Korean Job Discussion Forums

[panthermodern]

For the sake of discussion and before I respond to any points made to counter my points; Would someone please define "slavery".

I could for example point out that forms of "slavery" exist in the contemporary United States of America and is State santioned and supported.

[dbee]

I guess we could do worse, than to take the definition from dictionary.com

[thorin]

What constitutes slavery in the modern world?

http://users.erols.com/bcccsbs/bass/definiti.htm

"As slavery seems to take new forms -- it is still, nevertheless, identified by an element of ownership or control over another's life, coercion and the restriction of movement -- by the fact that someone is not free to leave, to change an employer. In a California garment sweatshop in 1995, Thai workers were found confined to a compound behind razor wire.

Contemporary slavery is not always easy to identify or root out because much of it is accepted within a culture. Debt bondage is practiced in many parts of the world, particularly in South Asia. In India and Nepal it is supported by a caste system that makes subjugation socially acceptable."

[panthermodern]

[dbee]

To make a comparison PM, if you look at the holocaust, there you had an institution where over 6 million people died over a 3 or 4 year period... jews, gypsies, russian, pacifists etc.
Now, I don't know how many people die on the roads around the world every 3 or 4 years, but i'd be willing to bet that it's a lot.

The net effect of both of these institutions are the same, both kill huge amounts of people. But what is different is the principle behind them. Sure keeping prisoners has similarities to slavery, as do low-paid labor, and forced migration.

But the principle is still different, as is the social stigma attached to being a slave. Slaves were little more than livestock, to be bought and sold, who had no rights whatsoever and never even had rights that could be trampled on in the first place.

PM said ...

[panthermodern]

Using a comparison of the Holocaust and Slavery in general is a poor one at best.

The net plan and result of the Holocaust was genocide, the mode and modus of the Holocaust was to kill, slave labor was a side benifit rather then then goal.

The Final solution of the Holocaust was genocide.

Under "slavery", which you yourself posted, the slave is a funtion of economic value, i.e. is bought and sold and thus has inherrent value. The Holocaust and the Final Solution was a situation where the "slave" was valueless and argued to be, by the Nazis, a liability to the German nation and economy.

In other words the Nazis viewed Jews, Gypsys and the others that they wished to exterminate as having absolutely no value while a "traditional" slave owner would at least view the slave as being valuable if only as property.

I would like to point out that I do not support slavery, it is just that in an economy of a fuedal era in any nation or the culture of an agarian society one must look at the morality and reality of the time in question and not from a modern industrialized point of view.

From a postmodern information age point of view "the good old days" weren't, but from a comtemporay point of view things would be viewed much differently.

Most people in most times view their own time as being the best possible situation under the circumsatnces.

People of the past did not sit around thinking; "Man, we are so primative and backward, I can't wait until were are enlightened and society advances."

Aside from during the Holocaust or as a punishment for crimes against society, slavery, to my knowlegde, has never exisited in a nation state or society which was industrialized.

Since were currently exist in a post-industrial age it is difficult to understand the rationalization, morality and prespective of "less advanced" periods of history.

Nietzsche point this out in On History and warns of the follies of being "super-historic".

[JongnoGuru]

We can discuss bad driving habits or prostitution in a purely Korean context without someone lecturing us on bad driving habits and prostitution throughout the ages in the West (or demanding that we define "bad driving" or "prostitution"). Likewise, I don't see why we can't look at the institution of slavery in a purely Korean context, without someone dragging in comparisons with the West (whether in the hopes of schooling us, or in an effort to muzzle the discussion).

Why not at least look at what went on in Korea, ask how Koreans themselves viewed it then and now, and then after that, maybe someone who's interested can start their own separate thread called Slavery in Korea and in the West: Compare & Contrast.

In the 1990s, when I was in the midst of my Korean antique-collecting frenzy, I bought a rather large wooden chest dating from the 1860s to '70s. After a few years in my possession, one of the boards warped and began to split, and I wanted to see if it could either be mended or replaced. To get to it, we had to strip away part of the paper lining from the interior (old yellowed mulberry paper with Chinese script).

Wedged up in one corner, behind the paper lining, was a long tightly-bound and pressed-flat roll of old newsprint. Inside the newsprint was a VERY old-looking document made of a sort of cloth-like paper, with inscriptions (all Chinese and well beyond my ability to read) and some traces of red and black stamps. I took it to a friend who looked at it for barely 10 seconds and said, "Oh, that's a slave record."

He knew what some of the elements were (location, name, registering authority) but there was still 70% that even he couldn't read. So we took it to a university professor he knew to get a better explanation. The prof told us it wasn't really a "record of ownership" per se, as we thought, but something akin to "travel papers" for a family of "household servants" who belonged to the chief magistrate of a gun (county) in Kyongsang Province.

That prof was a real oddball, though. He took us out for dinner that night, during which he did his best to assure me that the document I'd stumbled upon was neither rare nor particularly valuable, and I certainly shouldn't imagine I had a "real find" on my hands there. But then he calls me nearly every week for the next six months trying to get me to give, sell or donate that document to his school's documents library. I didn't let him have it.

[panthermodern]

[dbee]

PM said