The very poorest of the poor,
most of the world, have always had a horrible time.
They have been enslaved, they’ve been indentured,
they’ve had a vile time. They’ve had virtually no rights.
We know that. We know that that was wrong,
because a lot of things that were accepted as normal in the past,
we now view as being completely wrong.
And we have changed that.
Chattel slavery reduced being human beings who had rights.
They might not have been very good rights,
they might not have been very whatever,
but they did have a few basic rights.
One of them was that they owned their own body.
Chattel slavery removed that,
and it reduced human beings to objects,
to cattle, so that if somebody killed a chattel slave,
they didn’t have to stand charge for murder,
which is the killing of a human being.
But they might have owned compensation
to the person who owned that slave.
Slavery has always happened.
We know that. So,
so has happened. That’s not in thing.
It’s always been a thing. Back millennium.
We know that. The problem is
the Industrial Revolution didn’t just industrialize machinery,
it industrialized slavery.
Everybody working, no matter how poor in the industrial revolution,
as I have said,
no matter how badly paid, no matter how few their rights,
technically had a chance to get out of that.
That was not the case for slaves.
They could be killed with impunity
because they were not viewed as Human.
I am always worried about people who refuse to look at the past.
We can’t change the past. We can’t.
We need to look at it with all the nuance
and the messiness that it was
and understand that people had different ethics and morals back then.
But we still need to look at it and see it for what it was.
And I worry about people who don’t want us to look at it,
because I always have a sneaking suspicion they’d like to repeat it.