You'll Own Nothing...

Slavery, company towns, and the World Economic Forum

Ian Timonen asks: Any thoughts of doing a deep dive on WEF and that Klaus (Schwab) dude? It seems all sorts of frightening.

My immediate answer was no, I don’t have many deep thoughts on the issue because I haven’t really spent enough time looking into it. Nevertheless, the topic is worth discussing, if only because it’s become a source of the anxiety Ian is expressing in his question. Not that the anxiety is not well-founded. If this guy:

runs an organization that includes these people:

and they’re putting out propaganda saying:

then everyone is excused for jumping feet first into the deep end of the conspiracy pool. At least the Bolsheviks didn’t explicitly dress like supervillains.

“You’ll own nothing and be happy…” See, we’ve heard stories like that before, and not just from the Bolsheviks.

I.

In the current year, when the 1619 Project is considered history, Django Unchained is treated like a documentary, and Gone With the Wind has been thrown into the burn pile, most Americans have a very distorted understanding of how the institution of slavery operated on a day-to-day basis. Pop culture portrayals (the ones that have not been banned) would have us believe that sadistic Southern plantation owners routinely starved, beat and killed their slaves for the sheer thrill of it. When we meet Leonardo di Caprio’s planter character in Django Unchained, he is amusing himself by forcing two slaves to fight a gladiator death match. Well, as with all historical events that are integrated into a founding mythology - for example, the American Revolution, slavery & the Civil War, and World War 2 - the truth is a bit more complicated than the legend.

The Smithsonian Institute and the Library of Congress commissioned an oral history of slavery, interviewing hundreds of former slaves about their lives before and after the Civil War. An edited collection is available as a book, Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation. While the examples of nasty masters and violent incidents stand out, for modern readers it is almost as jarring to read about the pleasant memories many slaves had of the antebellum period. Living and working conditions of slaves changed in the 19th century as the self-styled aristocrats of the planter class adopted a paternalistic attitude toward their “household.”: