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<martin.klein@utoronto.ca> I agreed with Claire Dehon that every brutal and atrocious pheonomenon is not slavery. There is a certain tendency for certain terms to be the defined as the ultimate oppression, for example, the use of the term holocaust in ways that that deprives of meaning the systematic way people were masscred by Nazis during World War II. Still, there are ambiguities. Many contemporary forms of slavery involve insstitutions that do not quite meet a strict definition of slavery, but have many of the characteristics of it. For example, girls and women are bought and sold in eastern Eruope, southeast and south Asia, and other parts of the world. They are marketed in Europe, the United States, Israel among others, all countries with sophisticated modern police forces. They are as much owned as any slave, but their owners have no concern about their descendants. In fact, many will died of STDs or simply be realeased when no longer able to earn their keep. The same would be true of child labourers in many places. Sometimes, it does not seem worth making the analytic distinction, but I think it is still worth understanding the conditions under which slavery and other forms of exploitation arise, how they differ from each other, why, and how they evolve. Martin Klein
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