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 st
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
