“By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?”

— Walter Rodney

The Groundings with my Brothers https://archive.org/details/TheGroundingsWithMyBrothers (1969)
Context: We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.

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Walter Rodney 50

Guyanese politician, activist and historian 1942–1980

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“A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

Their Morals and Ours (1938)
Context: (On the American Civil War) "History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the Civil War. A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!"

“A slave has no morality, because he cannot choose between good and evil. He has only a derivative morality—that of his masters.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Source: Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938), p. 78

“When the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

The He-Ancient, in Pt. V
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

“The hungry slave
Brings danger to his master, not himself.”
Non sibi sed domino grauis est quae seruit egestas.

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia

Book III, line 152 (tr. E. Ridley).
Pharsalia

“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

“Pre-Constantinian Christians had been pacifists, rejecting the violence of army and empire not only because they had no share of power, but because they considered it morally wrong; the post-Constantinian Christians considered imperial violence to be not only morally tolerable but a positive good and a Christian duty.”

John Howard Yoder (1927–1997) 20th century American Mennonite theologian

Source: The Priestly Kingdom (1984), p. 135

“The British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Obsessive gambling is now regarded as a mental illness - but, argues Theodore Dalrymple, does that not mean that the Disability Discrimination Act makes it illegal for bookies to discriminate against obsessive gamblers by banning them from their shops? http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001721.php (February 19, 2008).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

“John Brown knew the masters secretly feared their slaves might revolt, even as they assured abolitionists that slaves really liked slavery. One reason his Harpers Ferry raid prompted such an outcry in the South was that slave owners feared their slaves might join him.”

James W. Loewen book Lies My Teacher Told Me

As quoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong https://books.google.com/books?id=5m2_xeJ4VdwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=lies+my+teacher+told+me&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dV39VNWyPMmWgwTN14JQ&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=maltreated&f=false (2008), p. 193
2000s, 2007, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (2007)
Context: Ideas made the opposite impact in the Confederacy. Ideological contradictions afflicted the slave system even before the war began. John Brown knew the masters secretly feared their slaves might revolt, even as they assured abolitionists that slaves really liked slavery. One reason his Harpers Ferry raid prompted such an outcry in the South was that slave owners feared their slaves might join him. Yet their condemnations of Brown and the 'Black Republicans' who financed him did not persuade Northern moderates but only pushed them toward the abolitionist camp. After all, if Brown was truly dangerous, as slave owners claimed, then slavery was truly unjust. Happy slaves would never revolt... White Southerners founded the Confederacy on the ideology of white supremacy. Confederate soldiers on their way to Antietam and Gettysburg, their two main forays into Union states, put this ideology into practice: they seized scores of free black people in Maryland and Pennsylvania and sold them south into slavery. Confederates maltreated black Union troops when they captured them.

“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.”

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) German philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist

“If ye do not feel the chain,
When it works a brother's pain,
Are ye not base slaves indeed,
Slaves unworthy to be freed?”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

St. 1
"Stanzas on Freedom" (1843)
Context: If there breathe on earth a slave,
Are ye truly free and brave?
If ye do not feel the chain,
When it works a brother's pain,
Are ye not base slaves indeed,
Slaves unworthy to be freed?

“By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?”

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Walter Rodney 50

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