The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

Slavery persists today, in countries including Mauritania, Ghana, and South Sudan. In recent years, the world watched the Islamic State put thousands of Yezidi women and children into slavery, killing husbands and bartering wives and children in slave markets. In 2020, a Samoan chief in New Zealand was sentenced to eleven years in prison for slavery. He was caught luring people from Samoa to New Zealand, where he would then bind and enslave them in order to enrich himself. In the West, this is unusual and punished when discovered, but in much of the world, the modern slave trade goes utterly unpunished. There are estimated to be over forty million people living in slavery around the world today. In real terms, this means that there are more slaves in the world today than there were in the nineteenth century.53 So this is not a question of historic what-aboutery. It raises the question of what might practically change for people today if we spent even a portion of the time that we focus on past slavery focused, instead, on present-day slavery. And what we might be able to do about this modern horror.