Slavers

Grand Mufti with Top Saudi Clerics

In a characteristically irenic gesture towards peace in the Middle East, leading Saudi government cleric, Sheikh Saad Al-Buraik, told Palestinians how to act towards Jewish women, "Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don't you enslave their women?" Why not indeed. According to high-level Saudi jurist, Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan, “Slavery is a part of Islam. Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long there is Islam.” And for a fact, slavery is alive and well in several Islamist countries, such as the Sudan, Somalia, Niger, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, to name several.

But perhaps we needn't go so far afield to find the kind of human subjagation endorsed by the Koran, here in the West we've been at something like it for several generations. Belloc had this to say:

"The more the State steps in to enforce conditions of security and sufficiency; the more it regulates wages, provides compulsory insurance, doctoring, education, and in general takes over the lives of the wage-earners, for the benefit of the companies and men employing the wage-earners, the more is this condition of semi-slavery accentuated. And if it be continued for, say, three generations, it will become so thoroughly established as a social habit and frame of mind that there may be no escape from it in the countries where State Socialism of this kind has been forged and riveted on the body politic.

In Europe, England in particular (but many other countries in a lesser degree) has bound itself to this system. Below a certain level of income a man is guaranteed a bare subsistence should he be out of employment. It is doled out to him by public officials at the expense of losing human dignity. Every circumstance of his family is examined; he is even more in the hands of these officials when out of employment than in the hands of his employer when employed. The thing is still in transition; the mass of men do not yet see to what goal they are tending; but the neglect of human dignity, the potential, if not actual, denial of the doctrine of free will, have led by a natural consequence to what are already semi-servile institutions. These will become fully servile institutions as time goes on." Belloc, An Essay Against Communism

I think Belloc was right; the "servile state" that he prophecied so accurately is surely a natural consequence of our ongoing retreat from the Incarnational Faith which endows mankind with inalienable worth. With that foundation abandoned, freedom becomes an exercise in dictatorship and the triumph of the strongest will.

Perhaps, then, it's no accident that we see the Socialist Worker's Party marching in step with Jihadi terrorists, for both deny in their separate ways the real value of the human person and are slavers, united in their attack on what was once christendom. The question is, do we have the conviction to fight back the assault?

Just a thought!

LSP