TO MAKE MANKIND INTO SAUSAGES (SLAVERY, MASSACHUSETTS, CHINA, AFGHANISTAN)

 

"Much has been said about American slavery, but I think that we do not even yet realize what slavery is. If I were seriously to propose to Congress to make mankind into sausages, I have no doubt that most of the members would smile at my proposition, and if any believed me to be in earnest, they would think that I proposed something much worse than Congress had ever done. But if any of them will tell me that to make a man into a sausage would be much worse — would be any worse — than to make him into a slave — than it was to enact the Fugitive Slave Law, I will accuse him of foolishness, of intellectual incapacity, of making a distinction without a difference. The one is just as sensible a proposition as the other.

(…)

The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal. 

Slavery and servility have produced no sweet-scented flower annually, to charm the senses of men, for they have no real life: they are merely a decaying and a death, offensive to all healthy nostrils. We do not complain that they live, but that they do not get buried. Let the living bury them: even they are good for manure."

Slavery in Massachusetts
 
by Henry David Thoreau


ThoreauTransforms His Journal into “Slavery in Massachusetts”

I think the real lesson Thoreau intended is not his life-style; not even his two-year prescription for cure. It is his attitude. And of this, as the Editors of Time remind us, Walt Whitman's portrait is the best: "Thoreau's lawlessness -- his dissent -- his going his own absolute road let hell blaze all it chooses". This, I think, has been a distinguishing mark of the American character, ever present in its folklore, its politics, its classical and popular art, even in what Americans admire of other cultures -- just watch, if not, Hallmark's production of Merlin."

Notes on the "Complemental Verse" 

by René Pinet (Bahia, Mexico) 

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.

Learned Hand

Los momentos más terribles de las crisis trágicas y la caída de las víctimas siempre inocentes son aquellos que ponen al descubierto, progresivamente, a un número mayor de personas no sólo las “tonterías” interesadas sino los crímenes con que – como si fueran “tonterías”- se gobierna el mundo. 

Comienza entonces una lucha de resultado imprevisible contra quienes pretenden gobernar el mundo con sus “tonterías” criminales.

Thoreau advirtió de ello en la crisis de la esclavitud de su tiempo prolongada en el nuestro.Así lo recuerda también, hoy, Wendell Berry:

Because we have not made our lives to fit
our places, the forests are ruined, the fields, eroded,
the streams polluted, the mountains, overturned. Hope
then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
of what it is that no other place is, and by
your caring for it, as you care for no other place, this
knowledge cannot be taken from you by power or by wealth.
It will stop your ears to the powerful when they ask
for your faith, and to the wealthy when they ask for your land
and your work.  Be still and listen to the voices that belong
to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields.

Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot.
The world is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.

The light turned into darkness that Dylan shows here

Come here I'll break your lousy head

Our nation must be saved and freed

You've been accused of murder, how do you plead?

This is how I spend my days

I came to bury, not to raise

I'll drink my fill and sleep alone

I play in blood, but not my own

Bob Dylan

https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/pay-blood/