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 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.
So Ghana proposed to punish itself and all of its neighbors for selling slaves to Europeans passing through towards Americas, or what?
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”.
I’m surprised the MAGA fucks in charge of this run away derailed freight train have not switched to the Confederate government flag.
Gravest crime so far
Hold up. I’m all fine with apologising for slavery if one participated in it… But does this include everyone who participated, or is this another appearences type thing that completely ignores the majority of African slaves were bought from African slave markets run by various West-Coast African kingdoms?
How many people are going to come in here with the same stupid racist take this is getting ridiculous
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.”
History isn’t racism. Slavery was everywhere.
Nice way to not address the facts you are presented with.
The thing you posted doesn’t address that slave trade existed in Africa for thousands of years.
The trans-Saharan slave trade existed long before colonialism, and the major sponsers of this trade were Ghana and then later Mali (the latter of which profited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade when it started).
That’s just accounting for West Africa, as the red sea slave trade existed during ancient Egypt, and continued until the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
If you want to present facts you’ll first need to be educated enough to actually learn what facts are.
None of them industrialized slavery. The entire European economy was only getting ahead in the middle ages by slavery and colonialism
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.
Glad the UN is focusing on current issues.
Indeed. The effects of trans-atlantic slavery are felt to this day.
If individuals want reparations then that’s fine but they also get put back in the position they would have been in had the slave trade not existed. That means that they are removed from the UK, EU, USA etc and returned to Africa or wherever their ancestral home land as of the 17th to 19th centuries was.
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.
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?
