On Sun, 22 Feb 1998, Bruce Miller wrote:

> Bill,
>
> You're concise definition of slavery, "one group of humans
> systematically degrading another for profit" misses the point. Slavery
> is about forceful exploitation, not degradation. Slavery is degrading
> because it callously utilises man as an expendable commodity. But
> degradation was merely coincidental to the goals of slavers.
>

Surely the absolutely central point about slavery was that one person
or organisation (in the economic sense) claimed to OWN as a chattel the
slave, and to have all rights of property (particularly of buying and
selling him/her to others) over that "chattel".  (In my first museum job -
at the greatly under-rated and little known Hull, England, Wilberforce
House Museum (first opened in 1905 as a museum of slave emancipation)
there are many auction posters for sales in which slaves were clearly
being presented as of less interest than e.g. a particularly good horse.

There is surely a significant comparison with the Holocaust, though
perhaps a rather different one that that raised so far.  The issue is not
a comparison with "Holocaust Denial", but surely a recognition that
claiming to own someone as property and to be able to buy and sell them
represents a quite different order of degradation than the sort of
(mere) gross economic exploitation and degrading of humans for profit?
The latter has happened (and continues to happen) without the factory
owner or whoever claiming they have the right to buy and sell the workers.

In the same way, even in this century alone probably far more died in
total in numerous other cases of gross genocide than the six million
murdered in the Nazi Holocaust, but the calculating ruthlessness and State
organisation of the Holocaust places that in a totally different category
of infamy. Equally, a system based on purported ownership of and trade in
human beings was surely far more than Bill's "one group of humans
systematically degrading another for profit".  Surely the slave trade and
slavery system was more than just a "DEGRADING" of those captured or born
into slavery?

Patrick Boylan