“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents
I thought for a long time before speaking again. “So these children are slaves,” I said. “They aren’t paid, and they have no other choice.”
“Well, you don’t have to put it like that,” Can said, with a clear scoff in her voice. “Nobody hurts them. Nobody fucks them. They’re safe and they’re taken care of. What more is there to childhood, anyway?”
I couldn’t answer her then, and I cannot now. In my travels, I have learned the same lesson again and again; every city as rich as Shy has that same flaw at its heart.
The life I live now is beautiful, but no one on Bambritch is entitled to the labor or the body of another. That is our one unshakable rule.
–The Book of Flora (The Road to Nowhere 3) by Meg Elison
It was only when I realized that I was a slave and not a slaver’s apprentice that I understood that what Archie was doing was a great wrong. Right and wrong had no meaning in my life until I was almost a woman. I learned some of it from my father, but he was not a talkative man. I began to understand when I knew the horsewomen, but I could never see it the way they did. They didn’t know what I knew.
–The Book of Flora (The Road to Nowhere 3) by Meg Elison
He yearned for escape with a desire that was near to insanity; awake and asleep it was his obsession; and he thought his heart had stopped when Squad-Leader Aras Dilley muttered to him, as Doremus was scrubbing a lavatory floor, “Say! Listen, Mr. Jessup! Mis’ Pike is fixin’ it up and I’m going to help you escape jus’ soon as things is right!”–It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
For a long time, I just figured that my parents’ friends were a bunch of sick rich pedophiles enamored of the 1960s and 1970s cinema genre of witchcraft and the Devil, like the popular Vincent Price movies portrayed at the time. Often referred to as “happenings,” during these events, drunk, drugged-out narcissists paid my parents to do what they wanted with my siblings and me. (All three of my siblings are much older than I.) For many years into my young adulthood, I thought that the satanic stuff was basically their one step beyond hedonism. Bored, rich, and demented beyond reason, they assumed that my father in his high priest red robes (signifying blood sacrifice) would be their fall guy if the group were exposed. Both of my parents participated in orgies involving children, which was instrumental to Omaha’s “happenings.”
…Rich, affluent, and powerful, my parents and their friends held beliefs that were well thought out and complex. Doctors, lawyers, law enforcement, high-ranking businessmen, and politicians—the people involved were community pillars, wealthy, well educated, well connected, and completely drunk on the power their group wielded.
…As a child, I couldn’t tell anyone what was happening because I couldn’t trust who was involved and who wasn’t, and what was happening was so crazy that I figured no one would believe me even if I told. People were adept at looking away, fearing they would somehow become involved in things too sordid to speak publically about.
–Rabbit Hole: A Satanic Ritual Abuse Survivor’s Story by David Shurter
“A few months ago I thought the slaughter of the Civil War, and the agitation of the violent Abolitionists who helped bring it
on, were evil. But possibly they had to beviolent, because easy-going citizens like me couldn’t be stirred up otherwise. If our grandfathers had had the alertness and courage to see the evils of slavery and of a government conducted by gentlemen for gentlemen only, there wouldn’t have been any need of agitators and war and blood.“It’s my sort, the Responsible Citizens who’ve felt
ourselves superior because we’ve been well-to-do and what we thought was ‘educated,’ who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution, and now the Fascist Dictatorship. It’s I who murdered Rabbi de Verez. It’s I who persecuted the Jews and the Negroes. I can blame no Aras Dilley, no Shad Ledue, no Buzz Windrip, but only my own timid soul and drowsy mind. Forgive, O Lord!“Is it too late?”
–It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
Essini’s parents had fled South to Yorbik Island where they were set upon by bandits and murdered for their paltry possessions. The bandits abandoned Essini in the rajal-infested interior forests, but an old Brown Dragon had found her and brought her to a Human enclave. They promptly about-faced and peddled the child to slave traders, who passed her from hand to hand until eventually a married couple from Gi’ishior, rug merchants who had no child of their own, purchased her out of pity. Now, she was as loved as any person could wish.
Auli-Ambar sighed. At least Essini’s story had turned out well, but it could have been much worse. Bandits and slavers were not known for their kindness to children, and Sazutharr had told her darkly, the fate of some children was so terrible, it made a Dragon shudder to think upon it.
The Dragon Librarian (Scrolls of Fire Book 1) by Marc Secchia
Vocabulary word for the day:
Disenthrall verb (used with object)
1. to free from bondage; liberate.
Vocabulary word of the day:
Manumit man·u·mit ˌ/manyəˈmit/ verb historical (used with object),
manumitted, manumitting.
1. to release from slavery or servitude.
As I spoke to more people who had been caught up in slavery I was amazed to learn that there are at least six distinct types of slavery in Eastern Congo: forced labor by armed groups; debt bondage slavery; peonage slavery; sexual slavery; forced marriages; and the enslavement of child soldiers. All of these types of slavery, in one way or the other, also support the destruction of this rich and unique environment. The most well-known slavery, related to me time and again, is forced labor at gunpoint.
–Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World by Kevin Bales