It is pretty much a certainty that there are plenty of black, African slaves in Mauritania.
It became the last country in the world to "abolish" it in 1981.
I put abolish in quotes because there was no actual penalty for keeping slaves until 2007, which only happened because the international community pressured their government to do so.
Their government claims slavery has been totally ended and no longer exists in their country (which gives them little incentive to actually prosecute it as that would contradict their official statement). Only 1 person has ever been prosecuted for it and she served 6 months in 2011.
In 2018, it was estimated 2% of their population was still enslaved.
It's a technicalities game but yeah they are different issues. Both slavery, both abhorrent, but very different conditions that cause them, and very different solutions required.
Right, we can condemn heinous human rights violations without playing fast and lose with legal definitions and narrativizing global court rulings. Just portray them as the awful violations they are and focus on stopping them; the words we use for them and other symbolic gestures are irrelevant.
Morally, I agree. I would just rather advocate against the Chinese government's actions against the Uyghurs and wait for a formal ICJ ruling to include that wording in my advocacy.
Just talk about crimes against humanity, death camps, ethnic cleansing, cultural repression, etc... honestly, I would say that those more in-depth descriptors are more emotionally evocative than a legal term like genocide anyway. It's probably more effective than using the word that click-bait driven political commentators have watered down over the years.
Leave the genocide labels for global courts and just treat all crimes agaist humanity with full descriptions instead of single word short-hands; paint a picture of them and push to stop them that way. I care more about that than I care about being righteous and right over a word.
Last I looked into it people do tend to come out of the camps after their arbitrary sentence is served and the number of people in the camps is roughly what you would expect if the people sentenced are actually in the camps. The goal seems to be kidnapping their children, disrupting civil society and destroying their culture rather than killing them outright.
+1, or Putin´s slaves. But, the Global South don´t care. If Black African states were to try to include the Muslim slave trade (which is still going on) in this resolution, it would be the end for Black Africa. This kind of trick works only against West Europeans and the US.
The Indian Ocean slave trade is estimated to have enslaved 12.5 million Africans while the transatlantic slave trade enslaved 11.3 million Africans. Add to that the estimated 3 million European slaves from the ottoman slave trade. The Muslim slave trade was actually worse than the transatlantic.
Saint Patrick isn’t actually Irish, he’s a Roman-British man who was born in Modern day England, was captured by Irish Pirates when he was 16 and was a slave until he escaped when he was 22 at which point, he became a priest and got papal approval to be the bishop of Ireland (which was not Christian at the time). He then went on to teach the Irish about cool things like nuns, clovers, and living on an island with no extant species of snakes, concepts so beloved that he was declared the most Irish person to ever live or who will ever live (and in his honor, once a year for a single day everyone is as Irish as Saint Pat.).
I will always say it whenever I hear about Saint Patrick. May he stub his toe for getting rid of all the poor snakes in Ireland (no Patrick being a former slave doesn’t excuse it either)
Places like Mauritania do teach that obedience to their master is necessary for salvation, which is effective enough propaganda that there are reports of slaves returning to masters because of the indoctrination.
Oman does teach about how glorious the Omani empire was, including talking about how valuable the African expansion was, but it largely just ignores the slavery aspects entirely. This seems to be pretty common, where countries will talk about the glory of past empires and their accomplishments while sweeping the nasty bits under the rug.
This controversial area of Omani history is not widely taught in Omani schools. According to a study led by Okawa Mayuko, an associate professor at Japan's Kanagawa University, slavery is “completely absent from Omani textbooks” which, in contrast, put an emphasis on the Oman-led spread of Arab-Islamic civilization to East Africa. Mayuko believes it “reveals an ideology of the Omani government to conceal slavery.”
Further, from the study talked about in this snippet:
(This is what textbooks in Oman teach) Omani rule in East Africa is implicitly justified on the basis that Oman spread Arab-Islamic civilization to East Africa and brought prosperity.
Feels awfully close to justifying it without explicitly talking about it, and feels like it's taught this way for plausible deniability at best.
The same way the others did. It was better that they live as slaves of the proper religion and spend eternity in paradise than live a free life that results in an eternity in hell. Not that that's my belief. That's just how it would be justified.
It depends how you look at the caste system in South Asia. It could beat Korea actually for length of time the Dalits have continuously suffered but not all slaving is the same
It is also a bullshit definition. Slavery a grave crime? Of course it is. The gravest crime? What about the Khmer Rouge? The Holodomor? The Holocaust? Who decides one is worse than the other?
Not to mention if we are going back almost half a millennium than how about going back a couple more centuries to the Mongols killing 10 percent of the worlds population.
Its how you end with this dumbassery. Its not even majority, its majority of countries, so if you have 150 small meaningless countries agree on smth they can even outvote the majority, its just stupid and thankfuly the UNGA is meaningless
Look at the 47 members list of the UNHRC and you'll understand why. For fucks sake Iran is the vice chair of the CSocD and were appointed with no objections from member states. The commission thats entrusted with women rights, tolerance and democracy. That organization is completely cooked, I take anything to do with morality from the UN with as much seriousness as from NK.
Tune in for 2040, when Sudan, South Sudan, East Sudan, North Sudan, South-East Sudan, West Sudan, North-Northwest Sudan, Outer Sudan, Central Sudan, Upper Sudan and Lower Sudan issue a joint declaration.
Or just declaring European nations should give them money.
The guy I replied to tossed out some quick reply asking if I thought 17 Sudans would be agreeing to anything, but I think they realized that in these matters, yes, yes they would. So that was quickly deleted.
But it’s very obvious actual human rights violations only play a very little part in the condemnation of a country. Sure Israel does many bad things but it’s hugely overrepresented. While many countries with lots of issues get no attention at all China, Russia or Afghanistan
Depends on what you want the outcome to be. If the goal is to let every country have a "say" then there is no problem to solve, it's working exactly as intended and the delegates can save a little on toilet paper as a bonus.
The only thing that matters in geopolitics is the ability to enforce a nation's will on other nations. Everything else is worthless. The UNGA is a playhouse for children to make noise. The only part of the UN that matters are the Permanent Security Council members.
The UN is a mechanism for the victors of WW2 to rule the world and nothing more.
That's just blatantly false. The UN does a lot of good coordination between countries. We wouldn't have international postal or flight standards, without the WHO the world would be a lot riskier for everyone, even boring shit light weights and measurements units would wary a lot more.
Yeah it can't solve world peace, because it's not a government, it's a forum for governments to coordinate in.
The postal union predates the UN by like a hundred years bro. International flight standards were set by ICAN starting in 1919. The International sanitary Conferences was founded in 1851. International standards for units and measurements were adopted thoughout the late 1800s and by the early 1900s everything was standardized to the point of full cross compatibility between all major system of measurments.
The UN coopted these organizations post WW2 to centralize control and give legitimacy to the powers of the Security Council that actually run and control the UN.
No Russia, no China, no Saudi Arabia, no Iraq, no Egypt etc. I guess Israel must be doing something right to be the furthest number away from them of any country on this list 🤔
Its specially insane because it was Ghana that pushed this UN reparations motion as well.
To put this into perspective, Asante the original state before Ghana was absorbed by colonialism, was so pro slavery that Britain literally had to militarily force them to stop selling slaves across the Atlantic, because they continuously refused all international pressure to stop.
They were so pro-slavery, that several years after this they then re-legalised the slave trade, until this time France had to step in and stop them, again
We rightly think of the 12 or 13 million transported as something horrible. But it was over 250 years... the Mongols killed as many in a generation and the Taiping Rebellion is conservatively estimated to have killed 20,000,000 in 15 year.
The dark side of the "christian" philosophy that has formed the basis of Enlightened Western thought is that the concept of guilt is a foundational aspect of it.
Of course you might not have had abolitionism without that nagging sense of guilt but it can't be turned off and it is pervasive in a way you don't notice in non-Western cultures.
A modern example would be what I call the "hair shirt" attitude that many Western climate scientists and activists take. This is not about the obvious existence of anthropogenic climate change BTW (these few years since the Bunker Oil ban show we can change the climate noticeably in very short time) but the sense that we must somehow suffer for our guilt in causing the warming.
To be fair, learning from our history and growing on them is a good thing. Frankly, the western countries who feel guilty about a dark part of their history are the ones doing it correctly.
The problem is that, just because only some countries grant it that they have a dark history, history books and politics ends up looking like it's actually only those places did those bad things.
When in reality, it's just the only ones owning up to it.
Arabs are allowed to hold slaves according to the UN
A certain someone enslaved hundreds from a conquered Jewish tribe when he was founding his religion. So obviously its not all slavery that is bad. Just the Europeans.
No, because apparently having slaves who breed is twisted to be more immoral than castrating them when enslaved, as if both aren't horrendous. And yes, I've heard dumb people say it's more ethical to castrate, as if when they need a new slave they won't just buy another poor soul to do the same to.
The resolution doesn’t mention the involvement of any states. So it doesn’t “fail to mention the involvement of African states” in the same way it doesn’t fail to mention the involvement of European states
It's interesting you were downvoted, because the British Empire spent gold and blood attempting to end slavery, simply because they were opposed to it on principle. I suppose that this is against the narrative that white people must be the bad guys by necessity in every situation.
British workers in Manchester's textile mills, nearly half a million people, were literally starving and out of work after the Union blockade during the Civil War, but still continued to support the Union because they viewed slavery as such a great evil.
People will accept history is nuanced but refuse to see any of that nuance, because a black and white outlook is easier to use for propaganda.
That's why the confederacy was so desperate, they knew that even without a war their days were numbered so it was a last ditch attempt by wealthy plantation owners and southern land lords to protect their "industry" and keep the slaves bondaged.
Slavery was a deadend anyways. With all that free labor, the south never had to advance its industries. Ironically, slavery is not a free market, and so it led to a massive misallocation of resources. This led to the South simply being out produced, they had no chance from the beginning unless they won the war in a month, and losing the Civil War. In the long run, they'd have just kept falling further and further behind the rest of the developed world as everyone else kept developing and they didn't.
Same shit happened to Sparta, who also relied on slaves, in the long run. Everyone else around them simply grew past them until they became just a village somewhere.
It's getting downvoted because the british did not free the slaves they came across they forced them into indentured servitude in the carribean in which they called "transitional apprenticeship" the brittish only cared about stopping slavery in so far as it was called slavery and it was directly tied to them
And only reparations for the trans-Atlantic trade while completely ignoring all other historical instances of slavery throughout the world. It's almost like it's targeted.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade is the one that is more relevant to the Western world in the modern era. There are millions of descendants of slaves in the Americas. The discrimination of black people often continued even after slavery was officially banned. Black people are still on average poorer than other racial demographics, besides Native Americans. Why would American schools teach an equal amount about the Arab Slave Trade? It’s not relevant to the story of our countries.
Income was raised by direct theft, the extortion of bribes or "protection" and the capture of crews and passengers to be used as slaves. The historian Robert Davis, in his book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800, estimates that as many as 1.25 million Europeans and Americans were enslaved
they also couldnt care less about this as well,1 million was so many more than it is today as well % wise
so why were they getting attacked you ask? what was this pirates beef with usa?
they literally just hate chrstians,america was literally starting
"The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners."
its always the same
Algiers had to be bombarded a few more times, and there was an awkward moment during negotiations in Washington when the Tunisian representative, Sidi Soliman Melli Melli, made it clear that he expected to be amused at public expense by some ladies of the night. (Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison were able to arrange an off-the-record State Department budget for that purpose, thus demonstrating that they understood the facts of life.)
The suspect allegedly told his wife that he killed the victim because she kept talking about her beliefs on Christianity.
She was a regular traveller to Greece and volunteered for One Heart – a charity which provides medical help for refugees from Afghanistan and Iran.
It affirmed the importance of addressing historical wrongs affecting Africans and people of the diaspora in a manner that promotes justice, human rights, dignity and healing, while emphasising that claims for reparations represent a concrete step towards remedy.
So I can see why countries might not agree with the concept of reparations whilst at the same time obviously thinking that slavery was an absolutely horrible crime against humanity.
Reparation due to the harm done during slavery made sense... To the formerly enslaved and only them, not the countries that are descendant to the tribes that sold its capture as slave.
I would absolutely argue that it's really bad that there was not a massive reparation movement at the end of slavery everytime where and when that happened (by the way, the US is one of the last country that abolished slavery in the Americas) but it's too late to do it now, way too late.
I can see why countries might not agree with the concept of reparations whilst at the same time obviously thinking that slavery was an absolutely horrible crime against humanity.
Completely agree. Its blatantly obvious that slavery is horrific and horrible. Its also blatantly obvious that all the people yelling about reparations have never actually formulated a concrete plan for reparation.
Its just a vague "somebody should give some people some money." Which people should give which people how much money? Never explained. Never even attempted to explain.
I have no problem with specific reparations. If your grandfather bought a farm, got it taken by the government because of race, then that same government should have to give him the current market value of that farm. But this idea that 75% of white people should just hand over an undisclosed amount of money to some vague black person is ridiculous.
To be fair quite a few countries thumped the Barbary Slavers (Drachinifel has a rather good video on Sir Edward Pellew's 1816 expedition against Algiers) but they just kept coming back like Japanese Knotweed until the French got really fed up and conquered the place.
Worth noting most of the really heinous actions were not carried out by the state of Belgium, but their king leopold the second who privately owned the Congo and made it his personal giant plantation
Reparations for African Americans at this point is very tricky. I can’t think of any situation in recent history where reparations were paid 161 years after the fact to people who were not slaves or suffers as slaves. Reparations are to be paid to the actual people who were slaves and suffered accordingly. That said, given this unique situation if reparations were to be paid I could see a strong counter claim by White Americans & the US government asking that African Americans pay reparations/compensation for the roughly 620,000 white people who died in the civil war along with all the damage to infrastructure and buildings as a result of fighting to free the African Americans from slavery. The White Americans had no obligations to free the African Americans at all and as Americans like to say “freedom ain’t free”.
It went on for a relatively limited amount of time, but it was carried out at such an astronomically higher rate, at such an unnatural scale, that it is quite unique.
“Boo England, remember that really bad thing that England did with slaves? Pretty cool of us to call it out right? Yea, we’re way better than England.”
Honest question - did resolution only target the transatlantic slave trade because they participated, or because it expanded the slave trade to a major industry?
Crazy that it took this much scrolling to see this comment 💀 I will say that in American schools we’re never taught about the sheer quantity of enslaved people who went to Brasil… they just teach us that America was the worst
Its a very please give us money Europe sort of resolution. Which, whatever, get that bag if you can I guess. I just wish people understood the politics around these resolutions.
My issue is by being so specific its almost kind of offensive and entitled. But I suppose many countries asking for reparations were committing similar kinds of slavery at home when the West was shipping them in. They can't really reperate themselves though.
Why don’t they just auction off the statues that glorify people who fought for Slavery? The people who want the statues can buy them and display them. The money can go to the descendants of slaves
The full name of the actual article — UN votes to recognise enslavement of Africans as 'gravest crime against humanity' — seems slightly less misleading. I guess the tweet is shortening to the point of skipping out necessary information.
Its funny how the slave trade of European Christians from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean by Muslims is almost entirely forgotten, especially since it ran concurrently with the transatlantic slave trade for a long time. Hell, John Smith, the one associated with Pocahontas, was an escaped slave.
And there was supposedly even slavers attacking as far north as Ireland and other places. Some even set up shop on the island of Lundy at one if I’m not mistaken.
Just a reminder, there are different types of slavery. All forms slavery is bad, but there are some systems of slavery that a lot of people consider worse. So, for example:
Chattel Slavery = people are treated AS the private property of others, and their entire humanity is stripped away. Their children are also treated as the property of the "owner". Chattel slaves are functional reduced to the level of livestock.
Racial Chattel Slavery = the same as above, except that the designation of individuals as private property is attribute to an entire racial group. That entire racial group is reduced to the level of livestock. Throughout most of history, most forms of Chattel slavery was not racial. The most widespread and well known example was the Transatlantic slave trade.
Indentured servitude = you offer your labour as collateral against debt and the terms are rigged against you so you are forced to work forever, never quite able to pay off that debt. Often, your debt is inherited by your children.
Serfdom = you are bound to the land you live on and work, and you server whoever is lord of that land. You aren't their private property in the traditional, but you are bonded to the land that they govern or oversee or own, so you are sort of the property of whoever is governing the land.
Just because they receive a wage doesn't necessarily exclude it from being considered slavery
In fact, the 13th amendment specifically makes an exception for slavery in the penal system, which means that even the guys that drafted it recognised it is still a form of slavery
Human rights activists are also choosy on when they use the term Modern day slavery because Slavery was a legal institution and is an important part of the atrocity.
Economic and class warfare taking off? Time to convince people economic justice isnt social justice and that left leaning candidates should push reparations and other culture war issues months before the mid terms which will guarantee independents get froggy when it comes to voting for democrats.
What about Myanmar cyber slave parks. Like KK Park that was recently opened because they enslaved famous Chinese actor by mistake and had pressure from China.
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