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Caribbean nations set to demand royal family makes reparations for slave trade
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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I wonder what they're expecting? The British Empire was the first major world power to abolish slavery, decades or, sometimes, centuries before the others. They imposed a death penalty on slave traders, and the Carribbean island of Tortola (now in the Virgin Islands) was home to Kingstown, the first colony of freed slaves. The biggest opponent to the abolition of the slave trade was the royalty of Lagos, the ones who were actually farming the slaves and selling them; it took the British Royal Navy to put an end to them once and for all. The debts incurred by the British Empire from buying the slave's freedom - and the Royal Navy policing the Atlantic and Carribbean seas looking for slave ships - were only paid off late in the 20th century.
If they were serious, they'd be commemorating what the British Empire did to end a millenia-old tradition of people as property. Maybe they could do it in the crumbling ruins of St. Phillip's Church?
They're demanding reparations from the royal family, not the british empire. Apparently, they can trace financial benefits from the 1700s to King Charles III.
Your proposed defense is basically that the practice of theft has been discontinued and that others were also thieves at that time.
This is just ridicolous. The british royal family was massively involved in the slave trade.
Also claiming the british empire was the first "major world power to abolish slavery" is rich, given that the empire became a world power because of slavery and genocidal colonization. Also it nicely ignores, that the british were still well involved in slave trade outside the mainland. A slave trade that was also genocidal, as hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans died even before reaching America.
But British people skewing and denieing their history of slavery, genocide, robbery and brutal opression is typical. I hope the fallout of Brexit finally gets them off their high horse and onto the ground of reality.
Are you fucking serious? You really can't be that fucking daft.
Yo, what the actual fuck!? This is literally what the claim is. The British government paid back all the slave owners for their loss of human property. Meanwhile, the slaves themselves were kidnapped, tortured, raped, stripped of their language, their religion, their culture, their history, their dignity, their family, their children, their labor, their sanity, their liberty, and they get worse than nothing. They get "liberated" into a legal regime that explicitly denies them the same rights as everyone else, a legal regime that assume everyone is starting on even footing with equal opportunity, a legal regime that refuses to prosecute crimes against black people, and a legal regime that commits crimes against black people.
Trillions of dollars were appropriated through slave labor. Trillions more were extracted directly from the African continent. And you want black people to be happy that Britain thought slave owners should get reparations for their loss of human property but that slaves don't deserve reparations?
You are fucking disgusting.
"I stabbed you, but look, I pulled the knife out a little. You should be celebrating me!"
He's British. They're the OG white supremacists. They just made a law exonerating their terrorists from their crimes in Northern Ireland. They called it the "Troubles Legacy Bill" and their Secretary of State for their settler colony celebrated with champagne in public.
Maybe calm down
Welcome to the entirety of human civilization. We're all descendants of slaves from one point in history or another, and there are still slaves today.
We should see if human civilization is even capable of existing without slavery before wasting breath arguing about reparations (that we know will never happen)
I think you have no idea about history. There is only one empire that subjugated 80% of the world population and that's the European empire. No one comes close, not Rome, not the Vikings, not the Normans, not the Chinese, not Genghis Khan, not Japan. Europe alone has dominated the globe for 600 years. What you call "the entirety of human civilization" is actually only white European society. Africa did not extract trillions of dollars from Europe. China did not extract trillions of the dollars from Turtle Island. The Aztecs didn't extract trillions of dollars from Siberia.
There is only one society that has done this and is still doing it and it's the European civilization that is anchored in the North Atlantic.
You claim reparations will never happen, yet ignore that reparations we're paid to slave owners when they lost their slaves. In Haiti, it was cheaper for the French to buy 50K new slaves every year than it was to keep slaves alive. They worked 10s of thousands of slaves to death every year. When the slaves finally revolted and killed all the French on the island, the French levied a debt on Haiti to cover the cost of reparations to the slave owners. That debt is still being repaid.
So don't tell me Europe can't make reparations happen because it can and it has done so. The North Atlantic empire is a white supremacist empire that has been dominating the global majority to the enrichment of the ultraminority and has done so through the invention of structural racism, racialized capitalism, and monopoly imperialism. They chose to ensure reparations go to the minority white slave owners and steal those reparations from the very people they enslaved.
No culture has a monopoly on greed.
Humans are gonna cornhole one another until the earth gets swallowed by the Sun.
One thing's for certain though: if your political movement includes reparations, then be prepared for fascists to win against you, bc people just won't go for it. Not when they're more debt saddled every year and their children's future looks ever dim.
I didn't make a moral argument about virtues and vice. I made a material argument about history. This is not a response.
And for the last 600 years the North Atlantic has been doing it to 80% of the world under a minoritarian regime that has overseen the devastation of the planet, multiple genocides including several that are still ongoing under the rule of the West, and the extraction of wealth from every part of the planet and concentrated in the hands of the ultraminority. We can reverse that by ending the reign of terror that is the West's dominance of the world.
Don't worry. The people you're talking about are far and away the minority and if they decide, again, to go fascist, they will eventually be dominated by the majority and crushed.
I'll be honest, arguing with people on the left feels exactly like arguing with people on the right, and that's why I guarantee we're headed for the worst of all possible scenarios.
Centrism is literally the position that all of the genocide committed by your society is totally fine and acceptable and nothing needs to change. You're headed for the worst of all possible scenarios for you. But the rest of the world will eventually dismantle the Eurocentric empire, and that means rematriating wealth and land to the people it was extracted from. Necessarily that means all of the Eurocentric world will regress financially and regress in terms of influence and power, but that's what's required for healing.
The British started half-heartedly "fighting the slave trade" as a calculated political/economic move after losing their biggest slave colony, the USA. For 200 years slavery built their empire, then they decided that depriving their rivals of more slaves was more beneficial. Literally nothing about this was "moral". They still maintained hundreds of thousands of slaves in their own colonies, such as in the Caribbean. "Fighting the slave trade" actually just meant not letting their competitors, the Spanish, Americans, and French, import more of them.
The slaves the British lost in the USA were replaced with workers in India who for all practical intents and purposes were practically enslaved. Without Indian workers to replace their lost American slaves, Britain never would have "abolished" the slave trade.
My man never heard about the USA? They had a civil war about it, made the news at the time. ( Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and international...)