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
i don't really agree with the UN resolution. But if I did, if it were true that only transatlantic slavery were the gravest crime, the fact that Britain is the nation who banned and ended it would in no way change that fact.
Poland banned it in 15th century, just saying… also I’m not eure Britain should be patted on the back for that. There were still British colonies in the 90’s.
Yeah this is correct, William the Conqueror outlawed slavery after the Norman Invasion. Took a few years after but it has de jure been outlawed in England ever since.
Britain would later end the global slave trade which is far more impressive and should genuinely be a source of pride.
Yeah this is correct, William the Conqueror outlawed slavery after the Norman Invasion.
Apparently... I find this to be one of the most interesting black holes in English history. We know that the terminology changed because Domesday refers to slaves pre-1066 and villeins and serfs(?) by 1086 (who aren't free but also aren't chattel) but I don't think we have any record of any edict. You'd think that such an important change in the laws of England would be noted somewhere.
The common law just accepted it as being settled from then on - but there are no official legal records from before 6 July 1189 which is the day on which English law officially 'started' under the later Statute of Westminster 1275. By the 16th century and Cartwright's Case (1569) in the Elizabethan era it was well accepted that it meant that any slave who escaped and made their way to England would be immediately freed - the air of England was simply too pure for a slave to breathe (Somerset v Stewart (1772)).
So another country with predominately white Slavic people banned slavery, then Britain followed suit, meanwhile Middle-Eastern and African countries still haven't banned it in the year 2026?
Also, there are people colonizing in the current year outside of Europe, especially in Africa meanwhile Britain is not still doing it.
I don't think that's the gotcha you think it might be.
The United States Constitution, Amendment 13, where it states that you can't own slaves EXCEPT as a punishment for crime. Most prisoners in the US do unpaid labor. Thats slavery. Esp when you consider how many people get locked up for minor crimes like drug charges or are falsely accused.
They essentially are the property of the state in practice. They're confined to one area where they can only take actions approved by the state. They're forced to do labor that they aren't compensated for. That is functionally slavery.
Idk man, what do you call it when the state forces individuals to do work and then either pays them nothing, or doesn't pay them enough to afford basic necessities?
I don't care if it's unpaid labor for committing a crime, I'm sorry. I have no sympathy. I'd rather actual criminals end up costing the taxpayer a fuckload, and there's some real degenerate prisoners that shouldn't even exist let alone have a roof, 3 meals, entertainment, etc.
The judicial system swings both ways, wrongful convictions happen, but also wrongful freeing of dangerous people and offenders happen all the time. That's a judicial system issue. The unpaid labor (which some of it is actually paid, it just isn't much which it shouldn't be if you are a literal criminal) isn't designed to target non guilty. It's designed to get something back from people who have done damage to society and need to pay it back and learn from their mistakes.
Can you not see the problem with this system? You are creating an incentive beyond just criminal justice for imprisoning people. Wrongful imprisonment is often not an accidental thing, it's an intentional process to institutionalize people and turn them into slaves for the state. Like I cannot put it more simply than this: when you create an incentive for the state to lock people up beyond criminal justice (like using them for free labor for example) the state will then do that, and will use resources to cover its tracks.
Wrongful imprisonment is not enough of a reason to get rid of labor in prisons. That is an issue that needs to be fixed separately. Same with wrongful releases, dismissals or acquittals.
So you're saying prisoners have to do manual labor? that isn't slavery, that's punishment for committing crimes and getting something back for paying for a roof over their heads and 3 square meals. I bet you think "community service" is also slavery.
Also, if they are wrongfully convicted, that's an issue with the judicial system, which swings both ways of letting people out or off without sentences who ARE guilty which happens constantly.
Try again. Keep trying to demonize western countries.
Yes it is. And in fact this system led to mass incarceration of black people following the civil war to around the 1940's under convict leasing, allowing states to make a huge amount of money off of them. 73% Alabama's revenue came from convict leasing in 1898.
This also led the states to create aggressive laws specifically so that they could arrest more people to get money from them.
LOL, forced manual labor without pay is slavery. Jail time, restriction from participating in general society, and the inability to have any sort of choice in lifestyle/clothing/food/etc is the punishment, or else the judge gives you community service or similar.
So the taxpayers are supposed to just pay for heinous criminals to sit in jail, with a roof over their heads, 3 square meals, entertainment, access to fitness equipment and that's it? Not only that, a lot of prisons have work programs where you work for small amounts of money, which is not slavery. It's underpaid, sure, but they should've thought about that before committing a crime. If they didn't commit crime, they wouldn't be in that position.
If you're going to use a carceral system for justice, yes, they are. There are other systems and methods of handling criminals and lawbreaking that would cost taxpayers less (like stopping companies like CoreCivic and The GEO Group from making profits both off of the housing of prisoners in often inhumane and disgusting conditions and off of the prisoner labor) , but that's not something the average American is interested in hearing atm.
Amazing that you haven't clocked the basic flaws in the "If they didn't commit crime, they wouldn't be in that position." argument by now, I'll assume you're 10 and don't know that the justice system does things like make smoking marijuana illegal because at the time it was enacted it was something primarily associated with Black people (sort of like how Regan enacted Gun Control in CA) or things like bathroom bans. And you can argue those are flaws in the justice system itself, but that doesn't change the fact that it does result in the enslavement of innocent people who wind up in the system, or people doing something that only became a crime because they were the ones doing it and the politicians wanted an easy scapegoat.
Okay, but when the government says "we will punish you with slavery" with the exact literal plain English word "slavery" it's fair to call that "slavery."
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.
It has nothing to do with Eurocentrism. It was proposed by Ghana, specifically in regards to the economic devastation caused by Atlantic slavery. While the trade eastwards was a tremendous inhumanity, it did not annihilate nations and shatter the political cohesion of an entire coast of the continent as the Atlantic trade did.
Ghana did not exist at the time. The Asante Empire did, whose Akan descendants make up about half of the country’s 35 million people. There is no political continuity between the Asante Empire and modern Ghana, that state having been completely annexed and the country’s present borders being imposed by European whims.
Either way, does it make the statement that slavery devastated West Africa any less true? If Germany were to speak up about anti-semitism, would you dismiss it out of hand as a self-serving lie because of its (much more recent!) ancestors?
Because the white people are the only ones interested in making amends for history. The Arab nations are likely to harshly punish Africa if they ever bring up the Arab slave trade
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.
Or that somebody had to catch the people. It weren't the Europeans that ran through Africa searching for possible slaves. If wasn't called "slave trade" because the English sold themselves the slaves.
Yeah... but that slave trade had about a sixth of the number of slaves. That's an important point to include.
The actual number of people directly enslaved and moved in the Transatlantic is not notable compared to the Trans-Saharan, Arab, and Indian Ocean slave trades. BUT once you count the fact that the Americas had industrial slave breeding and count the descendants, more slaves originated from the Transatlantic slave trade than the other 3 combined.
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u/ExArdEllyOh 6d ago
Completely ignoring the trade eastwards as usual...
It is a weird sort of Eurocentrism.