4 ms·

British paid out slave owners and abolished slavery decades before the USA did and without killing 1.5 million people. Sometimes it is better to pay out an inju

• rektide 4y ago
  Itself a perpetration of iniquity- the state spending vast amounts to make vastly wealthy immoral undeserving people who should never have had a thing further wealthy. Buying out unjust holders changes the form of injustice being carried, makes the illegitemacy less viscerally real & more palatable. But, imo, it's embarassing that law offers itself no options to fundamentally correct it's problematic past. It feels like a misalignment, to protect property & capital above all else, even in the most absurdly unfair & illegitemate of situations. Perhaps in places such events are politically necessary for change. But I dont think I am alone in finding that these past events & this present one reek, that it is low actions to escape the crime but still enable & make profit of the stunning injustice. To govern without ever permitting any actual rebalancing feels inadequate to build a worthy way.
• edflsafoiewq 4y ago
  Who should get the payout, the slave owners or the slaves? Incidentally, Brazil abolished slavery without a war and without paying out anyone.
• dontlaugh 4y ago
  The US civil war was primarily over different modes of production, not slavery directly. The British working class was forced to pay the former slavers until a few years ago, while the former slaves got nothing. That was in no way just or good or useful.
  • lightsandaounds 4y ago
    Why are you trying to white wash the civil war? It was fought over slavery. That is what the declarations of independence signed by the confederate states actually say. They spell it out. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...
    • dontlaugh 4y ago
      You misunderstand me. The ruling class in the north didn’t care about slavery, just their own profits. It just so happened that they were in competition with the ruling class in the south, whose wealth depended on slavery. Of course many workers did care about slavery and wanted to end it, so they allied themselves to the northern ruling class.
    • fennecfoxen 4y ago
      Whitewashing the Civil War as grandparent post did was in error, but don’t let the evils of slavery blind you to the leadership’s more immediate, stated war goal: to preserve the Union. Freeing slaves was an ancillary matter at best. If the actual explicit bona fide war goal was freeing the slaves, Reconstruction would have been a lot less oppressive and its Jim Crow regimes would have faced more obstacles.
  • coryrc 4y ago
    > That was in no way just or good or useful I think the people who stopped being slaves, along with their descendants, would disagree.
    • dontlaugh 4y ago
      It was not good that the slavers were paid, instead of paying reparations to the former slaves.