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.
Somewhat a bold move for Ghana. Only a few years ago a few of their MPs were terrified of highlighting anything to do with either the Trans-Saharan or Trans-Atlantic slave trade because of the heavy involvement from some local ethnic groups in capturing, transporting, and selling slaves. Which is not honestly actuate considering the lies and economic pressure from the Europeans. Probably just turned the corner after their Year of The Return stuff was so successful.
Gravest crime so far
The equivalent of the Epstein class has committed horrid human rights violations throughout history for their own profit and pleasure. Mainly the rich owned slaves, but taxpayers are expected to foot the bill for reparations? It would make more sense if the current human rights violators like billionaire Zionists paid the reparations for both past and current crimes against humanity.
Not going to dispute this other than to say that it’s “the gravest crime against humanity in MODERN TIMES.”
In past times, enslaving the populations of entire conquered nations or villages was common. Bringing slaves back to Rome was a regular part of an Army’s return. Enslaving one’s neighbors has been extremely common across the globe, since the beginning of humanity.
Beyond slavery, there have been marauders like the Huns or the Khans, who would attack a city, and kill every single living thing, and then move on the the next one.
Unfortunately, there are lots of candidates for the award.
Trans-atlantic slavery was worse because it maximally exploited the humans as cattle. A quick death is much more convient than a lifetime of suffering.
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.
rome wasn’t even physically capable of enslaving that many people as the african slave trade did.
Not just Rome, but Egypt, and every other nation, or whatever they were back then.
“they did it so we can too” is not the flex you think it is.
That’s not what I was saying, and you damn well know it. I mentioned Rome, and you seized on that to make an illegitimate point, which I countered that Rome wasn’t the only civilization participating in slavery, and you took that as an opportunity to accuse me of being soft on slavery, which is really, really stupid.
Highly disengenuous.
that’s exactly the point you are making though.
“we can’t help africa because the romans did it too! and then everyone will want restitution!”
Glad the UN is focusing on current issues.
Indeed. The effects of trans-atlantic slavery are felt to this day.
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
Things always get better when you measure crimes against humanity against other crimes against humanity.
Argentina, United States, and Isreal voted against.
and 52 abstentions, including the UK and EU member states.
canada, australia and new zealand also abstained
Them: “Hold my beer.”
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.
Dear MAGA Nazi loser virgin - kindly go fuck and then kill yourself.
I’m not American. And I’m not dying for anyone who can’t be bothered to learn history.
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.
I agree there are challenges with economic reparations but I do want to point out that the transatlantic slave trade was different from slavery as practiced throughout human history.
It was more cruel than even slavery practiced in ancient Greece and Rome (civilizations which Western nations like to harken back to).
European colonial powers firmly believed in and propagated a global race based caste system. This itself is a crime against humanity but they put into practice the subjugation of people with darker skin, defining them as less human as justification for their enslavement.
Throughout history many civilizations thought other peoples to be inferior or barbaric. But there has not been a global race based caste system based on complexion as colonial era Europeans practiced it.
Entire fields of false science such as phrenology and eugenics sprung from this dogmatic belief in skin tone defining ones worth. The culmination of this vile ‘purity’ ideology was Nazi Germany and even with the end of that movement, we have not seen the end white supremacist ideology.
This is a very unique problem that still has horrific reverberations to this day. I would not be so quick to absolve European colonial powers and their descendant nation states who still benefit from neocolonialism today. Reparations is a complex issue but I think verbal acknowledgment of accountability and an honest teaching of history would be a start in those nations that have been ongoing beneficiaries of these inhumane institutions.
To summarize, I’ll leave you with quotes representative of the worldview of one of the most revered figures in modern colonial/Western history:
"I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."
"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."
"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror."
"I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them… I believe that as the civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations."
Winston Churchill
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.
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.
are the descendants of the enslaved people still suffering from it? are the descendants of the enslavers still benefitting from it? yes?
then reparations should be paid.
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?
the states would be paying those reparations, not the people individually
european states should pay reparations to the nations they colonized and enslaved, and colonial states (the usa, canada…) should pay reparations to their colonized populations.
‘If white, then pay reparations’ is their answer
I think it would be reasonable to consider reparations for individual descendants of slaves. There are plenty of people alive today that can prove their descendance from a slave.
Reparations to entire countries in Africa seems a bit absurd to me.
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.
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.
“induced famine in china and soviet union” lmfao, are you fr
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
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.
Who generated the demand?
That’s an entirely different point. But they were already slavers before the europeans increased demand.
I would say the biggest problem right now would be finding African countries that can be trusted with using this money to actually improve lives of their citizens.
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024
Some are only fairly corrupt. Most are very corrupt.
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.
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
I don’t understand why people just knee-jerk reply like this without actually researching what they’re denying. It’s a pretty well-known fact that most of the slaves in the Atlantic slave trade came from African warlords and slavers (or at least I thought it was). I don’t thin that’s a particularly strong argument against reparations though.
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.
“the West” as a concept didn’t exist in the 17th century.
“My source is I made it the fuck up” - you
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.”
The only part of your original statement that is accurate according to your article was that they were armed by the Europeans. People actually by the European-trained raiders making up a small part of the total slave exports as stated in your provided article.
Europeans slavers being manipulative doesn’t excuse the actions of those who sold them slaves, all it means is that human beings are all capable of great evil. It kind if reminds me of blockbusting in the US during the 20th century. Just because the real estate agents were playing on the racist fears of the white homeowners doesn’t excuse white flight.
I do kind of take issue with the original commentor trying to handwave reparations because of this fact, but we don’t need to try and whitewash (yeah I know) the actions of anyone involved.
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?
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”
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
So the president felt more responsibility to his nation than to the slaves, at a time where slavery was much less frowned upon than today. I have a hard time retroactively faulting him for that. If he did the right thing for the wrong reasons, is it not still the right thing to do?
The war was not fought over slavery. That was only a convenient add-on. The US south was the primary party benefiting from slavery and the north wasn’t. Therefore it was easy for the North to tack that on the list.
While I don’t see it as a bad thing, it was certainly not the primary motivator or reason the civil war was fought. Also it took quite a while after the civil war to actually abolish slavery and even now there are have things like forced prison labor which is primarily done by black men whose neighborhoods are overpoliced.
It was not a primary factor for the north. For the south, slavery was the single most important issue for fighting this war.
I said lots not all
Removed by mod
Are we also going to put all the descendants of slave owners in positions they would be in if they didn’t own slaves?
Westerners dont regret it. They are still looting the 3rd world and waging war on our ground. We need to unite against them
That’s not racist at all
?
The entire West?
Everywhere from Ireland to Finland to Japan, they’re all looting the 3rd world and waging war?
Are you sure that’s not a bit of propaganda?
I think Ireland at least should be excluded; they were colonised by the British.
Okay, and Finland?
let’s just say you don’t want finland to visit your country for “business”
Nazi sidekicks, but also Linux and Nokia, so I don’t know.
they exploit workers in 3rd world where theyve built factories to fund pensions at home. They also passively support israel and supported several US imperialist wars in west asia
Yes they are and even if they arent they are getting indirect benefit from it.
Can you be more specific? How is Ireland looting the 3rd world and waging war, or indirectly benefiting from it?
Same as any other western country Ireland is investing in corporations exploiting developing countries (extracting resources and exploiting workers) while importing cheap goods from there. The entire west is basically outsourcing pollution and terrible working conditions to developing countries so they can consume most of the Earth’s resources.
Why too specific for ireland
