Sure let’s trade one corrupt slush fund for another one. Do you even listen to the things you say?

For Israel, exploiting an entire people is not a problem.

I mean, it was hardly the first European genocide.

This is why people don’t like the oppression Olympics. It immediately becomes about who you can make lose them.

I’m guessing afraid to contradict the US probably fits in there, too.

No because they would be agreeing to having to pay reparations.

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It should, because the collective wealth of most of Europe and the United States is built upon slavery.

Any time people profit from infrastructure and education, which isn’t available in the previously enslaved countries, they are benefiting from the fruits of slavery to this day.

Slavery has existed in many different cultures, and Africa has had slave trade after it was abolished in Europe and North America, but I think it’s fair to say that the transatlantic slave trade was the most cruel and inhuman form of slavery. The only form of slavery that may have been worse was the one Leopold II imposed on Congo.

It’s racism that made those forms of slavery even worse. I think racism makes everything worse.

I think the biggest contender for worst crime against humanity was the Native American genocide. That was also driven by racism. So was the Holocaust.

Hey amateur student of history here. The fuck do you mean? The only worst instances that compare would be the Native American genocides, Ghengis Khan putting a dent in the carbon footprint, the African slave trade, The Holodomor, and the Cambodian Genocide.

I get the want to counter the focus on the plight of Jews during the Holocaust feeding into Israeli support but this ain’t it chief, if you want to do this bring focus on everyone else killed in the Holocaust like the Romani, Gay folks, Trans folks, non-german minorities as a whole, and political dissidents. Don’t try to be edgy with the whole “the Holocaust wasn’t so bad shtick” that’s how you help uplift literal fucken Nazis.

If we’re doing Olympics probably, yeah. It might be top 20 but there’s a whole lot of world and a whole lot of history. The one that happened in Europe is the one European and European-like countries took notice of, though.

It’s great that we learn so much about it, and the fact that people just like us did it. Simply burying ugly things is the natural tendency. It’s also given us a framework to understand earlier genocides, and genocides in distant modern places, like Israel or Rwanda, as they happen.

Yeah but many of the victims of the Holocaust were white. Have you considered that?

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I think at this point it would be better to focus on providing things like universal healthcare, education, and retirement, to everyone, keeping the cost of living in check, and working on ensuring opportunities for dignified labor and fair compensation are available to everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity.

That alongside rigorous policy measures to reduce (with a mind towards eliminating) things like workplace discrimination, redlining, racial profiling, etc.

There are some examples where the descendants of enslaved people can trace their heritage to their enslaved ancestors, and identify the descendants of their enslavers (often generationally wealthy business tycoons who own factories that pollute the neighborhoods of the enslaved people’s descendants…). The people of Africa Town near Mobile, Alabama are a prime example, and there’s a pretty good documentary about it.

In those cases, where there is a demonstrable chain of ancestry, yes, civil law should require the descendants of the enslavers to pay reparations to the descendants of the enslaved.

But so many times it happens that everyone wants to paint with a broad brush, where there’s no room for nuance, and say things like “all white people should pay reparations to black people.” And that’s just too clumsy and would never work.

One, because not all white people are generationally wealthy descendants of enslavers, so such a blanket policy of collective punishment meets the definition of racism. Two, because there’s no way to quantify in abstract terms how much money “every white person” owes to “every black person.”

It’s better to focus on making society better as a whole, filling in the gaps where racial disparity still exists (by lifting up the disenfranchised, not by tearing down the privileged), making the wealthy pay their fair share to the government’s coffers, making the government ensure robust social safety nets which benefit everyone who needs them, and only demanding reparations in specific cases where there is a direct link between the descendants of enslavers and the descendants of the particular people they enslaved.

It’s been too long, and who exactly are you going to blame or get reparations taken from? Hell; If memory serves it was other black people who were gathering up and selling the black people into the slave trade. What you gonna do? Give $40 a piece to 50,000,000 black people, along with an I’m sorry card?

How do you determine who is descended of enslaved and enslaver? How do you identify who is benefitting today for something that happened 500 years ago? How do you deal with people that descend from both enslavers and enslaved? There is a long thread about this. Ultimately it is not possible to do what you are asking. Should a farmer in Turkey pay for the benefit the ottoman empire got from slave trade to a white looking mixed american of west african descent? You realize how stupid that sound?

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.

The only reason they didn’t have an Atlantic slave trade earlier was that they didn’t have the technology to do so earlier, there was virtually no transatlantic trade beforehand.

I don’t think it was a particularly cruel time. My ancestors didn’t have transatlantic trade, but they were among the cruelest people on Earth of any time. They certainly would have been Atlantic slave traders if they were able to, no doubt.

While I agree in part with the sentiment, I think is totally unfair to consider ancient slavery in Greece or Rome as less cruel. It was not less cruel depending on the slave in question. Slaves in mines and agricultural estates were in worse conditions then anything in American south. But if you were an educated slave then your life was indeed better. That also means that was common for slaves in ancient Rome to be able to buy freedom. Slavery was everywhere in society, so the comparison is really hard to make.

There is indeed a racial component in colonial slavery that was not present in ancient Roman slavery. A slave could be from Germany or from Syria and there was no difference in treatment.

I would say that both late trans-atlantic slavery and nazism share a philosophical root in the eugenetic movement, but both grew in parallel with different motives: in one case a justification for economic exploitation, in the other an ideological tool to enforce unity in nationalism.

The transatlantic slave trade started before the concept of race and the eugenetic movement. During the 15th century the justification was more routed in religion and the idea of having prisoner of war being better then to kill the enemy. Still and excuse for economic exploitation, but maybe more akin to what the greeks and romans were doing.

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.

canada, australia and new zealand also abstained

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 that the US not take in the Jews. What is worse is they also lobbied the rest of Europe stroking 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.

Valid.

I’m not going to argue which is worse, slavery or watching centuries of your entire culture destroyed in a day, along with every person in your life, before dying yourself. There are no winners in that argument.

Not just Rome, but Egypt, and every other nation, or whatever they were back then.