Political Slavery in Our Times
In 1977, East Germany ransomed hundreds of its leading intellectuals and artists to West Germany, partly because it did not wish to endure public criticism by its own citizens during an International Rights Conference. In spite of the human sale, there was no general revulsion against the East German government in the international community. The East German regime was considered by many social scientists to have more legitimacy than the West German government because of its more expansive social welfare system and its grandiose paternalist pretensions. Romania engaged in similar sales during the 1980s with its Jewish and ethnic-German subjects.
How many of its citizens does a government have to sell before it loses legitimacy? How many of its subjects does a government have to sell “on the world market” before all subjects of that government are recognized as essentially slaves? The fact that socialist governments treated their citizens as disposable pawns did not spur any type of backlash from American political scientists against them.
During the 1980–1988 Iraq-Iran war, the Iranian government used thousands of children to clear minefields for its precious tanks. Children were rounded up, given small silver keys to assure them that they would quickly enter Paradise, chained together, and sent to clear minefields in front of Iranian tanks. Older draftees were used in human wave attacks explicitly designed to exhaust the ammunition of Iraqi defenders. If the government possesses the right to throw children into a minefield for the convenience of its military operations, then are not all children slaves of the political rulers?
American conscripts as cannon fodder
American draftees during the Vietnam War were not as damned, but was their fate a difference in degree more than a difference in principle? American politicians claimed that the goal of the U.S. involvement was to prevent the people of South Vietnam from falling under communist tyranny. But politicians relied on conscription — which effectively gave them almost boundless power over the lives of millions of young American males. Had it not been for the military draft — and perennial government lies — presidents Johnson and Nixon and the U.S. Congress could not have squandered the lives of tens of thousands of Americans in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam.
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara described Vietnam as a “social scientists’ war” — and apparently the scientists had a right to deceive the students and send them to their deaths. In his 1995 book, McNamara announced: “Underlying many of these errors [in how the United States conducted the war] lay our failure to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues … associated with the application of military force under substantial constraints over a long period of time.”
But as army major and Gulf War veteran H. R. McMaster, author of the 1997 book Dereliction of Duty, argued, “This [failed war strategy] was not due just to overconfidence, not due just to arrogance, this was due to deliberate deception of the American public and Congress based on the president’s short-term political goals.” McMaster also observed, “The Great Society, the dominant political determinant of Johnson’s military strategy, had nothing to do with the war itself.”
McNamara, in a 1995 interview, justified not being honest with both Congress and the American people regarding the winnability of the war: “I was a servant of our president. He appointed me; he was elected by the people. My obligation to our people was to do what their elected representative wanted.” McNamara also insisted that citizens must obey: “Where you’re asked to follow instructions by an elected representative of your government, follow them…. I believe that we all have an obligation to serve our government or take the penalty, take a jail sentence, if we violate the law.” Apparently, no amount of government lies can reduce the citizens’ obligation to follow government orders.
It was politically cheaper to send tens of thousands of young people to die in vain than to risk being called soft on communism. According to a December 21, 1970, entry in the diary of Nixon White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman:
K [Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser] came in and the discussion covered some of the general thinking about Vietnam and the [president’s] big peace plan for next year, which K later told me he does not favor. He thinks that any pullout next year would be a serious mistake because the adverse reaction to it could set in well before the ’72 elections. He favors instead a continued winding down and then a pullout right at the fall of ’72 so that if any bad results follow they will be too late to affect the election.
When Haldeman’s diary was published posthumously in 1996, Kissinger hotly denied making such comments. The peace treaty was signed in early 1973; South Vietnam was conquered two years later when the North Vietnamese government ignored the treaty and sent its army directly into Saigon.
Politicians frittered away the lives of American soldiers in order to make political statements to the North Vietnamese government and the American people. This illustrates how political slavery differs from economic slavery: few private slaveowners would have cast off their prized possessions in the same cavalier way that American politicians disposed of the lives of conscripts.
Forgotten leashes
Over 400 years ago, French philosopher Etienne de la Boetie observed, “It is fruitless to argue whether or not liberty is natural, since none can be held in slavery without being wronged.” Similar sentiments spurred English thinkers from the 1600s onward, especially equating boundless government power with slavery. John Locke wrote: “Nobody can desire to have me in his Absolute Power, unless it be to compel me by force to that, which is against the Right of my Freedom, i.e., make me a slave.” John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, in Cato’s Letters in 1721, wrote: “Liberty is, to live upon one’s own terms; slavery is, to live at the mere mercy of another.” William Pitt declared that if Americans had submitted to the Stamp Act, they would “as voluntarily to submit to be slaves.” When the Continental Congress issued its formal Appeal to Arms in 1775, it declared, “We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery.” Historian John Phillip Reid wrote, “The word ‘slavery’ did outstanding service during the revolutionary controversy, not only because it summarized so many political, legal and constitutional ideas and was charged with such content. It was also of value because it permitted a writer to say so much about liberty.” Though some of the rhetoric of the 1760s and 1770s is overheated by modern standards, those thinkers recognized what unlimited government power meant to the lives of citizens.
Early Americans had a vivid concept of governmental authorities “going too far.” The early state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights sought to craft institutions to keep government forever humbled to the citizenry. When governments were less powerful in this country, most controversies regarding sovereignty occurred over whether state or federal governments had supreme jurisdiction within their domains. But as government power mushroomed, the issue of sovereignty became far more important. In the same way that every military invasion raises questions of national sovereignty, every regulatory invasion by politicians and bureaucrats must raise questions about the sovereignty of individuals over their own lives. What pretexts justify government massively transgressing the border of the individual’s own life?
In ancient Rome, philosophers debated whether a citizen was still free after he voluntarily sold himself into slavery. Are today’s citizens still free after they effectively vote to make themselves wards of the state? Proliferating paternalistic policies make a mockery of democracy; citizens who cannot choose their own toilets are supposedly free because they may cast ballots for politicians with authority over the appointment of the agency director who is supposed to oversee the bureaucrats who dictate what toilets citizens may buy. Supposedly, as long as the citizens are permitted to push the first domino, they are still self-governing, regardless of how many other government dominos subsequently fall on their heads.
Modern-day slavery
Have we transferred to government the authority that we previously condemned in slaveowners? As Lysander Spooner warned in 1867, “A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years…. What makes them slaves is the fact that they now are, and are always hereafter to be, in the hands of men whose power over them is, and always is to be, absolute and irresponsible.”
Political slavery is revealed at those moments when the path of the citizen and the state cross — when the citizen suddenly becomes aware of his complete legal insignificance.
Slavery is not a question of political intent. The greater the state’s legal superiority over the citizen, the closer the citizen becomes to a slave. Modern political slavery means politicians having absolute power over citizens — the transformation of individual citizens with inviolable rights into mere social, economic, and cannon fodder — disposable building blocks for their ruler’s fame and glory. The question of whether people are essentially political slaves does not turn on how often government agents beat them but rather on whether government agents possess the prerogatives and immunities that allow such beatings at their discretion. The measure of slavery was the extent of the slaveowners’ power, not the number of lash marks on the slave’s back. Slavery is not an all-or-nothing condition. There are different gradations of slavery, as there are different gradations of freedom.
Because they had experienced oppression by the tools of a government an ocean away, the Founding Fathers sought to craft a government that would be forever subservient to the law. If the rulers are above the law, then law becomes merely a tool of oppression. If rulers are above the law, citizens have the same type of freedom that slaves had on days when their masters chose not to beat them.
“Virtues” of slavery
While average folks still intuitively recognize the value of freedom in their own lives, there are plenty of poohbahs promoting slavery. Almost 50 years after the East German regime pawned its intellectuals, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is championing serfdom — at least for the mass of humanity. The WEF promised young people that by the year 2030, “you will own nothing and be happy.” Recent political reforms in many nations have furthered the first promise, ravaging private-property rights and subverting individual independence. Australian senator Malcolm Roberts warned: “The plan of the Great Reset is that you will die with nothing. Klaus Schwab’s ‘life by subscription’ is really serfdom. It’s slavery. Billionaire, globalist corporations will own everything — homes, factories, farms, cars, furniture — and everyday citizens will rent what they need, if their social credit score allows.”
The world’s kingpins will need to tighten all the mental thumbscrews for propertyless serfs to “be happy.” Euphoria could be in especially short supply considering other policies championed at the WEF. “Individual carbon footprint trackers” are a popular panacea at Davos, and the WEF has proposed the “setting of acceptable limits for personal emissions.” How many burps will it take to get sent to reeducation camp? To ensure the accuracy of personal emissions tracking, digital identification will be necessary —perhaps with an RFID chip where the sun doesn’t shine? And don’t forget another WEF pet project —Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), which will empower officialdom to financially destroy uppity citizens whenever they choose. WEF is also a leading cheerleader for censorship — the only way to stop hecklers from referring to it as the “World Enslavement Forum.”
Have the globe’s elite politicians and Lear Jet schemers gone too far? Have the bitter memories of Covid lockdowns and senseless mandates fortified the resistance against further aggrandizement by governments? Can the onslaught of a new slavery be rebuffed while plenty of private citizens still have their own property, free speech, firearms, and the will to resist at any price?
This article was originally published in the April 2025 issue of Future of Freedom.
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