The Egyptian pyramid builders were not slaves. I'm not saying they weren't engaged in back-breaking work for the duration of their short lives and may have experienced a touch of arthritis towards the end, but they absolutely jumped at the job when it was offered because of the three square meals, the honor which it conferred upon them, and the guarantee of a nice burial plot. They were definitely not slaves and I must say that this suggestion is deeply offensive to those of us who can see nothing but good in others and bad in ourselves.
The people who built the Aztec temples are a bit trickier. There's the whole sacrificing themselves in their 1000's on a daily basis to get round for one thing. We have to assume they were cool with that because it must have all made sense in their Aztec cosmology, plus we're waiting for some study to discover it was all Jesuit propaganda further disseminated by an early episode of Dr Who, and that the Aztec workforce actually provides conclusive evidence of pre-Colombian unionization, but I have to say the jury's still out on that one.
Now the White Sea Canal mob, they're very hard to figure out. The official record says they were a rum lot -anarchists, kulaks, members of the left opposition and such like- who all willingly participated in an enlightened reform-through-labour program- but, and this is controversial given who these people were, there are diaries and other records suggesting that some of them were not entirely happy and that in the provision for their well being, mistakes, sometimes quite big mistakes, may have been made. But we do have to take into account the difficult circumstances in which the Soviet regime found itself at the time, internationally isolated, a looming threat from Nazi Germany, and a work force who by and large were thick as mince and lazy with it. As a consequence, I'd not go so far as to argue that the canal ought to be filled in, but I'm glad that they stopped calling it the Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal.
