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?
So the US voted against so it didn’t pass, yet again, I presume?
Fuck veto voting
This isn’t the Security Council. Nobody gets a veto.
Yet again the genocide of first nations peoples/aboriginals is kind of forgotten. All crimes on a massive scale should be remembered by the international community and when one is elevated as the worst I fear that it will incentivise forgetting of the others and potential rascism clash poits.
It’s not. Most of the nations that suffered this crimes voted in favor.
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?
Fuck Argentina.
I’m from there, all I can say is… President Xi, my country yearns for freedom
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
igual decir que somos una colonia me parece un poco exagerado, estamos pasando por un momento de mierda pero eso le pasa a cualquier pais de latam cada ciertos años, el tema es que el peronismo tiene captado a la izquierda
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
Tangential but I swear no one talks about how insanely racist Argentina is. Just look at things that happen in footy there
They do, they just happen to not speak English as a first language.
And they export it.
Abstention might as well be an against vote
the UK:
So Serbia is the only European country with balls?
Turkiye also voted in favor. I get the reservation, but it’s EU.
Well Turkie has notoriously independent politics despite being in NATO(and EU candidate lol) so no surprise here at all.
Fair.
Proudly in favor
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 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?
Bullshit excuse
Bullshit counterargument
The transatlantic slavery trade lasted 400 years there was definitely more death caused by it than the Holocust .
How about this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
Your dad was probably alive when it happened
If it’s about duration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Saharan_trade lasted longer and it had more victims.
For sure, for sure. 15 million humans forcibly relocated and an estimated 30-60 million deaths over 400 years is certainly among the gravest human tragedies.
On the other hand could you imagine if tragedies like the holocaust or holodomor or the Chinese three years famine were extended to even a fraction of those 400 years? Or if a handful more cities had been nuked? Or if we let the 50 million people living in modern slavery die in bondage? What about the billions of people that have died from preventable diseases over centuries of neglect?
…Why are you even bothering to argue about this? There’s no objectivity in these conversations, and yet you insist that everyone but you is wrong.
On the other hand could you imagine if tragedies like the holocaust or holodomor or the Chinese three years famine were extended to even a fraction of those 400 years?
If they extended to 400 years then yes they would be worst than the slave transatlantic trade
There’s no objectivity in these conversations, and yet you insist that everyone but you is wrong.
You don’t abstain from a resolution about slavery that include reparations to the victims because you think another crime against humanity is worse.
They could even vote for this then introduce another resolution citing the holocaust as the gravest crime against humanity
If someone walked up to me and told me to label anything as the gravest, worst thing to happen in human history I would definitely abstain. It’s just not possible to say that [as a representative of millions of people] unless you’re OK with diluting the conversation around serious ongoing problems with hyperbole.
Sorry to the millions of people being genocided in Gaza, the real gravest tragedy is something else (or vice versa). There is no correct objective answer to such loaded propositions.
You don’t abstain from a resolution about slavery that include reparations to the victims because you think another crime against humanity is worse.
You shouldn’t frame honest attempts at reparations and progressive policy in black/white terms. The point of this resolution is the same as everything in the UN: toothless posturing that goes nowhere to the domestic political benefit of everyone involved.
The Nay votes can say they’re defending whatever tragedy plays best to their audience, the Yea can play off their moral superiority (either in opposition to Nays or for support of their tragedy) and the Abstainers get gold stars for their deft diplomatic balancing. And it didn’t cost anyone anything but ink!
Us peons are supposed to slurp up the drama and pump our echo chamber full of our chosen narrative (see: this post). But there’s another secret option: stop engaging with rage porn content, it’s better for your health.
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).
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.
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.
Yeah, sure, it was a semantic problem. Not a reperations problem. /s
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?
deleted by creator
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
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?
Your comment is a bit weird. The second section describes exactly why it makes no sense to be ranking crimes against humanity, which would include this resolution picking one winner.
Why then lead with the first section?
Because, while I agree that it’s bad to rank various crimes against humanity, I don’t like how Israel tries to weaponize the holocaust as a shield against any kind of criticism.
Fixed.
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.
If you know the us votes against anyways, why abstain?
There’s normally a reason when that assortment of countries chooses to abstain (the no voters are normally just evil). In this case it’s likely the use of the word “gravest”. I’d say the holocaust was worse, at least in the slave trade the people were just a means to an end. The holocaust involved torture by design and aimed to erase an entire religion.
Others may disagree, but there’s at least room for doubt on the declaration that it’s the “gravest”.
It’s nothing to do with the wording, really. This is about countries refusing to acknowledge the historic dimension of their racial supremacy doctrine, and denying reparations. It really doesn’t matter if it’s the gravest or not, which is, just by the span of four centuries of practice.
EU’s stated reason for abstaining is
1, use of superlatives
2, bias in presentation, against UN charter
3, they’re against reparations
I dunno man, it really just smells like they don’t want to pay up for their crimes against humanity. When your first two points are nit picking and your last one is “and we were told we wouldn’t have to answer for shitty things before we made rules about it”, it’s kinda giving away why you’re against it.
Ireland abstained too, and they didn’t really have a recent slave trade.
I dunno man, it really just smells like they don’t want to pay up for their crimes against humanity
Why does it counts only from 17th century onwards? Why only for 1 specific situation?
because the wealth generated by those crimes is still extremely influential today.
and that “1 specific situation” was the industrialised destruction of culture, people, families and minds for centuries.
So, it’s about influence on the current day? Silly me, to think the holocaust has more impact on the current world order than the slavery that finished in the 19th century.
and that “1 specific situation” was the industrialised destruction of culture, people, families and minds for centuries.
So it’s about duration? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Saharan_slave_trade This lasted long, wouldn’t this had more impact in the destruction of culture, people and minds?
wtf ireland, sweden, ukraine, united kingdom, canada, japan, iceland, hungary?
Abstaining feels like it is just as bad as voting no.
Everyone should have voted no. The African enslavement was really fucked up, but “the worst human attrocity in history, ever”? The world has done some really, really, fucked up things. I don’t really even know why this particular slavery would be picked out from the other slaves over thousands of years except that is was pretty recent and large scale. Why is the world even voting on this shit while on the verge of world war three, while it seems that half the rich elites running the governments are pedophiles?
Yeah no my understanding has evolved based on the skim of the article and the actual wording becoming more clear - didn’t think they were going for champions of all time when I initially reacted.
what do you think is weird about ukraine lol? https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FkDakZLWAAEnkyy?format=jpg&name=4096x4096
Not sure what a blacked out vote means, but tons of countries voted in ways I don’t agree with on this one too, so not sure why anyone should be singled out (my original point, call out collectively the failures).
sorry, lemmy was giving me issues uploading the image so i copied the wrong link, this is the one
Yeah, thats not a great look, but I also understand that since 2014 Ukraine has been in a war for its very existence with Russia, and that some neo nazi groups have done a lot of the fighting and dying for them.
I do not condone neo nazis, but I also understand Ukraine’s position not to shit on some of their best war fighters during a war for existence.
Its a complicated issue, and I think I would feel a stark difference had Ukraine been the aggressor, or had a repressive government (both things Russia is).
I believe that Ukraine will have to reckon with this if they survive the war, just like all countries will have to reckon with the far-right groups gaining traction and power in their countries.
It’s more that those in the Donbass region have been fighting a war for their own existence against Kiev since 2014. Kiev has far more Nazis than a few small bands.
i did not ask for nazi apologia bro, i dont care. you thought it was weird ukraine voting for this, i showed its a totally expected outcome given recent trends in the country, you can believe all the fairy tales your corporate overlords that form your government tell you to believe
ok bud, enjoy the echo chamber you live in. One day I hope you can look back at your crazy posts and laugh about it.
as always the gringos existence is based on projection, that’s what keeps your mental sanity and enables the fascist logic to permeate and rot your brain
Europe in general just abstaining. Mostly.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
Also, they could rape their slaves, so they could have more slaves to trade and exploit. I’m not sure if that number, twice the Holocaust, is correct for deaths. Wikipedia says that 12 - 12.8 million Africans were successfully trafficked to the Americas, as records show. This is only the recorded number, and it doesn’t take into account the descendants of 350 years of surviving.
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!
Lemmy doesn’t understand three states. You’re either with us or you’re a literal Nazi paedophile.
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.
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.
They could have acknowledged it at least. Maybe it could be a first step to treat their black population with the respect they deserve for literally building their cities.
Acknowledged? It’s always been acknowledged. This was a vote to say it was the single worst thing ever done by humanity… Ever.
This. Not the slave trades that lasted far longer, or any of the wars or rapings or genocides or slaughtering of children or ww2 human experiments or anything else. It was a vote to say that this one thing was the shittiest thing humanity has ever done.
Yes, exactly. Your point being?
You’re a bit of a dumb one, eh?
Maybe it’s in my genes. Wouldn’t you say?
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.
Sweden, Ukraine, UK, Canada, Japan, Iceland, and Hungary are all pretty damn right-wing and pro-imperialist.
What an absolutely preposterous statement.
How so? All are dictatorships of capital that rely on exploiting the global south, or play a role as a vassal state for imperialist countries.
How tf do Ukraine and Hungary exploit the global south?
Ukraine is more of a vassal than one of the bigger imperialists, it’s used similarly to how Israel is by the US Empire. It’s itself being harvested for rare Earth minerals and shackled with tons of debt while at the same time being used to attack enemies of the west. Hungary is both a NATO and EU member state, it’s firmly on the side of the imperialist system.
Imperialism essentially is monopoly capitalism at its most developed stage, turned international. In the modern day, the US Empire is at the helm of this, with the EU and other NATO countries being used to protect this system of international extraction. By being in NATO, Hungary plays a part in defending this system, and by being in the EU, it benefits from imperialist spoils.
yeah i dont its not like ewwwwrope in general is connected to the usonian war machine, yes you are right if things are not 2 + 2 they must not be real, it’s not like there is a complex mechanism designed specifically to mechanize atrocities and commodify them yes you are right im sorry.
gringo otroletravaladna
Here’s the map of the vote to really drive the point home.
It’s always the same map
