Esclavos en la Europa del siglo XX, 1914-1945 -- Esclavos en la Europa del siglo XX, 1914-1945
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SUMMARY THE REINVENTION OF SLAVERY IN THE ERA OF THE WORLD WARS: THE EUROPEAN POWERS, 1914-1945 Michael Seidman
Major historians have been searching for an understanding of the extremely violent era of the world wars, 1914-1945, and have proposed analyzing this period as an “European Civil War” or a “New Thirty Years War.” Both concepts reasonably focus on warfare in an age when wars killed at least 60 million people. Yet this violence also nurtured an unexpected reversal of the progress of abolition and a spectacular resurrection of slavery. This new book offers a reinterpretation of the period of the world wars by examining the reinvention of labor compulsion on the European continent. Nationalists, communists, and fascists revived the militarism, torture, and mass murder that characterized previous slave societies in Africa, the Islamic world, and the Americas. The introduction (chapter one) begins the examination of the reconstruction of empires and nations through forced labor by Young Turks, Italian Fascists, Soviet Communists, Spanish Nationalists, French Vichyists, and German National Socialists. Their states coerced hundreds of thousands or, in the Soviet and Nazi cases, millions of workers. Unlike previous enslavers, who were ambivalent towards work because it was for slaves, the new rulers of these varied communitarian projects in the era of total wars glorified working as much as fighting. They “honored” labor by eliminating “parasites” who were not considered worthy of being producers. Using the criteria of race, ethnicity, and class, they considerably narrowed the Enlightenment’s definition of the producer that had included nearly all workers without regard for religion or race. Their anti-individualist and anti-democratic one-party states removed parliamentary and judicial obstacles to labor coercion. Neo-slavery begins with World War I, a total war which blurred distinctions between genders and military and civilian realms. During that conflict to construct a more homogeneous Turkish empire at the expense of Christian minorities, chapter two shows that the Ottomans re-imposed slavery, which they had abolished reluctantly and tardily at the end of the nineteenth century. The ruling Young Turks mixed nationalism, Islamism, and Social Darwinism, which prepared the way for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Armenians and other Christians. The reduction of Armenian soldiers to pack animals was followed by massacres of men, children, and women. Some of the latter survived as compelled converts and sexual slaves in harems. The third chapter focuses on the introduction of state slavery and forced labor during Soviet rule in the aftermath of World War I. Imposed internal migrations in the USSR between 1914 and 1945 surpassed the 11-12 million enslaved transatlantic migrants from 1600 to 1850. In the interwar period Stalinist bondage was the major component of the USSR’s industrialization and military preparations. Obligatory labor in the Soviet Union possessed modern elements, such as the elimination of “counterrevolutionaries,” which allowed variations of the Soviet model to be adopted by post-World War II Communist states in both Europe and Asia. The most extreme and greatest resurrection of slavery occurred in the German Reich, the subject of the chapters four through seven. During World War II racialized forced labor, whose numbers reached at least 13.5 million in the German Empire, was much more consequential for the Nazi war economy than its Soviet counterpart. Both systems were deadly, but the Nazi camps contained those who were the most victimized—Soviet POWs, Sinti/Roma, and ultimately Jews. These groups were disposable and usually lacked the slight safeguards of the market that had characterized previous chattel slave societies. Even as the war was turning from Blitzkrieg to attrition, the Nazi regime eliminated millions of captured foreigners who were “useless mouths” unable to labor. The resulting mass of corpses posed novel issues of body disposal. The Nazis reversed the trend of concealing punishment from public gaze. Like past enslavers, they turned labor, torture, and executions into humiliating spectacles sometimes attended by German civilians, including women and children. They bestialized their victims as a “sub-species” worthy of serving as guinea pigs for experiments. The Italian Fascists—the subject of the eighth chapter—initiated their post-World War I movement as strike breakers. The Fascist takeover in 1922 was accompanied by a war against idleness led by a literally shirtless Mussolini who harvested wheat—at least on camera—in the fields. After introducing apartheid during the Ethiopian War, the largest colonial war in history which far exceeded their Libyan expansion in the 1920s, Fascists racialized Gypsies and Jews as wandering thieves and parasites. During World War II the regime also pitilessly persecuted presumed Slavic enemies who were assigned—like Ottoman Christians—to labor battalions. Metropolitan Italian labor camps resembled in overcrowding, exposure, hunger, and lethality those erected for the opponents of Italy’s African Empire. Yet, unlike the Nazi or Soviet camps, the Italian ones were often work camps in name only. Despite the broadcasting of fanatical Fascist work ideology, inactivity often dominated Italian camps in Europe and Africa. The ninth chapter concentrates on the period of the Spanish Civil War when both sides—Republicans and Nationalists—used forced labor to accomplish their goals. The Spanish conflict experienced the return of slavery in a nation where, like the Ottoman Empire, abolitionism had been weak and tardy. During the war the two enemies erected their own labor camps, which began in 1936 and, after General Franco’s victory in 1939, lasted until 1947. Both foes promised that prisoners could be part of the community if they redeemed themselves through labor. This principle also characterized Soviet camps and, at least for “Aryans,” the Nazi ones. The tenth chapter focuses on Vichy France. To help its Nazi partner, the Vichy vassal state reintroduced forced labor into metropolitan France on a massive scale. The powerful popular reaction against this restoration of forced labor for French workers and slavery for resisters and Jews in the first major nation to adopt abolitionism dramatically reduced support for the collaborationist regime and bolstered the French Resistance. The penultimate chapter analyzes the renewed abolitionism of the Western Allies (primarily the UK and US) which united their nations against the perceived neo-slavery of the Axis and accelerated its demise. During the war, the Western Allies tolerated the revived bondage of their Soviet partner, but Western neo-abolitionism prepared both the renewal of wage labor in Western Europe and the ensuing anti-Communist campaigns of the Cold War. The conclusion (chapter twelve) shows how the resurrection of slavery in the twentieth century illuminates not only the period 1914-1945 but also the historiography of global slavery. The concept of slavery has largely been defined by the experiences of the transatlantic trade when slaves were valuable commodities. However, looking at slavery from the perspective of its reinvention during the era of total wars casts new light on its history. While resurrecting the most brutal practices of the past, including infanticide, twentieth-century slavery further dehumanized and devalued its victims by its ideological and “scientific” genocides of “parasitical” enemies. Genocide accompanied the Ottomans’ revival of Islamist sexual slavery. The Italian Fascists instrumentalized a radical nationalist work ideology to enslave political and ethnic enemies. Soviet Marxism eliminated and reimposed state bondage on “counterrevolutionaries.” During the Spanish Civil War, both left and right erected their own forced-labor camps for their enemies, whether revolutionary or counterrevolutionary. The Vichy Regime broke with the pioneering secular abolitionism of the French republics and became a vassal subcontractor for the Nazis. The Western Allies, led by the UK and the USA, fought both world wars but especially the second not only to defend their nations and empires but also as a new antislavery struggle which prepared the coming Cold War.
