For liberty and justice
Addressing the problem of human trafficking
By James Fullmer
From the April 2007 Print Edition
Good historical movies are one of the finer pleasures in life. Apart from the fact that the storylines are often more interesting than any fictional plot we could have invented, there’s a sense of connection, as familiar historical events are brought to life before our very eyes.
Amazing Grace, which hit theaters a little more than a month ago with little fanfare, is no exception. The film is about the life of William Wilberforce, an 18th- and 19th-century British Member of Parliament who made it his life’s work to abolish the slave trade and eventually slavery itself throughout the British Empire.
Wilberforce was a deeply religious man, even more so in reality than in his cinematic portrayal. At one point, he begins to question whether politics is the right place for a man of high morals. His fellow abolitionists told him that he can indeed do both “the work of God” and “the work of a political activist.” In fact, they claimed, he needed to do the second to accomplish the first. And it is with this message that I think Amazing Grace joins Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as a movie that must be watched by those good people who are justifiably disillusioned by politics.
Yet there’s more to this movie than just an optimistic outlook on the power of good people to do great things in the realm of politics. Unfortunately, it’s probably something that a lot of people missed out on. So let me see if I can direct your attention to it.
See, I’m willing to bet that most people who watched that movie left (some even brought to tears) with admiration and awe for Wilberforce and the work he did. Their thoughts probably ran something along the lines of “thank goodness for people like Wilberforce … people like Abraham Lincoln … people like Frederick Douglass; isn’t it great that these great men were able to eradicate slavery from the face of the earth?” And after a few more choice thoughts about the wonderful accomplishments of our forbearers, the erstwhile movie watchers probably went back to their normal lives, completely ignorant of the false premise under which they are laboring. What was the false premise? That slavery has been eradicated.
I’ll say that again, since it’s the type of thing that one might easily skim over and miss completely: Slavery still exists. There are still millions of people enslaved around the world.
I can already hear the incredulous interjections. I’m not using the term “slavery” as a synonym for “child labor” or “poor working conditions” or even “shopping addiction.” I’m using the term “slavery” to mean “the state of a person who is a chattel of another,” with the full approval of Messrs. Merriam and Webster.
Nor am I using the term “millions” lightly (as in, I have “millions” of Facebook friends). According to several scholars’ best estimates, there are 27 million people around the world who currently exist in a state of slavery. For comparison, there were 3.5 million slaves in the South at the beginning of the Civil War.
Slavery today can take many forms. In Mauritania, where Arab families commonly own African slaves, slavery was technically abolished in 1980. However, the only thing that changed was that the government can now better pretend slavery doesn’t exist. After all, it has been abolished, right?
In Thailand, rural girls are lured to the city with promises of good pay and decent jobs but are thrown into a brothel, where they will be kept by force of violence until HIV renders them useless.
In India, whole families are enslaved by debt bondage, with no protection against masters who simply cook the books and never reduce the debt.
In Manchuria, the lucky few North Koreans who are able to escape are often caught and sold as laborers or prostitutes in China or Russia.
These realities are not often talked about. As far as I know, only one of the potential candidates for president in 2008, Senator Sam Brownback — coincidentally dubbed the “Wilberforce Republican” by The Economist — even mentions human trafficking on his Web site.
Fighting slavery is not a partisan issue, nor should it be. As a conservative Republican, though, I’m going to specifically address my fellow conservative Republicans. As far as liberals go, I’ll just say this: If they spent half the time they spend fighting imagined injustices on fighting actual injustices, the world would be a far better place.
It’s always fairly difficult to try to figure out what political party a certain historical figure would belong to if he were alive today, but that usually doesn’t stop people. In the case of Wilberforce, though, I think the GOP has a pretty good claim. Wilberforce famously said, “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.” The term “manners,” in this case, refers to societal decency. From this, we can infer that not only would Wilberforce be lambasted as a member of the religious right, but he would also probably co-sponsor a bill with Hillary Clinton against violent video games. But that’s another topic.
As conservatives, we cannot hide behind the argument that the dictates of the free market are absolutely right. Conservative author Rod Dreher once wrote, “man does not exist to serve the economy, but the economy exists to serve man.” We are free marketers precisely because the market economy is the most moral and efficient way of allocating goods and ensuring a good quality of life. That doesn’t necessarily mean it is perfect, however. The invisible hand, like a visible hand, may once in a while have clumsy fingers. And while we should always be wary of interfering with the market, I think that human slavery is a pretty good example of the economy failing to serve man.
I know a lot of people are going to say that this isn’t our problem. Especially with our continuing presence in Iraq, foreign interventions have lost a bit of their luster and isolationists on the right are becoming more prevalent, but this is our problem. This is our problem because it is our dollars that far too often fund the slaveholders. In his book Disposable People, Kevin Bales notes an old Brazilian proverb: “para Ingles ver,” or “for the English to see,” meaning “to do something for the sake of fooling someone.” In the olden days, the Brazilian slaveholders would pretend that slavery didn’t exist just convincingly enough to assuage the consciences of British businessmen. Today, the same thing goes on, only it is American corporations that are being fooled.
According to World Vision, a humanitarian organization dedicated to improving life for children around the world, one in four “sex tourists” — people who go to countries like Thailand to exploit enslaved prostitutes — is American.
On top of that, this is a problem that exists in America too. The Winter 2007 issue of the Berkeley Political Review takes a look at sexual slavery in San Francisco, noting that there are at least 90 “massage parlors” in the city that likely employ trafficked women.
We must remember that our party was founded to abolish not the capital gains tax nor Islamic fundamentalism but slavery. And it is from that first principle that we continue to derive our inspiration and political guidance. Lincoln once said of the slave that, “in the right to put into his mouth the bread that his own hands have earned, he is the equal of every other man.” We as conservatives believe in liberty, in life, in equal rights, and the vigorous ensuring of the survival of these things.
So what can we, conservatives and liberals, do? First, obviously, just get informed about the issue. Things aren’t going to change as long as we live in ignorance. A great resource for this is the Web site http://www.theamazingchange.com/ — it has a lot of links and information as well as a petition that will be going to Congress. Another good site — http://www.freetheslaves.net/ — is the home page of Free the Slaves, an American-based nongovernmental organization dedicated to fighting slavery worldwide. On campus, clubs such as Liberty in North Korea are leading the way in fighting modern-day slavery.
Colonel Robert G. Shaw, on whom the movie Glory is based, once wrote of the Union struggle in the Civil War, “We fight for men and women whose poetry is not yet written but which will presently be as enviable and renowned as any of them.” Those men and women still exist today. The fight still calls, and we can do something about it.
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