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.
While I agree in part with the sentiment, I think is totally unfair to consider ancient slavery in Greece or Rome as less cruel. It was not less cruel depending on the slave in question. Slaves in mines and agricultural estates were in worse conditions then anything in American south. But if you were an educated slave then your life was indeed better. That also means that was common for slaves in ancient Rome to be able to buy freedom. Slavery was everywhere in society, so the comparison is really hard to make.
There is indeed a racial component in colonial slavery that was not present in ancient Roman slavery. A slave could be from Germany or from Syria and there was no difference in treatment.
I would say that both late trans-atlantic slavery and nazism share a philosophical root in the eugenetic movement, but both grew in parallel with different motives: in one case a justification for economic exploitation, in the other an ideological tool to enforce unity in nationalism.
The transatlantic slave trade started before the concept of race and the eugenetic movement. During the 15th century the justification was more routed in religion and the idea of having prisoner of war being better then to kill the enemy. Still and excuse for economic exploitation, but maybe more akin to what the greeks and romans were doing.
We can go back and forth about the living and working conditions of various peoples held in bondage through history. I think if we really got down to it we’d find that those subjugated by the transatlantic slave trade had it worse in many ways but I’d like to come back to a few central points.
This was a slave trade on a scale never before seen in human history. 15 to 20% died in transport.
On arrival, people were completely stripped of their identity and personhood. They could not marry, they could not have families. They could not testify in court. They could be killed with a degree of impunity. They were non human property. This is not how slavery was practiced in Greece Rome or in more modern Islamic empires.
The status of being a slave was inherited from one’s parents (also not the norm).
The European colonial powers / slave traders developed a global race based caste system to justify all this. You’re right that it started on a religious basis but that doesn’t justify what it morphed into. We have white supremacists engaging in terrorism today because of this heinous ideology that they chose to normalize.
I think Ghana has a point by bringing this UN resolution to a vote and it’s pretty telling that the US, Israel (and Argentina because of Milei) voted no and every European nation abstained while 123 of 178 countries voted yes. That gives us a good sense of what majority of the world thinks and perhaps where the truth lies, though I understand why the West would want to stay in a bubble / safe space when this discussing this matter.
That resolution is just virtue signaling. It adds non binding untenable principles like an hierarchy of crimes against humanity and reparation across centuries for something that was not an international recognized crime at the time (while we agree it was terrible).
On the countries that voted yes we have:
I do not want to engage in whataboutism, that is not my point. My point is that this vote is full of hypocrisy. We are not voting for change, we are voting for scoring political points on easy propaganda at home (west bad, we good). While I hate the US, I found that the fact they opposed the resolution and the reason why they opposed the resolution was at least honest. None of the countries above that voted yes will do anything in terms of reparation, and they are not required to.
Finally, I have to correct you on something you said: both in the Roman Republic and Greece (Sparta) was legal to kill your slave without justification.
It was legal to kill your slave in America also as long as it was “by accident” and this was justified with biblical passage.
Freeing slaves was much more common in ancient Rome than it was in the transatlantic trade or ancient Greece.
Freed slaves could also qualify for citizenship in ancient Rome while for a century in the US they were either nonpersons or infamously 3/5ths of a “real” person.
As for those that perpetuated slavery in Brazil, it’s well established that Portugese settlers upheld the institution. How did Portugal vote? I wonder why. Now that Brazil is a democracy and those that were subjected to that cruelty have a voice - well that explains why they voted yes, doesn’t it?
I won’t contest any of the dates you’ve brought forward. But I will reiterate that slavery in the Middle East was closer to how slavery was practiced historically. European colonial powers turned slavery into something uniquely and monstrously inhumane so it’s understandable why these nations would prefer to hide from that truth. They created a global race based caste system to justify it, which has been a stain on human morality since then. At least there’s hope in the fact that the majority of the world sees it for what it truly was.
123 nations representative of 75% of the global population agreed with this proposition. It’s convenient to say they all did it to score political points and make a statement. But when representatives of 6.35 billion people say this was uniquely bad (considering all the horrific things that happened in their countries due to colonialism and other tyranical regimes), it may be time to stop and self reflect (for the countries that voted no or abstained).
Sorry, but you totally ignored my points. Did you not understand what I said and why I said it?
Why are you trying to say that the millions of African dead in the Sahara are somewhat to be ignored as slavery in the Arab world was more traditional? You are continuing to dismiss spartan and repubblican Rome slavery as humane when we already established that it was worse in mines and villas (when it was also your right to kill the slave with no need for a workaround?). You are trying to dismiss more than 60 years of free and independent Brazil supporting slavery? Portugal was a kingdom, now is a democracy, why you want to keep today people of Portugal accountable for the actions of kings 20 generation separated by modern Portuguese, but you will not keep accountable descendent from the same people living in Brazil? What is the logic here?
My opinion is that in those 123 nations there are lot of hypocrites that have promoted slavery to the milions of dead in the past but will not pay for the reparation in the preposition nor intend to take responsibility for any wrongdoing of the past. That is my point. Why the double standard? They are just dishonest. If European said “Yes” they would have just lied like all that other nations I cited above lying by saying “Yes”.