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Land of the Serf
A few years ago I was astounded to learn that during the War Between the States, many slaves fought for the Confederacy. It seemed a paradox, as if they were fighting against themselves.

Since then I’ve come to see that it’s not unusual for slaves to fight for their masters. No slave system can work unless the slaves accept their servitude and even regard their masters as benefactors. It’s naive to imagine all slaves as shackled, grudging, and dreaming of liberty.

Less then a century ago, when chattel slavery was still rife in Africa (where remnants of it still exist), an English writer was startled to find that runaway slaves were despised by other slaves, who regarded them as ungrateful to their masters. This was true even though slaves were usually acquired in raids by neighboring tribes, who kidnapped them as infants. Unable to remember their own parents, they were raised to regard their kidnappers as virtual fathers.

There is ample proof closer to home. Many Americans see nothing wrong with servitude to the state — in the forms of military draft, limitless taxes, or what is now being touted as “national service.” All these things presume that we belong to the state and must do whatever it demands of us.

In their minds, the state is within its rights to force young men to fight wars across oceans against other states that have done them no harm. Of course these young men are always told that these foreign states are “threats” and therefore that “we” are fighting for freedom. And of course it is treason to suggest that there is a certain paradox in being forced to fight for freedom, let alone that the real enemy of the young men’s freedom is their own state. ...

...Are U.S. troops today fighting for what Jefferson would recognize as freedom? Or are they fighting for an empire — not only a global military empire, but an enormous domestic system of unconstitutional laws, taxes, regulations, bureaucracies, and general infringements of the freedoms our ancestors took for granted?

The answer is obvious. They are serfs fighting for servitude. They are fighting for the CIA, the FBI, the EPA, OSHA, HUD, the Social Security Administration, the departments of Homeland Security, Education, and Energy, and of course the IRS, to name just a few agencies. President Bush says they are fighting for freedom. Jefferson might put it a little differently.

To many Americans, fighting for the U.S. Government means fighting for “America,” and America, no matter how tyrannous its government becomes, always remains, in their minds, a synonym for freedom. Some of these people may even hate what the government has done to this country, yet they are always eager to support it when it goes to war — even when war means new restrictions on freedom at home. ...