population, perhaps because the sources of supply were relatively nearby.

Also, many of the males that were brought in were used in swamp draining, mines, and other gang-work efforts with a high mortality rate. Many others were used as soldiers, with a high death rate and fewer chances for procreation.
 
A major driver of British abolitionism wasn't the suffering of the slaves but the corruption of the masters, we can't have respectable and well to do people engaging in such a grubby business so we better abolish it. Once slavery was abolished these reformed turned on penal transportation, in particular the 'putting out' system whereby convicts were placed under the control of free settlers and subject to their whims, which was also considered corrupting on the otherwise upstanding free settlers. Once transportation ended the descendants of convicts and Government authorities did their best to cover up the convict past so that it didn't jepordise their future. This was pretty easy because so many ex convicts and their descendants had made good in Australia. Its only now that people are becoming proud of convict heritage, in part because of a widespread perception that the majority of the crimes were petty so these convict ancestors weren't bad people per se. Perhaps this situation is akin to the absorbtion of the freed slave classes outside the US, where many slave descendednts have made good there is no great need to dredge up and minutely examine the past, its only required where the former slave class hasn't done well.
 
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