The United Nations General Assembly has voted to recognise the enslavement of Africans during the transatlantic slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity”, a move advocates hope will pave the way for healing and justice.
The resolution - proposed by Ghana - called for this designation, while also urging UN member states to consider apologising for the slave trade and contributing to a reparations fund. It does not mention a specific amount of money.
The proposal was adopted with 123 votes in favour and three against - the United States, Israel and Argentina.
Countries like the UK have long rejected calls to pay reparations, saying today’s institutions cannot be held responsible for past wrongs.
AIPAC won’t let them.
Anyway, i’d wager Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the greatest crimes against humanity.Hiroshima and Nagasaki were smalltime. Rookie numbers. Sure, the VFX was awesome but they’ve improved on that one since then, too.
Are they? The trans-atlantic slave trade lasted centuries. Millions died, millions more were enslaved. It’s not a competition, but the amount of victims was easily in tens of millions there and honestly is death worse than chattel slavery?
Millions in the past vs 200 000 within a second in the recent past, but true, not a competition.
is death worse than chattel slavery?
I’d rather there not be slaves to ask, really.
Exactly, 200,000 dead in a second plus the cleanup and resulting health/environmental issues… comparatively speaking very low on humanities attrocities, it’s just the speed that stands out.
Japanese treatment of Chinese during shit like Unit 731 caused astronomically more pain and suffering with lasting effects on humanity. The North Atlantic slave trade caused more damage to humanity than the entirety nuclear weapons/energy/research/testing combined.
it’s just the speed that stands out.
Pretty much, yeah.
Japanese treatment of Chinese
and Koreans.
Things always get better when you measure crimes against humanity against other crimes against humanity.
Somewhat a bold move for Ghana. Only a few years ago a few of their MPs were terrified of highlighting anything to do with either the Trans-Saharan or Trans-Atlantic slave trade because of the heavy involvement from some local ethnic groups in capturing, transporting, and selling slaves. Which is not honestly actuate considering the lies and economic pressure from the Europeans. Probably just turned the corner after their Year of The Return stuff was so successful.
I wonder why a colonized country still suffering from neo-colonialism didn’t want to accuse their colonizers.
Not the whole country, just a handful of MPs. But they were senior MPs and well-respected. These guys were genuinely worried about this.
And it was because they thought they’d be on the hook financially for reparations, which Ghana can’t afford. Especially for the groups who were coastal and “let” the Europeans get a foothold there. Basically a financial penalty for not themselves dying to prevent the Portuguese lamdbin Elmina (In before the Brits).
Also, they worried, IMO rightfully, about the Western propensity towards making blanket decisions that affect the developing world and not caring. UN level reparations policy might very well penalize source countries in some zero-nuance fuck up. Look at us. We are a zero nuance fuck up place right now.
Any “senior MP” is guaranteed to have been installed quite a while ago by the West. Ghana certainly wouldn’t be on the hook for reparations. In no way did (what’s currently) Ghana gain any kind of generational wealth from slavery. A few warlord mercenaries backed by European powers certainly did but that’s basically the same as a few corrupt people benefiting from neo-colonialism.
Any “senior MP” is guaranteed to have been installed quite a while ago by the West
Wow, how positively denigrating. “Those poor Africans can’t even manage their own elections,” hm?
Educated in the US or UK, maybe. Installed? LOL. Local elections in Ghana are hotly contested at times and tied to ethic group, family, and age more than anything external. I’ve seen plenty in person. There are plenty of average, and even well-educated Ghanaians that think slave castles should be torn down, not out of abhorance for the practice of slavery, but rather out of shame for having been a part of it.
And it’s been a pretty rapid turn since Ghana brought the issue of reparations to the UK parliament and didn’t get immediately shut down. So they have momentum that has quieted the more hesitant MPs. 6 or 7 years to pivot? Now it’s about the money.
Please don’t forget, this is the same county that buried their only skate park because it might “introduce homosexuality to the youth.” Don’t assume anything about their politics until you’ve spent time there experiencing it.
Yeah I wonder what happened that they couldn’t manage their own elections. Have fun with your block
Yeah, there’s more than a whiff of revisionism going on here. Not that they’re wrong about the specific issue.
If individuals want reparations then that’s fine but they also get put back in the position they would have been in had the slave trade not existed. That means that they are removed from the UK, EU, USA etc and returned to Africa or wherever their ancestral home land as of the 17th to 19th centuries was.
Are we also going to put all the descendants of slave owners in positions they would be in if they didn’t own slaves?
Glad the UN is focusing on current issues.
Indeed. The effects of trans-atlantic slavery are felt to this day.
While agreed …
There are some more pressing issues currently going on.
Like multiple wars, a handful of active genocides, modern slavery on a global scale that’s largely out of the public eye (honestly focusing so much on slavery of the past feels kinda like a slap in the face to the slaves of today), food and clean water scarcity in various places, and the general state of places like Haiti, Eritrea, and South Sudan
general state of places like Haiti, Eritrea, and South Sudan
Damn I wonder what happened to those countries to end up like that. Well have I got good news for you about paying those reparations.
Realistically paying money to places like that is a horrible idea
Reparations is infrastructure and education as well.
There are some more pressing issues currently going on.
Relax, UN is no going to do anything about nothing. They can just as well do nothing about slavery as about wars.
today’s institutions cannot be held responsible for past wrongs.
It’s not just that they don’t want to face the consequences of benefiting from apartheid. They want to continue benefiting from it.
Lots of americans would be very upset with you right now if they could read.
oh a lot of americans on lemmy are already very upset lmao
Americans fought a war over slavery, so obviously they very much weren’t all ok with it. Also, look at stats of where most slaves went. Brasil had the most, USA wasn’t in the top 5. Any number of slaves is too much though.
I said lots not all
Lmao barely and then went back on it during “reconstruction”
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, […] What I do about Slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union - Abraham Lincoln
So the president felt more responsibility to his nation than to the slaves, at a time where slavery was much less frowned upon than today. I have a hard time retroactively faulting him for that. If he did the right thing for the wrong reasons, is it not still the right thing to do?
The war was not fought over slavery. That was only a convenient add-on. The US south was the primary party benefiting from slavery and the north wasn’t. Therefore it was easy for the North to tack that on the list.
While I don’t see it as a bad thing, it was certainly not the primary motivator or reason the civil war was fought. Also it took quite a while after the civil war to actually abolish slavery and even now there are have things like forced prison labor which is primarily done by black men whose neighborhoods are overpoliced.
The war was fought over slavery according to the South’s constitution.
You quoted the wrong side, I suggest that you correct this mistake in the future.
The statement that “the war was not fought over slavery” is a falsehood according to history. It’s not an obscure fact, you can read their constitution at any time. Educate yourself, please, you make me wince in embarrassment
That’s weird, Abe just said that he didn’t really care about slavery, so why was there a war then?
It was not a primary factor for the north. For the south, slavery was the single most important issue for fighting this war.
Can’t you see how this story doesn’t make sense? Slavery already existed. So if the North didn’t care about slavery, then why would the South need to fight for it?
Trump : The gravest crime against humanity is I didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize, everybody knows that. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
What are we back in the 60s?
feddit.org mods banning people because that is disrespectful to the grandioseness of Nazi Germany in 3… 2…
Seriously. How dare they take away from the only true victims of history.
Not for nothing but many many different people have been enslaved, to this very day.
True. But if you knew anything about how other slaves were kept vs the way African slaves were treated beyond this dog whistle sentence you’d probably stop repeating it.
Or you’d repeat it more often and harder because repeating it is intentional
All slavery is evil.
Ya no shit sherlock. But recognizing that chattel slavery of the transatlantic slave trade was especially heinous does not mean you"re ok with any other form of slavery. And playing whataboutism whenever the transatlantic slave trade is brought is a dog whistle that emboldens bigots
got it. a little bit of a thing happened to a whole variety of people so we can safely ignore the huge injustice that was forced upon an entire continent because these things are somehow equal.
Slavery happened to whole peoples in multiple places. Rome enslaved peoples from all over europe. Slave traders from Europe and America didn’t introduce Africa to slavery. Africa was already fighting wars and enslaving each other across the entire continent. That is where the slave trade came from. They enslaved europeans if they got caught there. They had slaves to sell and Europeans found that they wanted to use them. It was a global problem and any peoples left in Africa are just as guilty of it as any European or American. Which is to say, not at all, because all of those people have been dead for two generations.
They are equal. African slavery was more recent and it’s effects are still noticable today, but it was still fucking slavery no matter how long ago it was. Is it that hard to show some respect for the long dead people who lived through it?
Because this one caused the genocide of roughly 100,000,000 people who died or were taken.
Putting word in people’s mouths doesn’t reinforce your point
That’s not putting words in people’s mouths. It’s a rhetorical technique called “reductio ad absurdio” which means to takes an argument to its extreme until it become ridiculous, thereby exposing its flaws.
You know that’s just gonna sound like “All slaves matter” right?
If you have two brain cells sure
Let’s see if you can use your two brain cells to look up whataboutism
“Israel” strange coincidence !!! (ironic)
They’re just jealous
For Israel, exploiting an entire people is not a problem.
The equivalent of the Epstein class has committed horrid human rights violations throughout history for their own profit and pleasure. Mainly the rich owned slaves, but taxpayers are expected to foot the bill for reparations? It would make more sense if the current human rights violators like billionaire Zionists paid the reparations for both past and current crimes against humanity.
UN - the most useless international organization by its own standards in modern human history
Gravest crime so far
Argentina, United States, and Isreal voted against.
and 52 abstentions, including the UK and EU member states.
canada, australia and new zealand also abstained
Them: “Hold my beer.”
