Yesterday I tuned into LoneMyth, a YouTube history channel accessible through our network page. I decided to watch the six-part 60-minute BBC documentary film Building The Great Pyramid.

The producers took the composite viewpoint character route which can be a nice touch. Ten minutes into the narrative stick-armed thugs come to the house of a youth, just into puberty, and abduct him. They tell him that since he owes his life to the king, he must labor for the king. This is surely a proclamation that has been heard tens of millions of times by poor bastards the world over when their betters decided to dispose of their life.

The filmmakers are to be commended for depicting this reality. The narrator gravely states that the boy will never see his home again, but labor for the next 41 years that remained to him. I liked this, particularly the portrait of the stick-armed thugs, who were a regular ass-whooping staple of ancient Egyptian life, usually recruited from ethnically unrelated communities to reduce empathy for the slaves of the divine king who they were charged with beating, torturing, maiming, and killing.

Then came the British twist, the semantic shift from a world of exploitation to one of order. The narrator stated that these ‘conscripts’ were not slaves; that ‘contrary to myth’ Egypt was so well endowed naturally that there was no need for slaves!

I wonder if I came to the narrator’s house with two of my stick-fighters, and informed him that he would forever be cutting, hauling, fitting and finishing stone blocks until too old to be of any use to my master, if he would call that freedom.

If you are not free, you are a slave. There is no gray area. Even when an ancient Roman sold himself to a gladiator school, or when a desperate English kid sold himself to a colonial developer as an indentured servant, he was still a slave—owned and un-free to leave—immediately after the deal was made.

What is the basis for this narrowing of the term slave to the point where it only defines a person of black African ancestry owned by a private individual of white European ancestry in North America between the mid to late 1600s and 1865? For this is currently the commonly accepted definition. When did it change?

It was the British and their colonists that slanted their own language to obscure the fact that theirs was a slave-based empire, as Richard Burton claimed into the late 1800s. The term ‘servant’ predominantly identified un-free people until the 1800s. From the late 1700s when the Church of England became involved in missionary activities and English abolitionists began to rail against plantation slavery, Britain was in a hypocritical position. Its navy was staffed by slaves rounded up by press gangs, its length and breadth was patrolled by gangs of kidnappers who captured poor children and sold them to judges who sold them to American and Canadian colonists. The protection money it extorted from overseas colonies in Africa and Asia was provided largely by indigenous slave labor.

The answer was to obscure its own practices by defining slavery exclusively in terms of the most hideous example, which was the plantation system in the Southern United States, begun by British colonists, who initially worked and beat white slaves to death, until convinced that blacks would last longer under the lash. While all nations are built and maintained on lies, an empire requires a vast hypocritical complex of falsehoods to maintain its fiction of legitimacy. In consequence, to this day white-over-black slavery is the only form of human bondage that is regarded as, or as ever having been, slavery.

A black Sudanese boy who is sold to a Saudi Sheik who rapes him, runs him as a camel jockey, and has him dumped in Somalia when he puts on too much weight, is not, in our sick eyes, a slave, because he is not owned by a white man, but a brown one. The tens of thousands of Russian, Filipino, Thai, Chinese, and African women who are captured and then bought and sold on the world’s prostitution market every year, are likewise not regarded as slaves. Children sold to factory owners and pimps by their parents are not, by our definition, slaves.

The account of the pyramid building was informative. But next to the blatant perpetuation of the horrific lie that English and American academics continue to cloak the human condition in, it was of little interest. Strictly speaking, I suppose there was no such thing as a slave until the Middle-Ages, when the Slavs [preferred as sex slaves by Islamic religious leaders] provided the root for our modern term. There are more slaves now than in any point in human history, and the egg-heads that make it their business to brainwash our children are now even trying to sell us on the idea that 40 years of dragging stone blocks under the threat of death was something other than bondage, something less than slavery.

In case any Brits are listening in, I’d like to buy a tenured British humanities professor. I’m flexible on price if he is argumentative, and promise only to beat him when he fails to do his chores, or disagrees with my opinions. He need not fear death, as he shall wear my heaviest fencing helmet at all times, so I can rip power shots with my rattan rod whenever the fancy takes me.