Yesterday, a Declaration of the trafficking of enslaved Africans and Racialized Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime against Humanity was voted at UNO. As usual, Israel and the USA voted against. How did your country vote? Any thoughts about it?
the thread on .world about this one is pretty gross.
Fuck Argentina.
I’m from there, all I can say is… President Xi, my country yearns for freedom
I’m from Buenos Aires and I say kill us all
As someone who isn’t from Buenos Aires that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make /hj
We’ve always been a colony of
and 
Now the government doesn’t care to hide it at all, quite the contrary the president is very explicit about his love affair with yankizionists.
And let’s not pretend that the opposition is any different. Except for some small trotskyist parties with no real political weight.
Liberal idealism plagues us, we need more political education yesterday
Here’s the map of the vote to really drive the point home.
It’s always the same map
Cries quietly in Indigenous slaughter
I hope your time will come too, it’s crazy how overshadowed this topic is
What does this vote achieve?
It’s meant to help get reparations for imperialized people
Always about money. It’s a shame it draws attention away from the 50 million living people who exist in modern slavery today.
Ah cool. I get Canadas vote then, kinda support it but poor wording. Among the gravest or something similar, Holocaust and Palestine should be up there.
Which is fucked, it’s like generational violence but an entire people instead of a family
It is four centuries of colonial violence, being kidnapped, stripped of your language, culture and humanity, tortured and raped and forced you and your descendants for hundreds of years to work to death just so that your owners could afford to not do anything productive. I can see how it’s the gravest. If people are gonna use this as an excuse not to care for other crimes against humanity they’re sadistic fools and should be called out as such.
It’s the sad reality of politics and agreements, simple wording can screw you over in ways you don’t yet see. Id be very interested to see what difference among the gravest would make. I’d be very disappointed in Canada to abstain then. And curious if any supporters change their vote.
Wrong
wtf ireland, sweden, ukraine, united kingdom, canada, japan, iceland, hungary?
Abstaining feels like it is just as bad as voting no.
Europe kind of had its own grave “crime against humanity” thanks to Mr Hitler, so perhaps that has a bearing?
Or perhaps not - I’m not sure what scoring such things really achieves.
I was surprised to see all the nordics abstaining from voting (really, almost all of Europe). I would say that abstaining is a long-shot from voting “no”, especially if you see it as overwhelmingly likely that this will go through without your vote. Voting no is explicitly stating that you’re against the formulation, while voting yes is saying that you’re explicitly for it. Abstaining can indicate that you are (for example) for the intent, but have reservations about the specific wording. In that case, you may not want to stop the declaration from going through, but still want to signal that you have reservations and don’t want to unequivocally support it.
Yeah in a parliamentarian position I guess abstention is different from saying no, especially when the legislation has the votes.
But I guess what I was trying to articulate is that it feels like they are respecting? the no votes by abstaining, IE not contradicting.
This feels like a serious cop out on an issue as absurdly black and white as actual Chattel slavery.
Edit: Good point though about reservations on the text, we don’t know what it said, although that defense can also apply to the No’s as well, which is why I shied away from it.
What we do know is that the full title includes “as the Gravest Crime against Humanity” and I can fully respect countries having reservations against that when there are other similarly horrible crimes. I don’t know why Germany abstained but I figure that some people might be pretty angry at them if they declared the slave trade was worse than the holocaust.
Yeah the wording there seems odd. Why do we have to specify that its the greatest? There are plenty of terrible crimes to go around, and it seems a bit off to make it a competition as to which one was the worst. Plus, we probably don’t even know about most crimes against humanity because they happened in e.g. ancient Mesopotamia wheres no records were kept
I think scale is the issue.
Basically, it was legal to rape, murder and/or kidnap Africans. It was so profitable that the main slave dealers were African tribes/nations who would sell their prisoners of war to the slave trade - thus encouraging more war and more slavery.
Estimates of African deaths (on the low side) are double that of the Holocaust.
This went on for 400 years. (Nazi power lasted only about 12 years by comparison.)
And even to this day, the African slave trade is responsible for much of the racism and division we see. So, yeah, slave trade shaped our world in many ways.
Absolutely fair for them, I guess. I do think it’s objectively the worst thing that ever happened as even some countries in the EU seem to back, and it’s not even close. That doesn’t mean other terrible things were perpetrated by the same kind of people.
yup, the reason I left them off my initial list of call outs precisely.
Edit: Curious if any grammar pros have an thoughts on the statement specifically, what is implied by it? Does it mean gravest of all time? Gravest currently occurring? Those are my concerns and things we / (I) don’t precisely know from the context of this post.
I skimmed over the full text earlier, it gives reasons for why it was the gravest crime against humanity, and in general did seem like it meant the gravest that ever happened (that we know of at least).
It also mentions (and really is about) reparations which I suspect mightve influenced the abstains even more than the assertion that it was the gravest crime. Easier to weasel yourself out of doing anything/keep reparations low if you can say you never really voted yes on that.
See this is the meat of it, great points, thanks for doing the hard work!
Good insight. That is more to consider than initial thoughts.
Lemmy doesn’t understand three states. You’re either with us or you’re a literal Nazi paedophile.
Europe in general just abstaining. Mostly.
It really feels like standing their ground on past “glories” to me.
I think it’s more about not paying financial compensations for their involvement in slavery and their enrichment with it. One could use the vote “yes” as a legal argument to pursue compensation.
Or how exactly paying those financial compensations would work.
Why is that surprising? Ireland is sometimes better, I would suppose, but Sweden, Ukraine, UK, Canada, Japan, Iceland, and Hungary are all pretty damn right-wing and pro-imperialist.
because us liberals idolize other western countries as enlighted white paradises
Checks out.
I don’t support the “Gravest Crime against Humanity” wording in the resolution, so I have no problems with the way my country voted.
the Gravest Crime against Humanity
So now, there’s layers on suffering.
The ones that died on manmade famines, the ones that died on slavery (not chattel), the holocaust, the ones that got tortured by isis, etc… Didn’t endure enough suffering.
Gravest crime against humanity is not the same as the most suffering caused. It is not just number of people that suffered either.
You only posted half of the title.
Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialized Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime against Humanity
The “Gravest Crime against Humanity” part honestly explains why so many countries abstained.
The slave trade was an absolute atrocity and certainly one of the gravest crimes against humanity but should we label it as the gravest crime? Do we really need to introduce a ranking between slavery, the holocaust and dozens of other genocides instead of agreeing that they are/were all bad without picking one as the worst?
Sadly, I would bet that it’s the jewish lobby that pushed a lot of countries to oppose this. They have this need to make the holocaust be the worst thing that has ever happened to any people in the history of time.
The holocaust certainly bad, it’s among the worst mass killings of all time, and the fact that it happened in relatively modern times makes it worse because the world generally isn’t as brutal as it once was. Is it worse than the Mongol invasions, which may have killed more than 10% of the entire world’s population at the time? Worse than historical wars in China which killed tens of millions at a time when the entire world’s population was under 200 million? Where would you rank African slavery in that? Is it less bad because fewer people died, or worse because there are things worth than death? I don’t really think it should be something you rank at all. And, I’d also oppose any attempt to rank any of them as “the gravest crime against humanity”, because what’s the point of that?
Yeah, exactly. Why make it a competition? The wording is honestly just bizarre
Future cyberpunk dystopias be like
It’s possibly the fact that it specifies the enslavement of Africans too. I don’t know much about this, but would that sound like it’s minimising other countries experiences, or current slavery?
Edit: clarified a sentence
Comparing to the Holocaust, yeah. And it is true. One of these atrocities was way bigger.
The holocaust doesn’t even rank in the top five in terms of numbers.
the holocaust wasn’t the biggest in numbers during WWII
The abstaining countries mostly has a Problem with “the gravest crime against humanity”, because there should be no ranking in crimes against humanity.
Where do you place the Holocaust, the holodomor, the crusades? The conquest of the americas?
Yeah, sure, it was a semantic problem. Not a reperations problem. /s
Bullshit excuse
Bullshit counterargument
The transatlantic slavery trade lasted 400 years there was definitely more death caused by it than the Holocust .
Side thing, but I don’t see the Crusades as at the same level of the Holocaust or the Holodomor. They were religious wars of conquest not campaigns of extermination. They were brutal, sure, but if you add them, then you have to start piling a bunch of other wars in there too, like the Mongol conquests, the Timurid conquests, the Arab conquests, the Ottoman conquests, the Aztec conquests etc. Which kind of dilutes the point of “grave crimes”.
There is nothing particularly unique about the Crusades, and at the time, the Roman Empire that invited them and tried to sanction them actually had a legitimate claim of them being reconquests of Roman territory (even though they ended up killing it off anyway in 1204).
But you recognise a ranking is not helping the thing?
Yes, obviously there is no total order. There is a partial order though.
That’s why I prefaced my whole comment with «Side thing,…». I’m doing an «um ackchyually» about the history of the Crusades, nothing more.
The crusades involved kicking muslims and jews out of the land. It was definitely a genocide and there is some genocide that are worse than others
The Reconquista in Spain, yes. In the Levant/Outremer? That’s just not what happened.
PS. I know that in the US, (CW: Hegseth) the christian nationalists are using crusading iconography to promote their deranged fascist apocalypticism. They are instrumentalizing the past the way fascists always do. Knowing and insisting on the actual history is a kind of negation of that instrumentalization. Don’t be tempted to just mirror a reverted image of their anti-intellectualism back to them.
Fixed.
Why am I even surprised by the US being the US anymore.
“Hey you know this thing thats super bad?”
“Of course we’ve known it’s bad for many years now”
“Well we should officially condemn it.”
“Whoa whoa let’s hold up and think about that for a second.”
Just think of all the money the US could make though! There must be a way to profit from it.
I don’t know the wording on the declaration itself, but it’s distinctly possible that the US prison system is in direct opposition to it.
It’s the Same Map As Always, USA + vassals Vs Rest of the World.
Is it? It’s not really subtle.
The yearly vote about blockade on Cuba is kind of an exception, even EU and the Oceanian Plankton usually vote “for”.
My favourite is the voting about combating the glorification of nazism, really says all
So this one is interesting to me because of the rhetoric used by the Ruzzianz during the early days of the Ukraine “Special Military Operation”.
Lots of talk about going into Ukraine and de-nazifying.
Curious if that played into this vote in any way, considering this vote occurred right in the middle of that. Poor form not to bring up this VERY important context.
You’re downplaying the systemic proliferation of neo-nazi groups like Azov in Ukraine, and the west’s collective complicity in creating the conditions for that.
I think you’re overplaying them, possibly because you’re highly affected by propaganda from those nations.
Can you elaborate? Do you think the global south near universally agreeing that Nazism is bad also means that they are highly affected by propaganda from those nations? Could it not be said that you’re highly affected by propaganda from western countries? Without backing your claims, that’s all they are, just claims.
Of fucking course you nazi lovers would have problems with combating the glorification of the nazism and justify this with the fact that you do support nazis.
dude you just took this from zero to one hundred, this is a legitimate point of discussion on the topic at hand especially when you consider the date of the vote. If you think based on anything I have written that I am a nazi or nazi supporter I have several bridges for sale that might interest you.
Chill out.
You immediately throw yourself to add the vErY iMpOrTaNt cOnTexT that the countries voting against combating the glorification of nazism voted as such not only because they happen to currently support country where glorification of nazism is officially supported, but they also did it because they are being so petty to vote just because they oppose the country presenting the resolution.
Especially completely shameful for country like Poland which lost 6 million people to nazi murderers.
Right so maybe those countries had a legitimate reason for voting against, beyond being “nazi lovers”.
What? Friend your ramblings don’t even make sense, please consider spending some time outside of whatever bubble you’re stuck in.
Edit: Just kidding I see the clear label on the chart.
was this an identical declaration? what vote was this?
USA doesn’t have vassals. If it did, they’d be helping them bomb Iran right now.
If the EU weren’t vassals they’d be importing fuel from Russia and solar from China, not because of ideals or whatever but because of practicality and (in the case of solar) to avoid climate collapse
There’s a pattern lead by the US, but they are all different, in my opinion. Where are you from? How did your country vote? How do you feel about it?
Part of the EU explanation:
We were prepared to support a text that emphasises the scale of the atrocity of the transatlantic slave trade, the importance of remembrance, and the need to continue combating slavery in its contemporary forms. Instead, the text before us raises a number of legal and factual concerns that we cannot overlook.
3 arguments
First, the use of superlatives in the context of crimes against humanity is not legally accurate, such as the use of “gravest” in the title and throughout the text, which implies a hierarchy among atrocity crimes, when no legal hierarchy between crimes against humanity exists. It risks undermining the harm suffered by all victims of these crimes and lacks legal clarity crucial for ensuring accountability. We firmly reject introducing ambiguity in this respect.
Second, the selective inclusion of lengthy, historical, and contentious references to regional jurisprudence and selective and unbalanced interpretation of historical events - such as in Preambular Paragraphs 21 and 23 - is at odds with accepted UN practice, as well as the stated universal and forward looking objective of this initiative. It risks creating divisions when unity is both necessary and achievable. The role of the General Assembly is not to substitute itself to the academic debate amongst historians.
Third, we are also concerned by certain legal references and assertions that are either inaccurate or inconsistent with international law. This includes suggestions of a retroactive application of international rules which was non-existent at the time and claims for reparations, which is incompatible with established principles of international law. The principle of non-retroactivity, a fundamental cornerstone of the international legal order, must be strictly upheld. References to claims for reparations also lack a sound legal basis. Any framework for reparatory justice must be grounded in existing multilateral instruments.
Ok, so the first two sound reasonable, but blabbering about “non-retroactivity” and being against reparations is fucking pathetic. Imagine taking that legal position during Nuremberg.
They were against that position during Nuremberg. Reparations from WW1 are what led to WW2.
My disappointment in the US continues to be consistent and expected.
i sometimes wonder how the us will develop in some future where the petrodollar is no longer the world’s currency; would it be like the uk/netherlands/belgium still clinging to colonialism or will it be spain/portrugal still trying to cling onto colonialism despite not being part of the club anymore.
It’s hard to imagine, because it is even more useless and corrupt than those other countries. And that’s hard to imagine.
i bet it’ll be like france, with the closest thing to actual colonialism that the world pretends it doesn’t exist; but w latin america instead of west africa.
