The world we live in is not free of slavery, I'm afraid to say. I feel safe assuming that most of the users of this forum live in the "free" part of the world, the one where a person's right to learn isn't influenced by their gender, their job is mainly dependent on their skills, abilities and, to some extent, luck, rather than skin colour, language, faith or family status. A world, where everyone has a choice in most situations. But reading the news, watching reports from various places around the globe, I can't help but wonder how many places are fundamentally different from what we often take for granted.
The Plantation Plight's prologue pretty much describes any area swallowed by war. There are many such areas around today and while slavery is not openly practiced there - at least as far as reports go, I haven't been to a warzone and have no wish to change that - sometimes a bit of information about disappearing people, very often chidren, comes out in the open. I doubt that they are used at a plantation, but there are other uses for people there. Children being sold and trained as soldiers, as disturbing as it may be, is a well documented fact.
I'm sure I have read about people being captured and forced to work at drug plantations or processing laboratories in South America and other places around the world. Sex slavery - and I don't mean fantasy or real-world BDSM, but people who are actually being forced to provide sexual services for someone;s benefit - is a real enough thing and it can take place right around the corner from anyone reading this. Women tricked into believing they are going to work in agriculture or services and ending up in a brothel doesn't surprise anyone where I live, you simply read about it in a paper and move on to your horoscope... Men also end up being tricked in a similar way, but they usually end up actually doing physical labour for appalling pay or no pay at all, having ended up in another country with their documents being held by their captors. I have read about one such man just this week.
And let us never, and I do mean never, forget about the way the III Reich based its war effort on using some of the nations it conquered as free workforce to use like toilet tissue - keep them working as long as they have any strength, then just get rid of them as efficiently as you can and get some more to replace them. I'm not an historian, but I do like to read on what we, homo sapiens sapiens, have done to ourselves over the centuries. As such, I cannot stop at mentioning Nazi Germany, seeing as identical ideas were developed and perfected at a similar time in another country. I mean the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labour camp systems. To me this was by far more disturbing than the Nazis, because the Soviets had time to develop and use the system a long time after world war II was over. It wasn't a war effort, it was a huge part of the economy of a superpower, one that advertised itself as peace and equality loving, based purely on slave labour. And the numbers mentioned by historians are breathtaking, as are the memoirs of people who survived and dared record their thoughts on the subject. And come to think of it, even if the Gulag was only a tiny part of the economy, what would you call an economy which pays its workers in a currency that is worthless (and I do mean worthless, the standard normal Rubbles were not exchangeable, only Comecon ones that were paid to higher-ranking people had any value outside the USSR) and doesn't allow them to travel freely within the borders of their country, not to mention going abroad? Isn't that in itself similar to slavery?
I send anyone, who wishes to ponder the subject of slavery in the not so distand past to "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who described the whole industry from inside. A fair warning, though - apart from being one of the most thought-provoking books I have ever read, it is also one of the most depressing ones. Simply by showing what our kin are capable of doing to one another and making me think the next time I read a mention of the Russian Federation's (the Soviet Union's legal successor's) penitentiary system, which includes labour camps for unwanted social elements such as feminists organising topless protests (granted that some of which were more than a little controversial) or female fighter pilots from a neighboring country (a country that, by the way, boasts having the geographic centre of Europe within its borders), who dared fight to defend their homeland from a covert invasion aimed at destabilising and annexing a noticeable part of that country...
My point is that however unsettling the Plantation Plight might be, it is a rather important story. It is unsettling simply because it touches a subject that we would rather pretend doesn't exist around us. We treat slavery as something of the distant past, some of us see the risk of it showing its ugly face again, but very few stop to really think about it. And pretending that something doesn't exist doesn't do much good - again, look at history. Not all Germans were Nazis in the early 20-th century, yet most of them seemed not to notice what was going on around the corner. The same applies to many citizens of the countries conquered by the Nazis as well as citizens of the Soviet Union... Looking the other way has rarely done any good. That is why I think any impulse that makes any number of people think about slavery gives us a better chance to avoid it happening, at least on a large scale...
Strangely, this story made me reach my limits. Not in terms of what is 'physically' described - it has been very soft so far to my sadistic eyes. But in terms of my 'philosophical acceptance'. What you both are describing is 'just too real' (I didn't say realistic)... Part of a world that we (or even worse - not us but our children) will have to live very soon. I've no problem with historical, fantasy, sci-fi stories... any horror can happen there as far as I'm concerned. But, as I said elsewhere, the 'Amnesty International' part of me is completely uneasy with judicial (or assimilated) corporal punishments...
