June 2, 2010
Gamamusa looked at the crowded classroom today and wondered about how this happened. The male students from the next class sat together, with everyone wearing military uniforms. 'Hmm, is a civilian woman to transferring to this school really a big issue?' Gamamusa thought to himself. Since he had never been in the military in south Korea, he could not understand them at all. He knocked on the blackboard to draw attention. "Come on, everyone, quiet! Today, theirs a transfer student coming! Everyone is going crazy about how beautiful she is, when you guys didn't even saw her face yet." The boys booed the professor, ruining the atmosphere. Gamamusa snorted.
The door opened as a pretty-looking girl came in. The military students all applauded in admiration. "… Long time no see, professor. I never expected to meet you here." Gamamusa scratched his head. "… What are you doing here? This is a garrison area with a lot of soldiers coming to school." Goyeun shrugged, "Well, I can go everywhere I want to, you know?" Gamamusa actually knew that Goyeun would come to this university. Goyeun wanted to become a chef but had no tuition, and Chungsan University was the only only university where food and nutrition department could easily earn scholarships funded by the state. Gamamusa pointed at the classroom. "… just go in and sit down."
...
Goyeun jumped out of bed. She had a splitting headache and stuck her head into the bed. "Ugh..." After a while, Gamamusa brought tea into Yeun's bedroom. Goyeun drank the tea that Gamamusa gave her and confronted him. "… Sorry, must have been surprising to see me collapse, all of a sudden, right? I guess I'm tired because I've been working a lot." Gamamusa sat down next to her bed and rubbed her shoulder. "It's okay. You were so passionate that you could get a scholarship from the Department of Food and Nutrition. By the way, I think you're late for work?" Goyeun was surprised when she looked at her watch. "Oh, my God! I'm sorry, mister, I have to go now." When Goyeun left the house, Gamamusa looked at his phone. There was a red spot which located and tracked her location with a tracking device. "Heh… I knew she would be distracted, but not recognizing my face? She's a smart girl since when she was a student, but she was always distracted." Gamamusa stroked his face without glasses and fake beard.
...
Around lunchtime, Gamamusa went to a restaurant for lunch and saw Goyeun. She was talking to students in military uniform while eating at the restaurant. He held up the plate and set it at the table next to it, and approached her table. "What are you talking about?" Go turned to the professor. "Oh, professor. We were talking about the TMI that yoi were talkong about. The boys were interested in your story." Actually, the boys were more interested in Goyeun. It was the girls who were interested in he's stories. The professor smiled with a little smirk. "Really? Then I'll talk about it in the classroom later."
"Slavery" The professor wrote on the blackboard. This was a sensitive subject, luring in not only the girls but also the boys who were interested. Goyeun also thought that the topic was new. She turned to the students and said, "You've probably heard of slavery. Western scholars say that slaves, who were prevalent in ancient times, disappeared in modern times due to the liberation of slaves. By Western values, slavery is not a universal system. But is it really true?" Boys began to whisper about the professor being controversial. The girls also thought that his idea was a little strange.
He drew a world map on a blackboard, and then drew lines between Europe, America, and Africa. "This is a map of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. From the 16th to 19th centuries, 10 to 12 million Africans were taken as slaves. About 2 to 3 million of them were taken to the United States. Then, how many people are being trafficked in the world today?" The professor took out a piece of paper from his bag. "…This is an article from the Harvard Gazette on Feb. 28. According to the article, as of 2010, about 12 million people in the world were declared to be trafficked." Students were astonished. This meant that the amount of slaves who had been traded for 300 years in the past are existing all at once.
The professor then attached a colored map of the world to the blackboard. He used chalk to draw a line between the north and south of the United States. It was green in the south and blue in the north. "When you look at the map, you might notice something strange. The climate of the south and the north is distinguished exactly by two. The southern region of the United States has a subtropical climate and the north has a continental climate. The corn plant coming from Spain in the 17th century were growing in the same latitudes as the continental climates of the north and midwest of the United States, so there is a lot of corn in the northern region of the United States, and relatively little in the south," Professor put down the chalk. "There is no shortages of food in the south. Because the population of migrants were less than the food production in the Americas, the amount of corn produced in the south to could feed everyone and leave a surplus."
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The professor tapped on the chalkboard, "…but it is true that food production in the south is relatively low. The proportion of agriculture in the southern industries is higher than in the north, and the amount of corn is relatively small, so it cannot compete with the cheap corn coming from the north. The south could never compete with the cheap and abundant manufacturing and agricultural products coming from the north of the country, under mass production. In deperste measure, the south found what they needed. It's plantations, or commercial agriculture that makes money." The professor wrote, "Cotton," on the blackboard. "As opposed to corn, cotton grows in both continental and subtropical climates. In short, it is possible to compete in growing cotton because it grows equally in the south and the north. However, for the south, which is lagging behind the north in both manufacturing and agriculture, they had to gain the upper hand in cotton cultivation. In the end, they used cheap labor to sell cotton cheap, and eventually used free labor."
This time, he drew a circle on Argentina. It had a subtropical climate, just like the southern region of the United States. "You've probably heard of Argentina. It was a prosperous country until the 1950s. The country's food production and food self-sufficiency rate were similar to those of the southern region of the United States. Even the progress of industrialization was similar to that of the southern parts of United States. The climate is similar. Nevertheless, Argentina fared better than the South." The students were puzzled by Professor's remarks. "The percentage of white people of Argentina's population is over 95%. As you can see from the fact that 20% of the population in the southern United States is black, there were no black slaves in Argentina. However, if you look at Brazil, which is close to Argentina, there are more than 50% of the population consisting of black and mixed race ethnically." The professor circulated the tropical climate in northern Brazil. "The majority of the black slaves are concentrated in sugar plantations in northern Brazil. They had no choice but to rely on plantations because tropical regions have lower corn yields than subtropical regions."
He shifted his focus back to Argentina. "On the other hand, Argentina was able to export food and factory-made goods because it had more food and a higher manufacturing percentage compared to them. On the other hand, even after the Civil War ended, the South introduced the Jim Crow Act to enslave black people continuously. However, things changed in the 1950s when the United States connected with the markets around the world after World War II ended. The Argentinian economy was crushed down because its food and manufacturing base was incomparable to that of the American Midwest. The South of the United States, on the other hand, started to export their goods to relatively poor third world countries, and stop forced labor because they were more prevalent in the Third World. The South and the Democratic Party, which no longer needed slavery, abolished slavery as a result of Lyndon Johnson's aggressive preferential treatment. Furthermore, the South, which had a relatively cheaper labor force than the North, kept it cheap with a substantial amount of cheap food coming from the North. This is impossible in Argentina without a continental climate. As such, economy and slavery can be seen as relative concepts."
This time, the professor spread a map of the areas where human trafficking took place on a blackboard. On the map, Western societies such as the United States, Western Europe, and Oceania were painted white, and the rest were relatively dark. The professor turned to the students. "The first slave liberation took place in England in the 1830s. It was natural that the first abolition of slavery happened after the Industrial Revolution took place, and then it led to the French Revolution, and the liberation of American slaves," the professor put down he's chalk. "When you think about it, all of these happened in the Western societies. Of course, their were multiple attempts to do this elsewhere. The communist revolution, that started the anti-feudal, anti-imperialist movement in the Soviet Union and spread across China and the Third World. Everyone knows the result. Gulags continued to operate in the Soviet Union, as did other countries. Russia, Asia, Africa, and Latin America are all subject to slavery today."
He smiled bitterly. "… What's funny is that the Western society that abolished slavery passed on their slavery to other countries. Britain built plantations in India, France built sugar plantations in Haiti, and even the modern United States favors products made from cheap labor in Africa." The professor pointed to the world map. "These things have been repeated over and over again in history. If you look at the Middle East, where agriculture began, they hated slavery more than the Europeans in its early days. Sparta, among the Greeks, had a slave population more than 20 times that of its own people, and Persia, which invaded them, was relatively tolerant of its slaves. Rome, which conquered the Middle East, built grape plantations in europe because of their lowe food production compared to the Middle East, but by the Middle Ages, the Germanic migration increased the food supply in Europe, and the Islamic world of the Middle East expanded it's slavery," the professor said. "We know slavery is not morally right. It's like war. But just as wars continued in human history, slavery has never been cut off. And when human food self-sufficiency goes back to to it's natural state.. when the economy becomes the same everywhere.. Western society will see the rise of slavery on their lands again."