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.
Why not slavery in Roman Empire? That shit went on for a 1500years
Slavery is much older than this.
America and Israel voted against, our other satellites abstained, our victims voted in favor.
Does it need to be a competition? Jeez
Jews are in mud
I can agree about the reparations part. There is no institution in the world that you could trust to handle a reparations fund and it would never be given to the people who actually need it. It would be a slush fund for the rich.
“We cannot do the right thing. There will be some corruption involved!”.
Corrupt reparations fund sounds better than corrupt military industrial fund.
Sure let’s trade one corrupt slush fund for another one. Do you even listen to the things you say?
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?
Not for nothing but many many different people have been enslaved, to this very day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
“Israel” strange coincidence !!! (ironic)
They’re just jealous
For Israel, exploiting an entire people is not a problem.
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.
The US would owe several times it’s worth in reparations for slavery, The War on Drugs, The destruction of the Middle East, Imperalism leading to the deaths of countless people, genocide of Native Americans, poisoning the world multiple times with chemicals, etc. The list is so long it isn’t funny.
I often say if you were to list all the atrocities and lives destroyed by the US it would be more than my lifetime just to read them all off. It is mind boggling.
You can say the same about any western European country also. Some of those things America did dont happen without western Europe
So it’s pretty definitionally oppression Olympics, but I feel like the slave trade is a decent contender. It lasted centuries, maybe more depending a bunch of history that’s still up in the air. The Holocaust only went on for a few years.
I’m not sure Ghana has hands as clean as they’re implying, though. The victims of the transatlantic slave trade had to (ahem) leave Africa entirely, and usually it wasn’t the Europeans catching and selling them on their own.
The Holocaust isnt even a notable genocide in history. What makes it special is white people humiliating, brutalising and killing other white people instead of the native African, Arab or Asian. Aime Cesaire makes note of this in Discourse on Colonialism.
I mean, it was hardly the first European genocide.
This is why people don’t like the oppression Olympics. It immediately becomes about who you can make lose them.
What was the first? I wouldn’t count the Armenian genocide as European.
Removed by mod
Yeah but many of the victims of the Holocaust were white. Have you considered that?
If we’re doing Olympics probably, yeah. It might be top 20 but there’s a whole lot of world and a whole lot of history. The one that happened in Europe is the one European and European-like countries took notice of, though.
It’s great that we learn so much about it, and the fact that people just like us did it. Just burying ugly things is the natural tendency. It’s given us a framework to understand earlier genocides, as well as genocides in distant places like Israel or Rwanda as they happen.
So it’s pretty definitionally oppression Olympics,
That is the reason so many countries abstained from the vote.
No because they would be agreeing to having to pay reparations.
Never going to happen. Who would force them to pay? Who would they pay? Its a conceptual reparation not a practical one.
Well maybe ending neocolonial exploitation for starters?
Removed by mod
I’m guessing afraid to contradict the US probably fits in there, too.
We don’t recognise any non-white responsibility in any form of slavery here
Slavery has existed in many different cultures, and Africa has had slave trade after it was abolished in Europe and North America, but I think it’s fair to say that the transatlantic slave trade was the most cruel and inhuman form of slavery. The only form of slavery that may have been worse was the one Leopold II imposed on Congo.
It’s racism that made those forms of slavery even worse. I think racism makes everything worse.
I think the biggest contender for worst crime against humanity was the Native American genocide. That was also driven by racism. So was the Holocaust.
but I think it’s fair to say that the transatlantic slave trade was the most cruel and inhuman form of slavery.
I can think of other contenders, actually, but Sparta and Russia are both retconned as white (before the concept existed). Maybe something in east Asia, or the Middle East. Any society with a supermajority of slaves is a good candidate to have some of the same rules in place.
I think the biggest contender for worst crime against humanity was the Native American genocide.
I mean, they also did that in Australia, for example, and there’s tons of similar events in prehistory we can see through sudden shifts in genetic makeup.
Genocides aren’t rare, and since the Americas were a bit more sparsely populated I’m not even sure that’s the biggest one.
I don’t see how any of that relates to the white washing of African people’s involvement in enslaving and selling other African ethnic groups but go on
It shouldn’t be the average taxpayer in these countries who has to pay for reparations (especially when many were descendants of peasants who were also often exploited in other ways), while the wealthy families who benefited the most evade responsibility, smuggling their blood-earned fortunes to tax havens.
It should, because the collective wealth of most of Europe and the United States is built upon slavery.
Any time people profit from infrastructure and education, which isn’t available in the previously enslaved countries, they are benefiting from the fruits of slavery to this day.
So nothing would be sent to Rio de Janeiro because the infrastructure there was built through slavery, and the same could be said for Luanda.
I am Portuguese. My grandparents and the majority of the Portuguese population didn’t even have basic sanitation or education in the 1970s, despite the fact that our country’s elite were among the greatest, if not the biggest, traffickers in the transatlantic slave trade. The electricity grid only reached their neighborhood in the 80s, more than a decade after the Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974. Perhaps, our family should receive reparations.
The elite should pay, and the exploited working class must not allow itself to be divided due to petty things like their country of origin. Engaging in any other way is simply falling into yet another “trap” of the universal rent-seeking exploiters, the bourgeoisie. In short, “não se confunda a árvore com a floresta”.
You guessed it, it’s the usual map:
The EU abstained because bla bla TLDR: they don’t want to pay reparations.
I am so fucking disgusted (yet not surprised) by this dipshit traitorous worthless pile of shit government of Germany, bootlicking fascists all over the world. Once, in the 80s/90s I was naive enough to think we had learned our lesson. But turns out, Germans will happily flock back to fascism the moment being decent human beings slightly inconveniences them.
Yeah - I know - it’s a matter of brainwashing & capitalist propaganda, and this is not a problem unique to Germany, but I prefer to be disgusted at the mess in front of my own doorstep before complaining about others.
Leck Eier, Fritze.
Removed by mod
I don’t think Estonia, Poland or Montenegro were very worried about paying reparations. Maybe colonial powers, but those are a minority in Europe.
