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.
I get it is extremely important to remember how bad the transatlantic slave trade was, but I think reparations after two centuries makes no sense. You cannot track responsibility 10 generations separated, you cannot track beneficiaries in a globalized world. Countries not involved in slave trade got indirect benefits through commerce, countries involved are instead not benefiting today from that historic trade. Slavery was common everywhere in the world for millennia. I find it hard to even begin to quantify a reasonable approach to a reparation framework that would work in the context of all the human tragedies in the last 5 centuries.
You don’t have to look at everything in terms of individual responsibility. We can clearly see that the injustices caused by transatlantic slavery, and imperialism more broadly, are very much still here. I think it would be nice to try to remedy this.
Of course, it’s non-binding, and the countries that should probably be paying reparations just happen to have all abstained (except for the rogue USA of course, voting against) so I don’t expect anything will happen. But it’s a nice idea.
black people live in slums in my colonial country and many of the exploited african nations.
start by letting them access to at least 20th century amenities and dignified work instead of finding every moral excuse not to.
this thread is full of sensitive westerners born on slave trader countries still rich on the spoils (and sometimes still benefiting from it).
I am a westerner, born in a non slave trader country that never existed before the 1860s. The country before was not a slaver country. The country before that was client state of a slaver country, but just for 20 years! The one before that was not a slaver country. Going event further the country before that was still not a slaver country. Then it was not even a country and still not a slaver one. This until the 1200s when we abolished slavery, so I guess that before then slavery was somewhat ok, but was white people slaves so I do not think that counts.
I think we never became rich on the spoils. We were definitely richer in the 1200s (we were so rich we paid for the slaves to be free!) and for some centuries after that. That was definitely our golden age I would say. Post war recovery after 1960 was also good, but mainly driven by local mechanical industries, not spoils I am afraid.
I am a westerner, born in a non slave trader country
contradictory so far
your lack of understanding of history does not constitute contradiction
your racism does not constitute understanding of history.
I have said nothing racists, so which part of history is incorrect?
the part where you think black people don’t deserve any kind of help for still being fucked by western racism, with the excuse you can’t keep track of it.
the “you are a white westerner” part was an educated guess based on that opinion.
Europeans and other monarchy-states are happier still feeding aristocrat and noble pigs, you mean? Yeah, I hear you.
Instead of throwing up my hands waiting for someone else to ratify a framework, I personally give substantial direct financial support to an African American family, not because I feel personally responsible for what happened 200 years ago, but because I know that what happened 200 years ago didn’t end 200 years ago but continued on and eventually became Jim Crow and eventually became the War on Drugs and all the while has just simmered there as subconscious racism. It affects them all day every day every time someone looks at them, every time they board an elevator.And alltogether it has unfairly advantaged me and disadvantaged them. I can’t even imagine the mental stress of being a black American over the last several years. And the entire 200 years we’ve been abusing and short changing these people, they have paid us back in unique gifts of art, music, and literature (on top of their everyday contributions to science, industry and education like everyone else makes too). I pay because it’s the least I can fucking do to help and say “someone sees, someone cares.” I give because I can, and never had to face what they face. I give because it’s their money.
You do you.
Actually they can easily restitute African countries for the immense damages they were caused.
But restituting the victims of slavery is inconvenient for the empire, while an atrocity like the Holocaust can be abused to fund and raise support for Israel.
That is easy because the Holocaust was between 1941 and 1945 and reparation were between 1952 and 1953. It is the same government, the same people, the same generation. The atrocity is clearly defined in time and space, and can be somewhat measured. Nonetheless, even in a “clear as day” situation, lot of opposition came to be part of this process, with this being a very difficult agreement to reach. Doing that 200 to 600 years apart, across multiple nation, multiple people, multiple culture, is borderline impossible and would settle anything. You cannot make it just for the hebrews with that reparations, you cannot with slave trade either. Same apply to WW2 reparation, Mongol conquest reparation (sound silly just to think about it), or induced famine in China and the Soviet Union.
Transatlantic slavery is easily traceable to the countries which committed it and which suffered from it. The time period is irrelevant. In fact Israelis are primarily the Jews which didn’t suffer from the Holocaust because they went to colonize Palestine instead of staying in Germany. So your argument works against you.
Should today citizen of Portugal (under the 1976 Republic) be accountable for the legal (at the time) actions of the Portuguese Crown? Should the citizen of Benin be accountable for the atrocities committed by Dahomey to secure the slaves from nearby tribes? Are the people of Benin both beneficiary and responsible for that? How much? Should Brazil pay for the action of the Portuguese Crown? Should Italy pay because the Republic of Genoa bankers benefited from the loans and contracts with the Portuguese merchants? How much is an Italian descendent from a Venetian born in today Croatia responsible for the sins of Genoese banker that finances the Portuguese crown to pay the Imbangala people to capture slaves?
Yes they should at least pay some reparations. Now why is Germany sending money to Israel?
reply to the entire question if you can, and bring a reasonable justification about who and how much should pay to who. We have Italian descendent from Dalmatia, we have Brazilian descendent from Portugal, we have people from Angola descendent from Imbangala, Benin people descendent from Dahomey, that needs to pay how much to other people from Angola and Benin?
Countries in Africa are still suffering from the consequences of Western slavery. The entire countries as a whole, not taking into account the people. The only reason Africa is still underdeveloped is because of Western slavery and colonialism.
(Primarily black) communities in the West could also be given restitution funds to make up their deficiency in socio-economic status caused by past discrimination
Gravest crime so far
I’m surprised the MAGA fucks in charge of this run away derailed freight train have not switched to the Confederate government flag.
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.
Things always get better when you measure crimes against humanity against other crimes against humanity.
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.
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.
You means the egyptians didnt have institutionalized slaving? Really?
Not in the same way. Even ancient Egypt considered slaves human and they had some rights, whereas trans-atlantic slavery fully reduced slaves to the level of animals. Egypt also didn’t start invasions primarily to capture slaves and use them on their plantations.
While you’re technically correct, trans-atlantic slavery had countries literally running their economies on slaves which is what I meant.
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?
no, it’s even more perverse. they were the ones creating the economical incentive.
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?
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.
America and Israel voted against, our other satellites abstained, our victims voted in favor.
Why not slavery in Roman Empire? That shit went on for a 1500years
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?
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”.
ITT: tons of softball racism by the people in the nations that voted no or abstained.
Notably of Germans showing up too believing the trans-Saharan slaven trade was worse. Guess their curriculum included a lot of anti-Arab propaganda to go along with the Zionism brainwashing
Jews are in mud
Glad the UN is focusing on current issues.
Indeed. The effects of trans-atlantic slavery are felt to this day.
Slavery is much older than this.
