this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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I feel like that one could go wrong. There's regions where slavery is still de-facto legal, isn't it awful to just let that slide as their opinion?
You mean the United States of America, right? Because slavery is still legal here.
Sure, if you count prisoners. The US has a ridiculous prison population and a lot of them are made to work; sometimes even for private entities.
Point made, back to the topic.
Isn't slavery universally panned, though?
Nope. Well, mostly, but there are a few regions where the tradition is still going. Mauritania only banned slavery in like 2003, and the law is basically a joke. Foreign journalists will tell stories about visiting and being served by rough people dressed in rags, until the host notices them staring and gets nervous.
The gulf states are also famous for having slaves, although in that case it has more to do with cost savings and a lack of scruples, and I don't think they would call them slaves, just workers-who-have-to-work-and-can't-leave. There's various forms of forced labour in probably most places too, but it's a matter of definition if prison labour or indentured labour count as slavery (which is usually what they're counting when they put out figures with a giant number of modern slaves).
I wonder what it would take to completely erase the practice from the human condition.
A few more decades, assuming all goes well and there's a crackdown on places like the gulf (that situation only exists because the US military umbrella protects the local royals). Mauritania is not a populous country, and in other poor countries you have to go seriously backwoods before people are able to even somewhat-openly keep slaves, so it's not like the progress made is negligible.
And of course there's cases where some guy (or guys) lock somebody in their basement, but if it's ended and the offenders punished immediately upon it coming to light, I'd argue we should count that as a sort of background noise that can't be avoided.