[discostu]

That's the trouble they got themselves into. I would never defend ANYTHING based on racial inferiority. Once they started trying to defend slavery that way we know that the south had perverted slavery into something very different than most other cultures have, and they knew it. Unfortunately that had a very nasty snowball, once you start defending your excesses by branding a race inferior you open the door to more and worse excesses.

We have to keep in mind that there hasn't been any time in recorded human history without slavery somewhere on this planet, including now. There's got to be something good about this system, the only other thing that has permeated human history so thuroughly is religion. Now we might not like the style of it, but we also get a very different view of slavery. Our knowledge is based almost exclusively on southern race based no way out slavery, which was an aberation in the realm of slavery. We also have an unrealistically brutal view of slavery thanks to things like Roots, a view that is not held up by the historical record.

Reduced down to it's basic form all slavery is, all it's ever been, is an exchange of labor for room and board. At some points in history that relationship was entered into involuntarily and sometimes voluntarily. But it's really not all that different from the laborer relationship we see defined without the word slavery. We all work for room and board, but non-slaves get to pick their room and board and slaves have that decision made for them.

[Ditto]

There's got to be something good about this system, the only other thing that has permeated human history so thuroughly is religion.

I disagree that there is anything good about it. I liken it more to things like rape or pillage --- they still exist and have existed all through history only because some are more powerful than others and are willing to use that power to serve their ends with no regard to morality.

Now we might not like the style of it, but we also get a very different view of slavery. Our knowledge is based almost exclusively on southern race based no way out slavery, which was an aberation in the realm of slavery. We also have an unrealistically brutal view of slavery thanks to things like Roots, a view that is not held up by the historical record.

With or with out Roots, slavery has been a moral abomination with no justification in the west since the Enlightenment, and certainly since the American Revolution. And as modern economic systems and industrialization have progressed since the mid- 18th century, slavery even lost its comparative economic advantage. Yes, a select few in the American south made handsome sums from slavery up to the time of the Civil War, but the impact of slavery was devastating to the southern economy and people as a whole. It took them nearly a century to overcome the gap in competitiveness that slavery created.

Reduced down to it's basic form all slavery is, all it's ever been, is an exchange of labor for room and board. At some points in history that relationship was entered into involuntarily and sometimes voluntarily. But it's really not all that different from the laborer relationship we see defined without the word slavery. We all work for room and board, but non-slaves get to pick their room and board and slaves have that decision made for them.

I really think you need to do some serious contemplation on what it means to be a slave. You seem to be trivializing life spent without freedom, or perhaps trivializing the blessing of freedom itself.