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Reflections On the Topic of Slavery - Part 3
by Alexandra Pereira
2009-01-10 08:46:18 |
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We know that modern slavery continues around the world, through the exploitation of workers and their lives, sometimes even in the most “civilized” countries. There are a number of ways in which people can be trapped and used in benefit of others, forced to be who they are not, or do things they do not want to do, generally oppressed, and see their most basic freedoms smashed, their lives simply erased from the map of the humanized human beings. You see, we are only human in a social environment – similarly, an environment created by humans can dehumanize us.
 Traffic of slave work, slave women and children continues in our world – all of it, including Europe and the U.S.: and here the trafficked ones are usually foreigners or newcomers, just like the foreigners of the old times, who were captured and enslaved. Some of the last news of 2008 informed us that during 2008 in Brazil, more than 4.000 people were enslaved in plantations of cane sugar, as the government made an incentive to the production of ethanol and inspections to the work conditions somehow… failed. How many millions of workers around the world are forced to comply with and participate in a work system which is far from bringing them satisfaction or a sight of fulfillment?
There are physical, economic, mental, psychological, emotional traps. None of them is good, though the latter are less obvious and equally destructive. As greater work rights tend to be obtained, mental and psychological forms of slavery seem to substitute the old physical abuses in our societies. There are so many – too many – human beings in this world forced to be who they are not, and forced to do things they don’t want to, through many different and abusive methods, and this is a kind of constant slavery, it is a kind of constant trap.
The bloody battle continues, the cruel war continues – it is just under our noses, and often disguised. There’s a silent battle happening, and reclaiming too many victims, between the First and the Third Worlds. There’s a silent battle inside each country right now, usually reclaiming many victims as well, between the members of a small minority who get all the privileges and an exploited majority dreaming about things they will never be able to accomplish or experience. There are vague dreams of a better world, and no practical changes applied to our reality.
 There is a silent and bloody battle happening right now inside each city. There is a silent battle, a cruel one, happening and reclaiming victims inside many families – and it is all part of the same continuum. Violence, exploitation, cruelty and exclusion or ostracism can happen in many forms. The more obvious one is the physical level. To it, you can sum all sorts of emotional and psychological abuses – they don’t necessarily happen together or at the same time, still they are all part of the same problem.
The family is actually one of the most basic cells – I would say the most crucial one – if we want to analyse and find ways to decrease emotional, psychological and physical abuse and exploitation in our societies at large, decreasing thus the suffering of many individuals. Families are the first environment – for the good things and, too many times still, for the worst.
This is where most individuals are raised, where they learn cooperation or how to imitate or replicate deviant and sane behaviours, where narcissistic parents or siblings, husbands and wives can exercise all their torture freely, with guarantees of not leaving behind many compromising or obvious traces which could elicit any legal punishment. This is where violence primarily happens. We are aggressive by nature, but this aggressiveness can be channeled to many alternative and highly constructive ends. It can be transformed. Sometimes siblings are encouraged to fight and put-down systematically other siblings – this is called scapegoating, a prototype for all the wars between brothers around the world. The world is our family, a world free from all kinds of slavery is our responsibility.
 For families and societies, the consequences of this process are devastating, but in different ways. Inside families, the scapegoat(s) feel(s) isolated, betrayed, rejected, blatantly exploited, deprived from the love or support of their most basic belonging group and unrecognized as a human being: dehumanized. Inside societies, we can find quite many current and historical examples of scapegoat groups who are/were dehumanized: including Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, Africans, African Slaves, Christians, Buddhists, Sudanese, Zimbabweans, immigrants, Tibetans, Georgians, etc. These seem to be, nonetheless, interchangeable, something which hardly happens inside families, where a change in the choice of the persecution target is not likely to occur.
Of course interchangeability is not the solution for the problem anyway, it can just represent a momentary relief with nasty side-consequences to someone else. The problem is not seen as a problem by the persecutors, but a solution for their needs, an endless source of bizarre gratifications. Just think about the Israeli missiles in Gaza or the British spreading malaria in Mugabe’s official perspective and seize if they are not momentary relieves. Anyone who refuses to go along and adopt a new scapegoat will be on the top of the list to become the next one. Human cruelty can manifest itself in the most varied ways – still its aim is always the same: domination and exploitation. Dehumanization. Slavery.
 We tend to believe that we are disempowered, the hopes do not exist, the good wishes are just wishes, and we poor helpless beings are condemned to see this silent bloody battle continue while our brothers are enslaved and killed, in many possible ways – and today, more often, in mental ways. We represent collectively the true victims of this battle. Those beliefs are not true, but an illusion. The illusions of disempowerment and loneliness, of unavoidable cruelty and helplessness are mental traps used by persecutors to ensnare and survive effectively through the use of very odd predator methods.
It is our job to build a human society where such methods prove to be unrewarding and, above all, inefficient in terms of human survival. They should just, as a result of our individual and collective development, be turned not functional and useless. Also, will science ever be able to identify very accurately, with physical evidences, the most harmful and deceiving personalities (e.g. identify very precisely psychopaths, sociopaths and very harming narcissists) and correct at least their lack of empathy and guilt and extreme violence, turning them into positive qualities? How would this start to affect a part of the human interactions? All this sci-fi would mean social changes with profound implications in our lives – or is it individual changes with profound implications in our social sceneries? I believe that one would boost the other.
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