“Imagine that….And yet….”

“Imagine that Robert E. Lee’s staff officer had not lost his three cigars in 1862.  Imagine that the general’s Antietam battle plans, which were wrapped around those cigars, hadn’t wound up in Union hands.  Alternatively, imagine that George McClellan hadn’t finally used the providential intelligence to stop the rebels in the bloodiest battle in American history.  Imagine that a thus disempowered Lincoln was unable to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.  Imagine that the South had won and spread slavery to the Western Territories.

Imagine that, eighty years later, Japan limited its racist empire to Asia, rather than attacking Pearl Harbor.  Imagine that Hitler, unchecked by the Confederate States of America, rolled back the steady advance of freedom since England abolished the slave trade in 1807.

Imagine, in other words, a world where the ideologies that endorsed slavery still stood.

None of these scenarios happened.  And yet: There are more slaves today than at any point in human history. “

Taken from  - E. Benjamin Skinner’s   A Crime So Monstrous:  Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery