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.
The most important point is that slavery practiced by European colonists is specifically designated as chattel slavery because it was uniquely cruel and inhumane compared to slavery practiced in the rest of the world and historically.
Referring to 123 nations representing 6+ billion people as hypocrites is a convenient and dismissive argument. The West can live its bubble / safe space but we know what the rest of the world thinks.
The broader world seems to understand that this cannot be oversimplified into whataboutisms, simple dualisms or be reflected upon without nuance.
The West is welcome to bring its own resolutions but I’d advise against it because if we’re going to keep track of all of the genocides, displacements and chattel slavery commited by one people onto another in the past 500 years it’s going to be a PR nightmare for them.
The colonial forefathers of many Western nation states knew this which is why they sought the destroy evidence of their wrongdoings. A more blatant example of this is Britain’s Operation Legacy. British colonial officials had a tendency to open fire on unarmed civilians (often women and children) and they tried to cover up countless examples of this and other immoral acts. They firmly believed in that race based caste system they helped create, which I mentioned earlier. So even if they were killing innocent non-white people, it didn’t quite matter to them since they weren’t really people from their twisted perspective.
A group of elderly Kenyans who were subjected to rape, torture and castration in British detention camps in the 1950s actually won a case against the British government in 2013 and were paid a $30 million dollar settlement distributed to 5228 people. They even had to fund a memorial to the victims in Nairobi.
Unfortunately most colonial atrocites are past the ‘statute of limitations’ so to speak so I agree that reparations would be complex. I’m just glad that the world sees European transatlantic chattel slavery for what it was and, even if it’s hard for modern Westerners to accept, at least they know how the rest of the world sees it now too. The first step to justice is acknowledgement.
Again, it is like talking to a wall, you are not addressing my points.
I am not referring to 123 nations as hypocrites, I am referring to the dozen of nations that voted “Yes” for slavery reparation but practiced slavery to the millions of dead and do not intend to pay any reparation.
The US already recognized and apologized for chattel slavery with H. Res. 194.
Again, Roman slavery was one of the most massive example of chattel slavery. Brazil was chattel slavery, the Islamic world engaged in chattel slavery (bantu in salts marshes in Iraq, plantation in Zanzibar, Ottomans plantations for sugar and cotton), the Sokoto Caliphate used chattel slavery (modern Nigeria working in plantations)
The vote at the UN was not for recognition, was for reparations, and the diplomats to the countries involved clarified multiple time that was not an internationally recognized crime at the time, so descended can not be held liable for reparations. Anything else is just performative. What exactly do you expect?
I should clarify my prior post in that European colonists were unique in practicing race-based chattel slavery
I am not at all challenging the fact slavery existed in the many societies. Concur with all of your examples but, and this is an important caveat, slavery was not practiced under a further dehumanizing race based caste construct in those societies, it wasn’t industrial on the scale of the transatlantic trade (rather more often based on domestic kinship models), and I would still attribute the perpetuation of slavery in Brazil according to the European colonial model to Portugese settlers. Unfortunately colonialism doesn’t end when colonists leave (as the field of post colonial studies has demonstrated repeatedly).
Even under Shariah (Islamic) law, slaves had the right to be fed and clothed like their masters, the right to marry, and protections against extreme physical abuse. This is not how European colonists practiced slavery via the transatlantic slave trade.
My understanding of your argument is that it boils down to slavery existed elsewhere. I 100% agree that it did. But the way European colonists did it was so much more cruel and inhumane, and I think that’s what the diplomats from 123 of 178 nations are recognizing here, and rightly so.
In short, we need to have some nuance in understanding how slavery is actually practiced. Some forms are more cruel than others. My argument is that the European colonists did it on a scale and with a degree of cruelty (creating a race based caste system on the basis of false science) never before seen in human history.
Their actions created a period where blackness was synonymized with enslavability and the echoes of that vile ideology reverberate into the present day.
That type of global ideological poison, in my view, certainly puts it among the gravest crimes against humanity. Because it’s not just the people they enslaved that were impacted. It changed how people with darker skin were and are perceived even in the present day. It tied a person’s worth to an immutable and plainly visible characteristic, their skin tone. To me, that makes it one of the greatest evils committed upon humanity.
No, they are not. They are asking for reparation, that is the entire point of the resolution. Reparation, it is said so many time in the document it is ridiculous. We want to say that slavery in US plantation was worse because it had a race component? Fine! I agree, but we are playing the game of “which crime against humanity is worse?”. I find it just degrading. Because Ghana does not really care about the life of the US american citizens that descended from the slaves. They want reparation for them. And reparation for losing millions of citizen is the same if you lose them to the Arabs or to the Americans or to your own internal plantations with chattel slavery.
If for you this is not hypocrisy I do not know what to say