When we hear about Newark — or Watts, or Buffalo, or the other Negro insurrections of the past few years — the first thing we need to do is to gain and keep some perspective on these shattering events. One important point to remember is that the overwhelming majority of the dead and wounded from these conflicts have been Negro — and most of them shot by the National Guardsmen who are so quick to move into the trouble areas.

Some varieties of slavery permeate American life today and go completely unrecognized — even by the staunchest libertarians. Take, for example, one flagrant case which, as far as I know, has never been attacked by even the most consistent individualist: compulsory jury duty.

Tanks rumbling through the streets, buildings sprayed wholesale with machine gun fire, the rubble pervading the cities looking like Germany in 1945, compulsory curfews and blockades imposed — who would have thought during the Age of Apathy in the 1950s that, a decade later, America would be reduced to this? And who can now deny that the Negroes in America are a colonized and occupied people? The tanks, the National Guardsmen and state police, the federal troops, are merely the outward manifestation of this ever-present fact.

The most revealing fact of the July civil war in the American cities was the continuing parallel to the attitudes and actions of America’s imperial war in Vietnam. The American troops’ attitudes toward the Negroes in the urban ghettoes followed with uncanny similarity their attitudes toward that other oppressed colored people: the Vietnamese. This is apart from the fact that American Negroes are drafted to fight and die in disproportionate numbers in the Vietnam War.

Masterpiece of Unconscious Humor during the July Days: the unmitigated gall of President Johnson in his July 24 proclamation: “We will not endure violence. It matters not by whom it is done, or under what slogan or banner. It will not be tolerated.”

Some of those who argue for conscription-slavery concede that it would be wrong to draft someone so that he might defend himself against some remote Enemy. But, they add, conscription is needed so that Society might be defended against the foreign enemy. But first we must realize that, as the late great individualist Frank Chodorov once put it, “Society are people.” “Society” is, simply, every person except you. By what right, then, do A, B, C, and D, put their heads together to decide that E must be enslaved to fight for their defense? Surely this is a monstrous moral doctrine.

We cannot fully understand the nature of the crisis in the Middle East by just following today’s and yesterday’s headlines. There are far deeper and longer lasting factors at work than merely who commands the Strait of Tiran or who is responsible for the latest border skirmish in the Gaza Strip. The first thing that we as Americans should be concerned about is the absurdity of the fundamental foreign policy position of the U.S. government.

We live in a land of euphemism, of changing labels so as to prettify or whitewash the harsh features of reality. And so, undertakers have become morticians, real estate agents have become realtors, press agents have turned into public relations counsel, and even rat catchers have been transformed into exterminating engineers. So has it been with the harsh features of our economic reality.

Any current drive for the abolition of slavery would only draw apathetic shrugs from the American public. Wasn’t slavery abolished in the United States over a century ago, and aren’t the only remaining signs of it confined to such backward countries as Yemen and Saudi Arabia? The answer is emphatically, No! and we shall be devoting a series of columns to pointing out the vast amount of slavery that still exists — unheeded and accepted — in the good old US of A.

One common argument in favor of conscription-slavery is that everyone has an “equal obligation to serve” the U.S. government. But apart from the dubious morality of forcing everyone to suffer as much as everyone else, this equality of obligation is impossible to achieve, because not everyone can have equal time in the front lines. Only a few can be in the front lines, to say nothing of cripples, the physically handicapped, etc.