I was perusing through Frederick Douglas'
My Bondage and my Freedom and noted a passage from a speech he gave at Finsbury Chapel in England, which was included in the appendix. Setting out to define the institution of slavery in precise terms, he argued that cruelty was one of its essential attributes.
Of all things that have been said of slavery to which exception has been taken by slaveholders, this, the charge of cruelty, stands foremost, and yet there is no charge capable of clearer demonstration, than that of the most barbarous inhumanity on the part of the slaveholders toward their slaves. And all this is necessary; it is necessary to resort to these cruelties, in order to make the slave a slave, and to keep him a slave.... If it be right to hold slaves at all, it is right to hold them in the only way in which they can be held; and this can be done only by shutting out the light of education from their minds, and brutalizing their persons. The whip, the chain, the gag, the thumb-screw, the blood-hound, the stocks, and all the other bloody paraphernalia of the slave system, are indispensably necessary to the relation of master and slave. The slave must be subjected to these, or he ceases to be a slave.
The genocide in Sudan has been occupying my thoughts lately, and as I was pondering the horror of concentration camps that have been erected in Darfur (see this
DU thread), and the meaninglessness of phrases like "never again," Douglas' words struck a chord. What if concentration camps are indispensably necessary to the world system? What if the world's polities are constituted in such a way as require or even tend towards massive displacements of people and the imposition of cruel living conditions, if not death?
Some will argue about the terms being used: Concentration camps, internment camps, detention camps, refugee camps, relocation camps, prison camps, labor camps, death camps. Certainly one can draw meaningful distinctions. However, the perpetrators of atrocities rely upon euphemestic language to disguise their crimes, and people who have been driven into barbed-wire enclosures may be especially vulnerable to acts of brutality. Perhaps there is an index of misery and death that would demarcate the boundary between a refugee camp and a concentration camp. I wouldn't know. Or perhaps it's a question of intent, or policy. At a certain point it becomes moot. After all, is humanity any better for the fact that Anne Frank died in a Nazi labor camp rather than a death camp?
Seeing that the instruments of mass extermination are all around us, I wonder if there is a dialectic that would give them meaning. In Douglas' world, there was the master/slave dialectic. Does that still obtain? Or are there other dialectics, forces, polarities? Citizen/Alien, Us/Them, Insider/Outsider, Believer/Infidel.... Has the world's political culture evolved to the point where the humanity of the Other is universally acknowledged and respected, or is dehumanization truly necessary to our way of doing business? I don't know anymore.
Another passage from Douglas' speech:
I may be asked, why I am so anxious to bring this subject before the British public-why I do not confine my efforts to the United States? My answer is, first, that slavery is the common enemy of mankind, and all mankind should be made acquainted with its abominable character. My next answer is, that the slave is a man, and, as such, is entitled to -your sympathy as a brother. All the feelings, all the susceptibilities, all the capacities, which you have, he has. lIe is a part of the human family. Hie has been the prey -the common prey -of christendom for the last three hundred years, and it is but right, it is but just, it is but proper, that his wrongs should be known throughout the world. I have another reason for bringing this matter before the British public, and it is this: slavery is a system of wrong, so blinding to all around, so hardening to the heart, so corrupting to the morals, so deleterious to religion, so sapping to all the principles of justice in its immediate vicinity, that the community surrounding it lack the moral stamina necessary to its removal. It is a system of such gigantic evil, so strong, so overwhelming in its power, that no one nation is equal to its removal. It requires the humanity of christianity, the morality of the world to remove it. Hence, I call upon the people of Britain to look at this matter, and to exert the influence I am about to show they possess, for the removal of slavery from America.
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