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Land of the Serf
A few years ago I was astounded to learn that during the War
Between the States, many slaves fought for the Confederacy. 
It seemed a paradox, as if they were fighting against themselves.
Since then I’ve come to
see that it’s not unusual for slaves to fight for their masters. No
slave system can work unless the slaves accept their servitude and even
regard their masters as benefactors. It’s naive to imagine all
slaves as shackled, grudging, and dreaming of liberty.
Less then a century ago, when
chattel slavery was still rife in Africa (where remnants of it still exist),
an English writer was startled to find that runaway slaves were despised
by other slaves, who regarded them as ungrateful to their masters. This
was true even though slaves were usually acquired in raids by neighboring
tribes, who kidnapped them as infants. Unable to remember their own
parents, they were raised to regard their kidnappers as virtual fathers.
There is ample proof closer to
home. Many Americans see nothing wrong with servitude to the state
— in the forms of military draft, limitless taxes, or what is now
being touted as “national service.” All these things presume
that we belong to the state and must do whatever it demands of us.
In their minds, the state is
within its rights to force young men to fight wars across oceans against
other states that have done them no harm. Of course these young men are
always told that these foreign states are “threats” and
therefore that “we” are fighting for freedom. And of course it
is treason to suggest that there is a certain paradox in being forced to
fight for freedom, let alone that the real enemy of the young men’s
freedom is their own state.
Some Americans think the draft
would be all right as long as it were applied “equally” —
to whites and blacks, to rich and poor, to men and women alike.
![[Breaker quote: Fighting for our masters]](2004breakers/040415.gif) Jefferson, we need you now! Thomas Jefferson himself, as both
slave-owner and politician, would have plenty to answer for, by his own
principles. But that only means that his principles were sound. If Moses
broke the Ten Commandments, they would remain valid.
Are U.S. troops today fighting for
what Jefferson would recognize as freedom? Or are they fighting for an
empire — not only a global military empire, but an enormous
domestic system of unconstitutional laws, taxes, regulations,
bureaucracies, and general infringements of the freedoms our ancestors
took for granted?
The answer is obvious. They are
serfs fighting for servitude. They are fighting for the CIA, the FBI, the
EPA, OSHA, HUD, the Social Security Administration, the departments of
Homeland Security, Education, and Energy, and of course the IRS, to name
just a few agencies. President Bush says they are fighting for freedom.
Jefferson might put it a little differently.
To many Americans, fighting for
the U.S. Government means fighting for “America,” and
America, no matter how tyrannous its government becomes, always
remains, in their minds, a synonym for freedom. Some of these people may
even hate what the government has done to this country, yet they are
always eager to support it when it goes to war — even when war
means new restrictions on freedom at home.
It didn’t start with Rush
Limbaugh. During the War Between the States, Lincoln had thousands of
Northerners arrested and hundreds of newspapers shut down for voicing
Jefferson’s principles. Equating dissent with treason, he created
“democracy” minus the freedoms of speech and press and,
having made the Union a debate-free zone, won reelection in 1864. The
untold story of that war, and its grimmest irony, is the Great
Emancipator’s assault on Northern liberties.
The bold libertarian and
abolitionist Lysander Spooner condemned both sides in that war. The
South, he said, was fighting for chattel slavery, the North for political
slavery.
The North won. Chattel slavery
was abolished. Political slavery prevailed. You may not belong to a private
master, but you very much belong to the state. The chief freedoms you
have left are merely things the government still permits you to do. Even
these permissions are being steadily narrowed and revoked, because they
aren’t yours by right.
Jefferson understood that your
government is, in the nature of things, your natural enemy and must be
kept on a short leash. Today the U.S. Government keeps us all on a short
leash. And some of us, who regard anything short of concentration camps
and torture chambers as mercy, still think this is freedom.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2004 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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