Unlike the past that the term slavery could easily be defined and discerned, definition of slavery, or better to say modern slavery, is disputed today. But as the unanimous opinion reigns, modern slavery is an institution whereby human beings are divested of their freedom and personal rights and describes a number of conditions involving control of a person against his or her will enforced to surrender to the wills of a master by violence or other forms of coercion. Defined in this way, the slave is wholly subject to the will of another and it has been practiced, in varying degrees, since the earliest of ages into the modern world.
According to some drawn common characteristics that distinguish slavery from other human rights violations, a slave is:
· forced to work — through mental or physical threat;
· owned or controlled by an ’employer’, usually through mental or physical abuse or threatened abuse;
· dehumanized, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as ‘property’;
· physically constrained or has restrictions placed on his/her freedom of movement. [1]
The public opinion assumes that slavery, the legal ownership of a person before the abolishment of slavery, is now illegal in all countries. Actually, the trade was legally abolished in the early 1800s. It is also prohibited by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. Despite the fact that slavery is banned in most of the countries, it exists today and is usually ignored by most of people in the world and the media as well because it is practiced under a variety of forms and affects people of all ages, sex and race.
Can it be called anything else but slavery when extreme poverty forces parents to offer themselves or their own children to toil in the fields as a guarantee against a loan that they hardly afford to pay? Or when individuals are lured by the promise of a good job but instead find themselves subjected to working without payment while enduring physical abuse, often in harsh and hazardous conditions? Or when the indebted, abducted and trafficked women and children are intimidated by crime families and mafia gangs into any disdainful and reprehensible activity? Or even when people are illegally lured and recruited by individuals, political parties, militia groups, freedom fighters and cults to work, usually under threat of violence or other penalties, in order to accomplish intended ambitions and objectives?
You do not need to be too smart to indicate instances of practiced slavery in the modern world. Endless, mushroom-like emergence of cults that physically and mentally enslave the recruits is one among many nightmares of the modern man. In fact, man’s hope and struggle to find out the right that is in many circumstances identical with the wrong and the false, sets him on a path at the end of which is a gateway at which a man stands to push them through as slaves. As Steven Hassan, the liberated member of a cult, puts it into words:
Throughout the world, people are stressed out, sleep-deprived, and disillusioned with existing political, social, and religious institutions. They are hungry for hope. Charismatic cult leaders with delusions of grandeur or an appetite for power and money are eager to take advantage of this situation by recruiting and indoctrinating people into a form of mental slavery. 2
There are countless unscrupulous religious and political leaders who today use a variety of cultic mind control techniques to deceive and enslave followers and deprive them of their freedom among other worldly possessions. Soon after drawn into the cult, the recruits lose their resistance and accent to be manipulated under the dangers and threats manufactured by manipulators who have sought to silence their courage. In fact, many are of the opinion that among many dangers man is exposed to by his fellow creatures, the mind control techniques practiced by majority of the cults to enslave the recruits are the greatest because they empower the evil men to carry out any evil deed that continue mostly undetected.
Enslaved by political cults, the members are mostly bought and sold in political bargains for the fulfillment of certain political interests. Speaking of one instance in particular, for more than three decades some free Iranian people have been enslaved in the clutches of a terrorist cult globally recognized under a variety of alias. Mojahedin Khalq Organization (MKO, MEK, PMOI, NCRI, NLA, … ) is a notorious political cult that nobody but those in its bound can possibly give details of the rough, cult-like life they have long experienced within it. The victimized insiders of the organization that have managed to tear the bounds are the sole evidences of modern slaves enslaved within the organization’s slave camp located in the heart of a scorching desert in Iraq the group refers to as Ashraf City. It is easy to prove that, according to the above state characteristics of a slave, the members of MKO are indeed modern slaves who are spending their life slaving in its camps mastered under the Rajavis.
References:
www.antislavery.org
Steven Hassan; Releasing the bonds, Freedom of Mind Press Somerville, MA, 2000, p. 10.
