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the iron horse

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Slavery Still Continues

It is estimated that up to 27,000,000 people live in slavery today. It includes men and women who are forced to work in sweatshops.

It includes traditional chattel slavery in countries like Niger, Chad and the Sudan.

It includes girls and young women forced into prostitution in Asia.

And more

All races of people, thoughout history, have been subjects of slavery.

It still continues today with almost no outcry.
 
Without sounding racist have white people been slaves apart from as POW'S ?
 
vaz02 said:
Without sounding racist have white people been slaves apart from as POW'S ?

I'm sure there have been. If we're counting prostitution and sweatshops, etc there have been micro examples of white slavery, but I can't think of any large scale examples. Off the top of my head...
 
the iron horse said:



I posted this thread.


Have you seen this issue addressed on any local or national news lately?

I know you posted this thread. Some form of this thread has been posted earlier today in the valentine thread and periodically ever since I've been a memeber.

The problem is, posting it isn't enough, and you're throwing several issues into one.

The issue of sweat shops needs to be addressed seperately from the issue of prostitution, etc.

This is what I'm getting at and trying to get you to think about.
 
The problem is, posting it isn't enough, and you're throwing several issues into one.

The issue of sweat shops needs to be addressed seperately from the issue of prostitution, etc.

This is what I'm getting at and trying to get you to think about.



I am thinking and troubled,

and believing it will all be set right one day.
 
There are slaves in North America too, sex slaves and forced labour. There has been the odd story in Canada addressing the issue. I have seen a couple of documentaries addressing the issue and a couple of films about the topic.

Eastern Europe has a massive sex slave industry luring women into false jobs and trapping them in slavery.

I don't think it captures the attention of Western media because it's hidden so well by the perpetrators that we don't see it as a mainstream crime in our society. But you are right it is outrageous that in 2007 this continues. Many countries where this originates are barely maintaining a civil governing system so this isn't a priority for their legal systems. Other countries just don't make it a priority.
 
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Re: Slavery Still Continues

the iron horse said:

It still continues today with almost no outcry.

Perhaps it's because all of the slavery you've mentioned exists "underground" and illegally. Is there any country left in the world that still allows and protects legal slave ownership?
 
vaz02 said:
Without sounding racist have white people been slaves apart from as POW'S ?

Yes, for example in the time of the Roman empire.
Later, in the middle ages, they were called villeins or bondsmen and served the local Earl, Duke or whoever owned the peace of land.
They weren't called slaves, but that's something we do even today... just create an euphemism.
 
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Vincent Vega said:


Yes, for example in the time of the Roman empire.
Later, in the middle ages, they were called villeins or bondsmen and served the local Earl, Duke or whoever owned the peace of land.
They weren't called slaves, but that's something we do even today... just create an euphemism.
Not to mention the taking of slaves by the Barbary Pirates all the way up to Ireland
 
The Vikings held slaves as well. But sometimes they released them when they became good friends or did some good.

I would say, whenever someone takes another one's rights and makes him to his serf, who has to do what he gets told, and has no rights, that's slavery.
Serf is just an euphemism, as we use conflict to avoid the term war.
 
vaz02 said:
Were serfs in russia slaves ?
I think that's basically the same thing as what Vincent's describing, isn't it? At least here in the US, history textbooks generally use 'serf' to refer to what he's calling 'villeins or bondsmen'--I realize the Russian equivalent was somewhat different, but I thought they were still more or less the same system (feudalism). Anyhow I've read discussions comparing serfdom to slavery before, and my impression is they're similar enough to make a 'yes or no' answer difficult. As I understand it, serfs weren't per se the property of their manor lords (they couldn't be sold on the market, for example), so in that sense it's not like slavery as we generally understand it. However, legally they were considered to literally be part of his land holdings--they couldn't leave and go work for someone else, and neither could their children; they got only what food and shelter and garden plots of their own he afforded them, and had to do whatever work he wanted them to do.
maycocksean said:
Is there any country left in the world that still allows and protects legal slave ownership?
No. Although as trevster pointed out, most of the countries where these kinds of things are happening on a wide scale barely have functioning governments anyway (or they're functional only in certain areas of the country) and don't have the resources they'd need to put a stop to it--assuming the political will is there to begin with. Sexual trafficking and much sweatshop labor as well are often internationally coordinated rackets (not with the blessing of international law, of course) which makes them very difficult to uproot too.




Here's a website that seems to have links to many NGOs etc. involved with the topic, as well as lots of information and some campaigns of their own.
 
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Villein and Bondsman were the terms I got for the German word "Leibeigener". :)

The only way that time to get free from your owner was to get into a city and live there for over one year. It was a strange system, because in that time everybody could throw you out the city, but on the same time you had to find work, and you somehow had to show in the end that you have lived in the city for over one year (in the area of today's Germany it was one year, six weeks and three days).

They didn't sell you, that's right. There was no slave market or something, but considering that these people weren't free people and their whole life and survival depended on the goodwill of the landowner I wouldn't say there is any difference to slavesthat would necessarily demand a distinction between these terms.

So the original question was if whites ever have been slaves on a big scale, it's a clear yes, and it started with the Greek and Roman empires and ended somewhere in the late middle ages, early new times.
 
Has slavery always been exclusive to agrarian-type societies, or have there been cases of slaves used in urban settings, doing more manufacturing-type labor? Other than the obvious sweatshops of course.

I ask because while those of us up North like to wax superior about how "the South" were barbaric slave-owners while our ancestors up here were so much better/more enlightened. the historically accurate answer seems to be that slavery just wasn't practical up North, economically. Ive even read that paying dirt wages up North was actually less costly than providing for slaves in one's possession. So if it costs X per day to maintain a slave, you'd be better off playing <X per day for the same work and sending them home to poverty. Gotta love capitalism huh? :angry:
 
In the Roman empire slaves did every work there was. The rich patricians bought slaves to do the work, which included housework, teaching, manufacturing, agrarian work, builiding, just everything. Patricians didn't work, because they had their slaves. The only thing they did was making a career as a politician, in the military or selling what their slaves produced. And in the meantime they enjoyed themselves.
It was basically the same in the Greek empire, or more accurately said, the Greek city states.

Later in the middle ages that changed because Christianity set different values on work and people, and the influences of the Roman empire was abandoned.
The people that came from the east, the so-called barbarians (the Romans called every people that didn't belong to their empire barbarian), valued people differently as well.
When the aristocracy and the cities established, the whole society changed, and the only ones that remain unfree were the uneducated that lived outside the cities, where the landowner owned all the land and the people that lived there.
Later, after the reformation started by Martin Luther, it was also that the religion of the Earl, Duke, or whatever rank the landowner was, was automatically the religion of the people living there.
 
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article2303020.ece

Sex traffic: Danielle was 15 when she was sold into slavery in the UK
A major report into trafficking of thousands of children into sexual slavery in Britain. By Sophie Goodchild and Kurt Barling
Published: 25 February 2007

Danielle was excited at the prospect of leaving her home in Lithuania for a summer job in Britain at the age of 15. The work had been arranged through a friend who was unable to join Danielle until later and so put her in touch with a man who would take her to London.

Danielle suspected nothing until the stranger took her passport once they passed through customs and left her with two Albanians and a Lithuanian woman. It turned out that she had been sold for £3,500. The "holiday job" was working in a brothel in Birmingham.

"I was terrified but didn't know how I could escape. I spoke no English and knew no one," says Danielle who did eventually flee back home to Vilnius but is still terrified of the traffickers. She is now 18.

Thousands of children have been sold into sexual slavery in Britain according to human rights organisations, and many, like Danielle, have been trafficked from abroad. Until now, exact figures on the scale of this abuse have not been available. But a report published by social research charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) tomorrow says the figure is 5,000 and most are girls. The study reveals that, 200 years after the slave trade was officially abolished, trafficking for sexual exploitation, domestic servitude and enforced labour is destroying young lives.

Police and human rights organisations warn that coercing vulnerable people into degrading or low-paid work and holding them against their will has increased massively over the past nine years. Cheap travel, the lure of easy profits and increased demand for sex services are all factors that have turned the modern slave industry into a £5bn-a-year business, second only to the illegal drugs trade.

Nearly half of those trafficked end up being sold for sex; these are overwhelmingly women and children. The typical age of a trafficked woman is between 18 and 23 but many are passed off as 18-year-olds when they are actually younger. More than three-quarters of women working in off-street massage parlours have been trafficked into prostitution. The men who control them will make them have sex with 10 clients a day then pass them on over and over again to other slavemasters. Threats of violence against their families guarantee their silence.

Trafficking gangs have a firm foothold in the poorest countries, including parts of Africa and Eastern Europe, where people can be ensnared by the promise of a better life.

Italy and Spain have always been the popular destinations for Romanian traffickers. But the UK is fast emerging as a new market. Exploiting women for sex is big business in Romania where the average wage is £100 a month. Here pimps are known as "fish",re especially in the small town of Cernavoda, tucked away in the country's poor south-eastern corner, where many of the town's single male inhabitants, and even married ones, have turned to pimping. The main legitimate source of employment is working at the nuclear plant whose reactors dominate the town's skyline. But jobs here are scarce and only for those who pass school exams.
 
It's believed that someone from Birmingham who was lost in a Caribbean Island was sold into slavery. She was lost two years ago.
 
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