The barbarians at the gate

There are more slaves in the world today than there ever were when it was legal: probably as many as 27,000,000. As many as 17,000 are brought into the USA annually. There are about a million slaves in Africa and 24 million in Asia. Who are these modern slaves? And I'm not talking about sex slaves although they do exist. Most modern slaves are enslaved due to debts incurred sometimes several generations ago. From People for Sale:

Most people imagine that slavery died in the 19th century. Since 1810, more than a dozen international conventions banning the slave trade have been signed. Yet today there are more slaves than at any time in human history.

And if you’re going to buy one in five hours, you’d better get a move on. First, hail a taxi to JFK International Airport and hop on a direct flight to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The flight takes three hours. After landing, take a tap-tap, a flatbed pickup retrofitted with benches and a canopy, three-quarters of the way up Route de Delmas, the capital’s main street. There, on a side street, you will find a group of men standing in front of Le Réseau (the Network) barbershop. As you approach, a man steps forward: “Are you looking to get a person?”

Meet Benavil Lebhom. He smiles easily. He has a trim mustache and wears a multicolored striped golf shirt, a gold chain, and Doc Martens knockoffs. Benavil is a courtier, or broker. He holds an official real estate license and calls himself an employment agent. Two-thirds of the employees he places are child slaves. The total number of Haitian children in bondage in their own country stands at 300,000. They are restavèks, the “stay-withs,” as they are euphemistically known in Creole. Forced, unpaid, they work in captivity from before dawn until night. Benavil and thousands of other formal and informal traffickers lure these children from desperately impoverished rural parents with promises of free schooling and a better life.

The negotiation to buy a child slave might sound a bit like this:

“How quickly do you think it would be possible to bring a child in? Somebody who could clean and cook?” you ask. “I don’t have a very big place; I have a small apartment. But I’m wondering how much that would cost? And how quickly?”

“Three days,” Benavil responds.

“And you could bring the child here?” you inquire. “Or are there children here already?”

“I don’t have any here in Port-au-Prince right now,” says Benavil, his eyes widening at the thought of a foreign client. “I would go out to the countryside.”

You ask about additional expenses. “Would I have to pay for transportation?”

“Bon,” says Benavil. “A hundred U.S.”

Smelling a rip-off, you press him, “And that’s just for transportation?”

“Transportation would be about 100 Haitian,” says Benavil, “because you’d have to get out there. Plus, [hotel and] food on the trip. Five hundred gourdes”—around $13.

[...]

It would be nice if that conversation were fictional. It is not. I recorded it in October 2005 as part of four years of research into slavery on five continents.

The sad fact is that, while we in the West live in the 21st century, we're only 10% of the world's total population. The other 90% live in varying degrees of societal, political and cultural development all the way from from the Stone Age (in the jungles of Africa, Amazonia and Papua-New Guinea) to an approximation of modernity in the socalled "developing nations" but the vast majority of human beings are still uncivilized barbarians.

Now is not the time to play footsy with these folks. The Muslims are the most bellicose of them (and are still some of the worst modern slave owners and traders as they have always been) but none of them are our equals morally, culturally or politically. Multiculturalism, moral equivalency and their ugly cousin, "political correctness" are quite simply ploys by Western Marxist Fifth Columnists to use the barbarians to destroy freedom and capitalism. The War on Terror is only one facet of the Great War for Civilization which we will be waging for the next few centuries.