I'm deep into working on my next novel, whose theme is slavery and human trafficking.  Slavery, like piracy and deadly bacterial infections, are old scourges of human kind that many thought had gone away, but have returned with a vengeance. 

Modern slavery takes two forms, enslavement of workers and sexual slavery.  Both share essentially the same features.  They grow, like cancer, in societies where poverty is endemic and governments are weak, corrupt, and uncaring.  And, modern slavery flourishes when there is a market in wealthier societies for the products of that labor--whether it is prostitution, cocoa, or strategic minerals.   Children in southeast Asia are sold in sexual slavery by their desperate parents so that pedophiles from the West can take paid vacations to enjoy practices that are felonies in their home countries.  Multiple generations of low caste Indians are tied to debt slavery making knick knacks for western consumption.  And forced laborers in sub-Saharan Africa mine the strategic mineral tantalum so that our computers will run cool. 

And not enough people care. 

This year, in my job as a lobbyist for organized labor, I worked on a bill with anti-slavery activists that would have required corporations to make public their efforts to eradicated slavery from their supply chains.  The experience opened my eyes to how widespread slavery is and how we all somehow are touched by it.  The bill eventually died, but the issue won't die. 

Not for me, at any rate.

In my new novel, many of the characters from Eve of Destruction  return to confront this new--and very ancient--evil in our midst.  And the governments that send them on their missions, who interests are strategic and global, must deal with the all too real human tragedy of the modern slave trade.  

I have created this blog to communicate with my readers about the issues of the day, particularly as they relate to my novel Eve of Destruction.  Please feel free to comment.  I hope this blog will be interesting and thought provoking.

I wrote Eve of Destruction to be both entertaining and highly plausible.  Eve is a thriller that could really be happening.  Right now, today.  The biggest problem I had describing the regime in Iran is that it is probably worse than most Americans understand.  It is difficult not to make the Iranians seem like cartoonish bad guys.  This is partly a function of the loss of US credibility in the wake of the highly deceptive propaganda campaign undertaken by the Bush Administration to justify the invasion of Iraq. 

However, there is another factor at play and we need only look at how the West looked at Adolph Hitler prior to the Second World War.  For most people in the 1930s, the Nazi regime was a comic-opera affair, with its odd dictator and his Charlie Caplinesque mustache, hysterical speeches, and goose stepping followers.  It was hard to see the man as something other than a figure out of a central European comic opera--until it was too late.  President Mahmoud Amadinijad of Iran and the Ayatollahs who rule the country with an iron fist are also hard to take seriously.   They say zany things, sponsor art exhibits for holocaust deniers, and talk about world hegemony for Islam.  Despite the fact that the Iranian regime shows every intention of trying to acquire nuclear weapons and has threatened to use them against Israel, many people feel that the threat is overstated.  Despite the fact that there is overwhelming evidence that the Iranians are the world's foremost sponsor of state terrorism (and have been for some period), there is a sense that such accusations are intended to stoke up passions to justify an invasion by a Bush administration hell bent on expanding its "splendid little war" in the middle East.  Despite the fact that the Iranian regime sent 150,000 of its own children to their deaths as human mine detectors in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and today train and glorify suicide bombers, brutally repress everyone from gays and lesbians to ethic and religious minorities to trade unionists (last year they had several hundred thousand women arrested for having their hair showing in public), there is some sense that the regime is moderating or is growing more democratic.

So my novel was intended to be a wake up call and a warning.  Listen to what the Iranian regime freely says about its intentions.  Just because you may be skeptical of US government intentions doesn't mean that the government of Iran doesn't mean what it says.

If you want to hear it straight from the source, go to www.memritv.org and take a look at some of the video clips from the television shows that air every day in Iran (and throughout the Middle East). 

Personally, I believe that economic sanctions, strictly and forcibly applied, can convince the Iranian regime to moderate its course.  Hopefully, it will not take military action.  But a nuclear armed apocalyptic regime in Iran is a risk that is too great to risk.