Worthless arguments such as the following, not so long ago found only on far-right blogs, are now found in mainstream journalism:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/no-moral-case-britain-paying-060000493.htmlThere is no moral case for Britain paying slavery reparations
I say that reparations are not the best thing for victim bloodlines to be demanding (instead, they should demand that all colonizer bloodlines be eliminated), but I definitely agree that Britain needs to be held accountable for its past actions.
the call for Britain to pay reparations for slavery is absurd. It is true that some Britons, including, it seems, at least one of the King’s distant ancestors, were involved in trading and owning African slaves from about 1650 to the early 1800s.
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But the context was this. Slavery was a universal institution, practised on every continent by people of every skin colour.
Except for the inconvenient facts that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britaina law of Ine of Wessex stated that anyone selling his own countryman, whether bond or free, across the sea, was to pay his own weregild in penalty, even when the man sold was guilty of a crime.[20]
In 1102, the Church Council of London convened by Anselm issued a decree: "Let no one dare hereafter to engage in the infamous business, prevalent in England, of selling men like animals."[27]
Some historians, like John Gillingham, have asserted that by about 1200, the institution of slavery was largely non-existent in the British Isles.[25]
So why did Britain, which centuries prior to the colonial era had already decided that slavery was bad (back when the enslaved were "white"), suddenly practice it from the beginning of the colonial era (when the enslaved were "non-white")? Being subjected to this double-standard is what reparations are being demanded for.
Africans were capturing and selling other Africans to Romans and Arabs centuries before Europeans entered the market in the mid-1400s.
Yes, but without the double-standard. Therefore they can argue that slavery was a institution they regarded as acceptable no matter who was being enslaved, whereas Britain (and the other Western colonial powers with similar "white"/"non-white" double-standards) cannot. It is similar to how a state in which meat-eating is legal so long as it is not human meat being eaten is far more systematically unjust than another state in which eating human meat is legal along with other meat-eating.
If some Britons profited from it, so did those Africans involved in slave-trading.
No one is saying Britain should not have purchased "non-white" slaves. But, once purchased, Britain should have treated them the same way they treated "white" slaves for whose release they paid ransom to Barbary corsairs etc.. They did not. Being subjected to this double-standard is what reparations are being demanded for.
Finally, the double-standard continues:
The idea of reparations can sometimes make good sense. No one disputes that Germany’s post-1945 government should have restored stolen property to its owners or compensated them for its loss. In those circumstances, the identities of the Jewish wronged and the Nazi wrongdoers, and the relationship between original victims and surviving family members, were clear. And the harm done was definite and quantifiable.
(But at least this paragraph proves that Jews are "white".)