On page 606, Maureen has a moral and ethical dilemma about slavery. She says, “If all we can afford is slavery, then keep them as slaves. And put them to work so we can afford something more.\u00a0 Only we don’t call them slaves, either, because that makes it too easy to think like a slavemaster. We can put them to work, but we call them prisoners of war and we treat them as prisoners of war”.<\/p>\n
When we touched on this in class, I had just left another class discussion on the reclassification of labor during Reconstruction after the Emancipation Proclamation in our own country.\u00a0 In the south, after the abolition of slavery, many African Americans were arrested for minor offenses and purposely sentenced for long periods of excruciating labor.\u00a0 In this way, the individual, the person was valued at nothing.\u00a0 I’m not advocating slavery, but during that period the individual was extremely important.\u00a0 If a slave master lost a slave, he lost an actual monetary amount.\u00a0 There was some sort of incentive to at least keep their slaves within boundaries of an “acceptable” workload.\u00a0 When the shift occurred from slave labor to convict labor, there were absolutely no boundaries.\u00a0 With this quick shift of semantics it was possible to arrest a child, as young as six in some cases, and literally work them to death.\u00a0 There was no one to concern themselves with the welfare of these prisoners, and many died of diseases not even work related. It was pretty abysmal to say the very least.<\/p>\n
Since the New Brotherhood Cannibal Angels of God Army became the Stronghold’s “prisoners of war”, I see their fate being the same as what has happened in American history.\u00a0 These prisoners are only extra labor to the Stronghold.\u00a0 Before they had acquired them they were doing all the work, and successfully so, themselves.\u00a0 Did Maureen really make the right decision by deciding to call them prisoners only? Weren’t they still treated like slaves? I feel like there is no justification in utilizing this euphemism when they ignore it entirely.\u00a0 Does it even make it a euphemism in this case, or is it creating a new definition of what a prisoner is in this new world after Hammerfall?\u00a0 Or maybe this new world releases the moral implications of completely controlling another life as we witnessed with the cannibals? Maybe I’m the only one worried that the children that control the lightning also control slaves…I mean, prisoners of war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On page 606, Maureen has a moral and ethical dilemma about slavery. She says, “If all we can afford is slavery, then keep them as slaves. And put them to work so we can afford something more.\u00a0 Only we don’t call them slaves, either, because that makes it too easy to think like a slavemaster.… Continue reading Slavery Versus Prisoner Labor<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[13],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":377,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372\/revisions\/377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}