This relates to the BBC article [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66596790] which states “the UK should pay $24tn (£18.8tn) for its slavery involvement in 14 countries”.
The UK abolished slavery in 1833. That’s 190 years ago. So nobody alive today has a slave, and nobody alive today was a slave.
Dividing £18tn by the number of UK taxpayers (31.6m) gives £569 each. Why do I, who have never owned a slave, have to give £569 to someone who similarly is not a slave?
When I’ve paid my £569 is that the end of the matter forever or will it just open the floodgates of other similar claims?
Isn’t this just a country that isn’t doing too well, looking at the UK doing reasonably well (cost of living crisis excluded of course), and saying “oh there’s this historical thing that affects nobody alive today but you still have to give us trillions of Sterling”?
Shouldn’t payment of reparations be limited to those who still benefit from the slave trade today, and paid to those who still suffer from it?
(Please don’t flame me. This is NSQ. I genuinely don’t know why this is something I should have to pay. I agree slavery is terrible and condemn it in all its forms, and we were right to abolish it.)
The problem I have with this viewpoint is this.
Where does it start and where does it end?
World history is full of atrocities, crimes, war etc.
Additionally, many of the things which we now consider atrocity or crime might not even have been one in the past.
Fabricating such artificial claims is the same as Putin is doing by using the history book for creating claims on Ucraine.
This has always been an issue I get stuck on. If we hold current people liable for the crimes of their ancestors, how far back do we go?
The trans-atlantic slave trade was abhorrent, but slavery didn’t begin or end with it.
Do Egyptians owe Jews reperations due to how they were treated? Should the Italians compensate half of Europe and North Africa for what the Romans did? Should Arab nations pay the UK and Ireland for the people kidnapped by the Barbary Pirates?
The Ottomans were still keeping slaves until the early 1900s, long after the western European powers had ended the practice, why aren’t we seeing calls for reperations from Turkey to Slavic nations?
we go as for back as needed to achieve a somewhat just society.
Let’s take your example of the Jews in Egypt (other than the fact that the source for Jewish slavery in Egypt is just religious texts without any archeological evidence ever found): is there some great opportunity divide between an Egyptian and an Israeli? no, so we obviously don’t need to worry about that.
or for the Ottoman-Slavic question: do Slavic peoples have less opportunity than those of modern day Turkey? no, so we don’t need to worry about that.
and yes, Italians (and many other parts of Europe) do send different types of aid to Africa for these reasons
Do Black people in the USA have massive opportunity differences in comparison to the WASP population? yes, they do, thus it is right to conduct these reparations. You may not be the only people to have committed slavery, but you sure still wear it proudly, and you are still a deeply systemically racist nation.
TLDR: it’s not about revenge, but righting wrongs.
Even currently in some rich Middle East countries, there are technically slave workers - construction & household to name 2.
Exactly, maybe we should worry more about ending it now than what happened two centuries ago.
this is why the slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy
“if we punish people for murder, what about self defense?”
or
“if we arrest people for selling meth, it’ll end up making the state arrest people who drink coffee”
you can legislate for a specific instance and not have it spiral out of control into insanity.
Maybe some people would try to seek reparations for ridiculous stuff. It’s exactly the purview of the law, politics and diplomacy to navigate that.
This isn’t a slippery slope fallacy. Nobody’s saying “if we let the gays marry the next thing that will happen is people will want to marry animals!”
What people are saying is, okay if this is being done in the interest of fairness, who else needs considered, and is it practical to consider them? Are we ever actually going to be able to achieve something close to fair?
In the US a great example in this discussion is native Americans. Do they get more or less for having their entire society destroyed, land confiscated, being driven on death marches to far away land, repeated treaty violations, decimated by smallpox, and many of the other tournaments?
I have native American, German, and Scottish ancestors that never owned a slave. I don’t have “African”, Irish, or “Asian” ancestors.
Do I get a check, do I get excluded, or do I pay for the sins of someone else’s forefathers? And then because… despite all the struggles my ancestors endured themselves, I lived in a country that’s trying to reconcile past sins of slavery they had nothing to do with directly (and hopefully were opposed to)?
Fact of the matter is, native americans suffered horribly, they just don’t exist in any kind of numbers to make a stink about it, and many of them bred into the white population.
We’re never going to get to “even” and we seriously need to consider if more unfair government wealth distribution is the solution to previous unfair government wealth distribution.
Hell I’m a full on Democrat and I strongly believe this will only make race relations worse. Like by a factor of 100 if they did that here. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and there’s no way sufficient time money and resources will be spent to actually make anything resembling fair happen here or in the US; you can’t do that when you’re trying to score political points.
Governments should be trying to help people from where they are now, not trying to reverse history and retroactively remedy history spread across hundreds of years.
Well considering the last slave (coerced labor) was freed in the 1940s, it’s still extremely recent. These are people’s grandparents and great-grandparents. The velocity of money is very real.
Honestly, it should never stop. There should be wealth, inheritance, and estate taxes that even out advantages and disadvantages over time. Poor people shouldn’t be paying for it because of their race, rich people should because of their advantages.
This is just communism. Distribute wealth until everyone is equal. You don’t even need to bring race into the equation to achieve the same results as being proposed here.
