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.
Argentina, United States, and Isreal voted against.
and 52 abstentions, including the UK and EU member states.
canada, australia and new zealand also abstained
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.
Gravest crime so far
Here’s the biggest problem with reparations…
Most slaves were captured and then sold by other africans from competing kingdoms or tribes, to the europeans who would then take them across the atlantic.
Giving reparations to current africans would actually be like rewarding the original slavers.
I think this might miss the point of reparations
I thought the point of reparations is not to “pay off” a historical wrong, but instead is meant to help offset the generational of disadvantage caused by slavery and racism to those who suffer from that legacy today
we need all kinds of changes to end cycles of poverty and generational trauma, and reparations is just one tool among many to help with that - but it’s more about fixing the broken thing now than about absolving guilt
Well, sure. But a lot of developed nations already have a lot of programs aimed at doing that.
Also, as someone has said somewhere in this discussion, who exactly would receive reparations? It’s not exactly an easy thing to ascertain.
yes, I do think reparations has many problems with it - ideally it would be a matter of transitioning wealth accumulated through slavery from the people who benefited from slavery to the people who suffered under slavery. We are generations away on both sides, but it’s not like the effects haven’t certainly enriched some while hurting others even today.
Usually when I hear about reparations, the idea is to use tax money to do it, but at that point a lot of the people paying the taxes for reparations are also the victims of generations of slavery, so … I dunno, doesn’t feel like the most targeted or ethical approach.
And yes, who do we decide who receives reparations? Is it just for slavery, or are we going to recognize the way slavery and racism are intertwined and related?
What about reparations for other racist choices, like segregating Black communities and building interstates through their communities, polluting and robbing those communities of health, wealth, etc.?
Again, reparations is just one tool. I’m not sure you can really argue that racism has been properly dealt with or solved, or that reparations has no place in a program of racial and social justice, even if we can pick out logistical difficulties.
Further, why does it feel like you are against this project of justice, rather than for it?
I’m against reparations because, as you said, it would be unfair on both sides.
The people that would be taxed (the majority) probably never benefitted from it, at least not directly. I can give you an example. On my father’s side we made a family tree reaching all the way to the 17th century, and there were no rich landowners or noblemen. It’s highly unlikely they owned slaves. Should my family pay for reparations?
Now, if you can accurately trace slave owning people and their descendants are still wealthy, then by all means…
What I’m saying is it can’t be a blanket measure.
Also, if we europeans must pay, then the arabs better pay up as well.
And then you have the question of who receives the money. Africa is rife with corruption. I wouldn’t want the money to go to some corrupt government official. But how would you trace the exact people or families who should receive the money? What if the family who was enslaved mixed with the family/tribe/kingdom of the slavers? Then what?
I’m absolutely for helping Africa, but it just can’t be this fantasy notion of reparations because it’s not feasible.
Hm, my point wasn’t that reparations is unfair to both sides, but that there are better and worse ways to go about it.
Regardless, I think measures that aim to fix economic inequality and wealth distribution, and particularly efforts that are rooted in morally defensible arguments about repairing the harms caused by slavery and racism are noble and worthwhile. I’m even happy for imperfect versions of this where the US government pays reparations using tax money - it’s a much better use of my tax money (whether I personally benefited from slavery or not) than a lot of the villainous stuff the US currently does with my tax money.
Besides, the positive outcomes are alone worthwhile.
Typically I think of reparations as being sent to those who can show their lineage goes back to African slaves in the US, in which case it’s usually African-Americans who are the primary beneficiaries of reparations, not bureaucrats in Africa.
The way you are thinking about reparations makes me think you are not very keen on projects of social justice in general. Maybe you’re just jaded or cynical about the possibility for justice to be handled fairly, but I think we should be motivated to supporting and finding paths forward that help people whether they are perfect or not, and I just don’t get that vibe from you.
I am keen on social programs. Social welfare programs, which in fact I consider fundamental in a developed society.
I just don’t see reparations as a good social program.
They do have these programs but they barely scratch the surface or even contra the damage currently being done to the communities in question.
It’s not exactly easy but it’s not exactly impossible either. Of course, not you necessarily, someone could keep declaring it impossible to do no matter much the subject is researched.
For example, we can see that the communities effected by this have had far less investment than places that benefitted. The way to fix a severe lack of investment is through significant investment. There’ll be more, of course, but that’s an easy one right there.
I’m definitely not against giving more money in these programs, or widen their scope. I do think we have a moral obligation to help, in general. If you are better off, that is.
But where do reparations stop? There’s hardly a place on this planet who wasn’t taken advantage of, or hasn’t taken advantage of another.
I mean, we’ve barely started. I don’t think it’s time to think about when we should stop. But, if we have to, it’ll be when it’s finished.
But a lot of developed nations already have a lot of programs aimed at doing that.
Programs like “we bomb the shit out of you”, “climate catasthropy”, “unlimited global apartheid on the world’s exploited masses”?
This is just a complete lie what the hell
Which part? That Africans captured other Africans? Definitely not a lie… Europeans didn’t go to the interior. They showed up at the western coast, anchored offshore, and bought captives from mercenaries or tribal warlords who had brought conquered Africans from the interior to the coast specifically because there was a customer (horrible I know) to buy them – the European slavers waiting in their ships. Port towns grew wealthy and powerful as the “portal” to African slaves.
Slave Ship is a good (and brutally dark) book about this.
They did show up at the shores and took slaves. Then they found out they could sell guns and arm mercenaries to do it for them for even more effective slavery. And they killed anyone who resisted them.
Just because they armed and hired middle-men to do the dirty work on the shores (and only because it was cheaper for them to do this) doesn’t absolve them from being the cause these people were transported into slavery.
Next you’re gonna argue slavery only started in Africa when the first europeans started doing it, completely ignoring the centuries of arab slave trade before that, and centuries after europeans outlawed it, and which likely enslaved as many people.
The truth is, it was an awful thing with a lot of different parties involved for different reasons, throughout a very long period.
Slavery had always existed. Institutionalized slavery was an exclusively European invention. Frightening how little people know about it and how much they’re willing to defend it https://review.gale.com/2025/04/08/african-slavery-vs-trans-atlantic-slave-trade/
How convenient you chose to ignore the exact paragraph from that link that touched very lightly on what I said:
“In stark contrast, the trans-Saharan slave trade introduced chattel slavery where enslaved individuals were the property of their enslavers with no rights and their status was inherited by their offspring. This system stripped individuals of any agency and autonomy which reduced them to mere commodities.”
Arabs enslaved millions for a much longer period of time (all the way up to the late 20th century), raped the women, neutered the men, literally denying milions of a future generation from existing.
But I don’t see anyone asking them for compensations.
Strange you stopped reading there.
Indigenous African slavery was typically localised whereas the trans-Atlantic slave trade functioned on a more industrial scale by forcibly transporting millions of Africans to the Americas to meet labour demands of plantation economies.
Institutionalized slavery was an exclusively European invention.
Whoever told you this, stop listening to them. They are not to be trusted
Every historian ever.
Well you’re conflating “how it happened” with “who’s to blame”.
Obviously the European slave trade was the prime mover for regional African warlords capturing would-be-slaves in the interior and of course this doesn’t absolve the European slavers of anything lol
It’s the truth. Sorry? Do you think the slave traders were parking outside Africa, ranging across the continent, and grabbing people with big nets?
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They were armed and trained by the West and acted as Western mercenaries. This is like blaming neo-colonialism on the countries suffering from it because the West installed a puppet government there.
They were armed and trained by the West and acted as Western mercenaries. This is like blaming neo-colonialism on the countries suffering from it because the West installed a puppet government there.
Why are you using Cold War propaganda terms to describe something that happened before Marx was even born?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/mar/31/epiloguetothedebateonslav
The single most important - and also, alas, the most overlooked - causative factor is the gun. Once African tribes that formerly fought with bows and arrows or spears were introduced to the devastating nature of the musket, the cannon and the Gatling, all bets were off, so to speak.
Apart from directly hiring their own mercenary armies to go into the interior of Africa to kidnap slaves and pressgang them into the purpose-built slave forts, the European slavers would go to Tribe A and say to its leaders: “Look, we only came here to buy your gold, as we’ve been doing for years. But Tribe B has sent emissaries to us, asking us to sell guns to it. Now, we know that you are their immediate target, having fought them in terrible wars not so long ago. Because of our friendship for you, we have told them we have no guns. For now.”
That has nothing to do with my comment. I’m talking about your use of the word “the West” everywhere. You’re confusing entire centuries. This is back when Russia was a monarchist empire too, for example.
Why?
Why are you spreading racist propaganda over the entire thread to excuse Western slavery? What does the article I linked start with?
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.
Lmao barely and then went back on it during “reconstruction”
I said lots not all
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
I’m surprised the MAGA fucks in charge of this run away derailed freight train have not switched to the Confederate government flag.
Things always get better when you measure crimes against humanity against other crimes against humanity.
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.
Does it need to be a competition? Jeez
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?
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
Yeah, I get they have done some awful things. I think Spain, with the conquering of the Caribbean and Mexico, did kill quite a few people. While some will call it genocide others will argue it was disease that did most of the work.
Personally, I view it as a genocide because their intentions to kill and subvert the natives was clear and just because their diseases got them first doesn’t suddenly absolve their intentions. They came to conquer and tens of millions of people died as a result.
A more recent example is the UK with India. Estimates are pretty wild here. It depends on if you attribute mismanagement and the resulting famines to the UK which, honestly, I think is fair. This could be one of the greatest losses of life ever with estimates from 55-100 million.
There is a debate here and that is do we count unintentional deaths or only deaths that are directly attribute to a malicious action. This becomes a gray area for some people. I personally don’t like to pull punches just because a country rolled a snowball that lead to an avalanche.
Leaded gas for example, which was invented in the US, has killed around 1-5 million people a year for a very long time (almost a hundred years of widespread use) While not all lead poisoning deaths are from gas, the majority is. We are looking at a half a billion people on the high end and people are still dying in the millions to this day.
Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the US poisoning the world with chemicals. While you can say the blame is shared by all countries that participated, there is no denying the US invented and proliferated them to begin with.
We still don’t understand the implications of things like forever chemicals and micro plastic which have invaded the body of every single human alive. People don’t realize how bad it really is or perhaps they just accept reality for what it is without thinking critically about the situation.
Nay sayers can of course say there wasn’t intent and it is just the byproduct of technology development. While this is a compelling argument for some when you research it you find out the scientists at the time did have misgivings where they knew of problems to begin with or shortly after proliferation.
A great example of this is global warming. The US petroleum scientists knew about this back in the 1950’s. 70 years later we are still denying the reality that global warming will displace billions of people in the coming century. This will become the greatest loss of life from any single event ever.
There is a huge debate around responsibility that will always rage on from people who don’t want to claim responsibility for economic reasons. Look at the most recent vote of no by the US at the last UN meeting where they attempted to recognize slavery as one of the greatest human rights abuses that needs reparations.
Intention is important and that is where the US shines above all in the modern era. The two largest human executions in a single event in history was the fire bombings of Tokyo and the dropping of the Atomic bombs. These were intentional and done to a civilian population.
The US related military actions have killed more than any other country in modern times. Being the number one producer of arms the US has brought destruction on a scale that no civilization could even imagine previously.
The world crafting the US engaged in is truly epic and started on their back porch with the Native Americans. What made the US so great is extermination. Imagine any single European country having access to the fertile landmass that is the current US. This is why American Exceptionalism is such a joke.
Only it wasn’t their land. It had millions of people on it. Unlike the rest of Europe (besides the UK) the US had no intentions of sharing the land or respecting treaties. Even tribes that assimilated like the Cherokee were eventually forced from their lands. It was a purposeful genocide because the reality was such an abundance of land was easily shareable.
The US greatness was built on an unholy combination of genocide, slavery, and thievery on a scale that had never been seen before save maybe from the Mongols or Rome.
Only they were ancient history, we have already been enlightened by this time. We understood natives needed be protected not exploited. This intention despite the knowledge of its wrongness is really the heart of the matter and what some would call truly evil.
Our world crafting didn’t just stop with sea to shinning sea native genocide. No other country has come close to orchestrating the number of regime changes like the US in the last 70 years. In particular waging a subversive war against perceived leftists was particularly egregious causing millions of deaths over supposed ideological differences.
All this wasn’t possible without the industrial military complex. The greats like Henry Ford perfected the assembly line laying the groundwork for the industrial military complex as we know it today. An industry built on the death on suffering of humanity. Please don’t take this as hyperbole though.
Henry Ford was fond of the Nazi party. He donated to them much like many other wealthy US industrialists. Hitler looked up to the US and modeled his genocide of the Jews after the Native American genocide.
Initially Hitler wanted to expel the Jews. He sent envoys to many other countries asking to take the Jews in. This did not sit well with the wealthy industrialists like Ford. They lobbied hard and successfully ensured that the US did not take in the Jews. What is worse is they also lobbied the rest of Europe stoking ant-jewish sentiment to not take the Jews in.
This lead to the final solution, but the logistical calculations were beyond the Nazi Empire. That is when US companies like IBM stepped up to the plate to help with the census. Yes, the numbers tattooed on the Jews wete developed by IBM processing power. IBM then helped to figure out how many Jews could be shipped to their death daily so as not to backup the death camps.
This is a common theme throughout history with the US having their fingers in so many atrocities, not just with other countries but their own citizens as well.
I totally get that the US came from Europe but it has taken their imperalism and turned it into an art form of destruction. The US is responsible for the most deaths and suffering in history and they are still going strong with no signs of remorse or faltering.
America and Israel voted against, our other satellites abstained, our victims voted in favor.
ITT: a disturbing amount of multi paragraph comments and replies from a disturbing amount of people doing unbelievable levels of mental acrobatics to say “nothing can be done, it’s too late, everything is good now”.
Fuck you, nothing anyone has written in a try to make this bad comes even close to a valid point against this. All you’ve managed to do is show your ingrained racism and inability to feel empathy, sympathy and understanding of struggles you, your family and any close relative withing a few hundred years have gone through.
Liberals are always “on the side of justice” until it comes at a slight cost of their own privileges. Then it’s “the past is the past”.
So Ghana proposed to punish itself and all of its neighbors for selling slaves to Europeans passing through towards Americas, or what?
What you are mentioning is something that happened before there was a Ghana. It was, however, done by countries that existed back then and still exist, and benefited from the system.
Why not slavery in Roman Empire? That shit went on for a 1500years
