Musings from notes I made with pen and paper whilst sitting beneath the trees in my garden earlier today: When black African people were slaves, few white people considered this wrong. Many of them were Christians. Perhaps they thought that as slavery wasnt condemned in the bible, it was OK with God. The terms used to describe black slaves were redolent of those we use routinely to label the animals we exploit in so many ways - stock , for instance. Black people were property and few thought this was wrong. Vegans believe that owning other animals is wrong. We consider them beings of inherent worth and dignity and that humans have no business breeding millions of them in captivity, solely to use them for something, as if they were objects with no feelings. This was exactly how most civilised white people viewed black slaves at one time. Simply property, an asset, a livelihood. There were kind slave owners who were probably the minority, but it was still enslavement, and still wrong. Black slavery was mainly factory farming human beings to do unpaid labour for their masters and to be sold in markets for a profit. The women were often raped to produce more young slaves for use. (The Nazi regime objectified Jewish people and other inferior beings in the same way. Their skin was used for lampshades etc. It was a byproduct of the slaughter). When the abolitionists started to speak up and the black slaves themselves started to rise up in revolt, there was ferocious opposition and outrage. A war was fought because of it. I can imagine the endless debates over dinner about the crazy abolitionists and how a slave free future would be uneconomic, disastrous to the countryside, result in loss of many livelihoods etc, etc. The elitist attitudes that allowed slavery to be a socially accepted system are still with us. They are enmeshed into our psyche, in part, by the normalising of animal slavery. This idea, which, wherever it came from, is well overdue for abolition in a civilised world, permits the vile attitude that some beings are less than to simmer on the backburner of human consciousness. When we eradicate that, perhaps we will be nearer an end to wars and genocide which have, at root, the idea that some lives are much more important that other lives.
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 12:23:06 +0000
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