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August 08, 2003
Corrupt living at Club Guantanamo?
Conditions are so appalling at the American "torture camp" at Guantanamo that a Russian mother wants her son to be allowed to stay there: "I am terribly scared of a Russian prison or Russian court for my son," Amina Khasanova was quoted as saying by Gazeta newspaper on Friday. Hey, I thought we were supposed to be mean and brutal. What's going on down there? You can read the whole thing here. The Romans used to enslave those captured POWs who were not killed outright. The more intractable warriors deemed unfit for domestic service were sent to the arena to be used as gladiators. There were problems with this, of course, as the following piece shows: The agricultural slaves were captives who spoke many different languages so that they could not understand each other, or they were born slaves; they had no solidarity to resist oppression, no tradition of rights, no knowledge, for they could not read nor write. Although they came to form a majority of the country population they never made a successful insurrection. The insurrection of Spartacus in the first century B.C. was an insurrection of the special slaves who were trained for the gladiatorial combats. The agricultural workers in Italy in the latter days of the Republic and the early Empire suffered frightful indignities; they would be chained at night to prevent escape or have half the head shaved to make it difficult. They had no wives of their own; they could be outraged, mutilated and killed by their masters. A master could sell his slave to fight beasts in the arena. If a slave slew his master, all the slaves in his household and not merely the murderer were crucified. In some parts of Greece, in Athens notably, the lot of the slave was never quite so frightful as this, but it was still detestable. To such a population the barbarian invaders who presently broke through the defensive line of the legions, came not as enemies but as liberators. 5Hey, don't get me wrong; I am all for Classical Values, but I think in the case of slavery we had the right idea in getting rid of it. Slavery caused the Romans a lot of problems, and many have argued that it prevented the development of a modern free economy. (Much more recent history shows a close association between slavery and a stagnant economy.) Are our Guantanamo prisoners getting a taste of too much freedom? If so, it would be very dangerous if they returned home -- because they could be a corrupting modern influence. (A primary reason why Stalin sent repatriated POWs straight to Siberia.) posted by Eric on 08.08.03 at 06:06 PM |
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