Slavery is an ancient and evolving economic system,
that every empire in history has made itself great on.
Systems of slavery are about money, power, and markets
-how else were domestic slaves to be acquired and sold?
Nowadays slavery is perpetuated by theft of the person
through the already diminished civil liberties of those
about to become enslaved: The levels of domedtic slavery
are the measure of the inequality, within any given society.
In ancient times, with domestic slavery, the proximity of slave
to owner within the same dwelling made many masters
who thought well of themselves think well of thier servant,
whom they had to trust when the task was important enough.
Industrial slavery, like the trade in slaves as commodities
from the sixteenth century onward by European countries
was spectacularly amoral in robbing the slaves of the names
their tribe gave them, as slavemasters sold them on.
By then slaves were a currency to be sold and bought
by the masters of the slave trade who set the calendar
slaves lived by, and printed Bibles for mission societies
to give to the slaves who could read that made the slaves
even more submissive, because with what they read
what they did not know was that their Bible had been edited
to remove from it any section that made rebellion from slavery
part of human history. Finally slave owner were responcible
for making thier slaves have sex and breed to create more owned
human beings, whilst upholding the superiority of having a white skin
also having coercive sex with slaves which perpetuated the paradoxical position
of creating many children where the colour of their skin varied awayt from white,
thus multiplying between white people the shame and fear of misceganation.
All this and much more could be filed under the confusion St Paul
admitted to where in Romans he wrote 'I do not understand what I do/
For what I want to do I do not do/but [I do] what I hate I do',
where he was writing about sin, not about the hubris of slavery
or the history of sorely mistaken race relations, through which,
still we seek some enobling grace by which to live beyond conflict.
