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Guardian owner apologises for founders’ links to transatlantic slavery
- joemazerino 4y agoThis is the first (and probably the last) Guardian post I will upvote. Eat yourself, go ahead! Eventually the Guardian will realize who ran the slave trade, not report on it, and keep shooting themselves in the proverbial foot.
- firstlink 4y ago> not report on it I wonder who will be getting reparations 200 years from now for this? What form will those reparations take? Will they be perhaps... in-kind?
- boppo1 4y agoWho ran the slave trade?
- throwayyy479087 4y agoBlack Africans, unless he's implying that it was run by the Jews. It was not, but White Nationalists don't care about that part.
- wahern 4y agoHere's a somewhat decent summary of the history--not the most intelligible or accurate, but it at least hits upon the various facets: https://newafricanmagazine.com/16616/ https://newafricanmagazine.com/16616/ You won't find any simple narratives or histories in earnest company as 1) there is no simple narrative to be had, and 2) the culture wars makes it incredibly difficult to discuss objectively. To understand how twisted the discourse has become, here's a scholarly paper I stumbled across that seems to claim that the continuance of the Arab and Indian Ocean Slave Trades was beneficial by providing competition with the burgeoning Atlantic Slave Trade: https://www.persee.fr/doc/outre_1631-0438_2002_num_89_336_3992 https://www.persee.fr/doc/outre_1631-0438_2002_num_89_336_39... It's from 2002--culture war debates in academia typically long preceded the explosion in populist debates. Though that paper also has some solid quantitative analysis, and I'm tempted to think the framing was designed to make swallowing the proposed numbers more palatable--the range of estimates of the number of African slaves in the Arab and Indian Ocean Slave Trades is significant and people seem to get quite vitriolic about it, seemingly out of the belief one number or another has the effect of shifting culpability.
- adastra22 4y agoI think he is alluding to the fact that the actual slavers operating in Africa were all black Africans. The white slave ships showed up on the west African coast, bought slaves at auction at a vibrant slave market, and shipped them to the Caribbean. They didn’t actually do the enslaving. Whether that is a relevant distinction I leave up to you.
- Incipient 4y agoBuying stolen merchandise, and continuing to keep it once you realise it's stolen, and from whom it's stolen, while definitely not as bad as doing the stealing, is still...fairly morally low.
- adastra22 4y agoAlso in terms of impact, the money and guns the European slave buyers brought to the table completely changed the slave trade. It went from the sort of low key slave markets that existed everywhere, to arming and bankrolling civil war in the interior of the continent just to produce slaves as spoils of war to be sold at these markets. It completely destroyed inner Africa, creating conditions of warlords and ethnic strife that still exist today.
- adastra22 4y agoApologize for what someone did 200 years ago? That’s ridiculous.
- paulddraper 4y agoI apologize adastra22 ran a stop sign in 2015.
- crispinb 4y agoIDK - given organisations can have longer lifespans than individual humans, it's not unreasonable for them to apologise for things they actually did. Also, 200 years seeming like a long time to you is not 'true', it's just one cultural taste among many. 200 years isn't long to mainstream Chinese culture, for example, nor to the British Aristocracy, nor to many individuals who read a lot of history. My sense of 'the present' is a window of about 400 years. The Guardian should though perhaps consider apologising for its thin news coverage and superabundance of trite opinion columns.
- adastra22 4y agoI strongly disagree with it’s your point about 200 years being a long time. That’s entirely missing the point. It’s a strong principle of both western morality and our system of laws that “the sin of the father does not fall upon the son.” If you traffic in slaves you have some explaining to do. If your father trafficked in slaves, that by itself has nothing to do with you as long as you weren’t involved. If your great-great-great-great-grandfather trafficked in slaves, well that’s purely of historical interest.
- widdershins 4y agoWhat if your father's slave trading generated a huge fortune, which is bequeathed to you?
- adastra22 4y agoStatute of limitations exist for a reason.
- alwaysanagenda 4y ago[dead]
- vintermann 4y agoThere are maybe more recent things they should apologize for.
- jdkee 4y agoThe Guardian is simply pandering to their audience. I highly doubt the Economist or the Wall Street Journal would apologize by judging actions that were permissible in the past by today’s moral standards.
- lyubalesya 4y ago[dead]
- primax 4y agoSo... they weren't even slavers, they just bought cotton? This is like California trying to pay reparations. A state where slavery was never legal, taxing people who never owned slaves to give money to people who were never slaves.
- yieldcrv 4y agoI would personally like to see the records of who got paid for indigenous scalps in California I bet we will see some familiar last names from currently prominent families, like from the militias deputized in the Mendocino war I bet there are records in Sacramento Could spark a relevant reckoning
- lazyeye 4y agoNowhere near enough. The Guardian needs to be shut down permanently and all its employees cancelled.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]