Slavery was once global, though Greece and Rome are remembered as partial exceptions. In our time, only Western Europe has become mostly free, but Nazi Germany intended to push it back into slavery.
Today, the words “slavery” and “slave” are not applied to wholesale slavery of a country.
In Stalin’s Russia, slaves and slavery were used in statements about free countries such as “the slaves of capital,” from which slavery Stalin had allegedly liberated Russia, with the intention to liberate all mankind.
The slavery of classical antiquity is associated with marble buildings for free people built by naked slaves.
Not in Stalin’s Russia. Stalin provided his slaves with what was necessary to keep them from freezing to death, and his subordinates determined all “wages and salaries” as well as the rent they had to pay for one room in what used to be a six-room apartment occupied by one family in old, pre-1917 Russia, now turned communal, shared by six families.
Stalin’s slaves were maintained at a minimum expense, while the bulk of the country’s wealth went into the production of weapons to turn the rest of the free world into Stalin’s global slave country.
Those who were not in Stalin’s concentration (or death) camps or were not shot or tortured to death were paid a bare minimum so they could keep themselves alive and be able to work.
According to Stalin’s culture-propaganda, Stalin’s slaves were the only happy people on earth, the opposite of the “slaves of capital” that they were before 1917 in Russia or that they are in today’s “capitalist countries” of the West.
Freedom in a country implies the freedom of every citizen to get access to independent courts. In New York, I wrote a column criticizing Golda Meir, then the prime minister of Israel, for changing her political views on Stalin, depending on the “political correctness” in approaching a political situation “as of today.”
My sympathies were always with Israel. In one of my articles I wrote for Commentary magazine, I wanted some of Israel’s brightest citizens to take a good look at that monster, Stalin, particularly at how Golda Meir trusted Stalin during her visit to Stalin’s Russia.
Golda Meir sued me for defamation. The New York court concluded that she was wrong. End of the case. I walked home. That was all. I was free.
To ask why slavery exists is the same as would be to ask why theft, murder, and torture exist. Indeed, it is slavery, not freedom, which has existed for millennia and will perhaps exist for millennia, while freedom, a recent social phenomenon even in Western Europe, may disappear everywhere.
What will ultimately win the world over — freedom or slavery?
Freedom is leading in science and technology, since in freedom men or women of genius can work in any field they choose or create, thus jumping ahead of slave countries by many years or decades or centuries.
On the other hand, it is easier for a free person to pass secret military data to a slave country than the other way around, which makes a free country more vulnerable.
The population of the “People’s Republic of China” exceeds that of the United States, the most powerful of the free countries, by 1 billion people. In a slave society, it is possible to turn many of this extra billion of slaves into producers and users of the latest military weapons.
Can the free countries respond? Can the population of India, a free democratic country, be armed and trained by all the other free countries to defend freedom if freedom is attacked by slave countries?
A defender of a free country knows what the free countries are fighting for. A slave fights only because he is forced to fight: If there is no “fight or die” compulsion coming from the slave owner, a slave flees. Where to? To where he will not be a slave.
In the slave countries, slaves keep silent about a possible future collision between their slave states and the free countries, while the citizens of the free countries are free to talk about it.
A free American is free to get the latest news of the possibility of a biggest war in the world history, with the most destructive weapons ever used. The concern of New Yorkers, however, is minimal, as though what is going to happen to them is much further away than the planet Mars.
Yes, the free countries do not take seriously the global danger looming ahead, and the re-election of the current U.S. president will possibly be the most dangerous example of it.
Lev Navrozov can be reached at levnavrozov@gmail.com
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