https://www.yahoo.com/news/calls-reparations-old-emancipation-global-152718865.htmlDozens of nations were involved in the slave trade. How should they compensate descendants?
By prohibiting those of colonialist bloodlines from reproducing, and letting in those whom they colonized to become their demographic replacements.
The call for reparations is being sounded beyond the U.S., with activists and political leaders demanding accountability for slavery and colonization of their countries.
In Jamaica, which became a British colony in the 1650s, the government has begun a push for reparations, seeking redress for nearly two centuries of slavery on the Caribbean island.
Officials announced the effort in July, with one legislator suggesting that the government seek roughly 7.6 billion British pounds, or roughly $10.4 billion in compensation from Britain. An official amount has yet to be publicly confirmed.
“Our African ancestors were forcibly removed from their home and suffered unparalleled atrocities in Africa to carry out forced labor to the benefit of the British Empire,” Olivia Grange, Jamaica’s minister of culture, gender, entertainment and sport, told Reuters over the summer. “Redress is well overdue.”
Indeed. But should it be money, or should it be justice?
For those who support the growing movement, the question is how global powers should compensate the descendants of the enslaved people whose labor and commodification helped fuel the economic rise of several Western countries.
Those who did the labour should own what the labour produced. Not the estimated equivalent present-day currency value of what the labour produced (which is worthless in reality), but the actual infrastructure and other hard assets of those Western countries.
“The royal family benefited from slavery financially and many of our African brothers and sisters died in battle for change,” David Denny, an activist and general secretary of the Caribbean Movement for Peace and Integration, told CNN in November.
So the Windsors should be prohibited from reproducing.
“The essence of the reparations movement is that if you cause harm to a group of people, you have a duty to repair that harm,” said Verene Shepherd, a historian and the director of the Centre for Reparation Research at the University of the West Indies. “Those who benefited from the labor of the ancestors of African people are still benefiting from the wealth. There is an intergenerational generation of wealth on one side, and an intergenerational transmission of poverty on the other.”
Yes. And financial reparations will not change this more than momentarily. Only by prohibiting reproduction of colonialist bloodlines will the intergenerational generation of wealth surely end, since only then will there be no subsequent generations of those bloodlines.
Critics of reparations programs often argue that slavery and colonization are past offenses and don’t justify compensation.
If an individual of a colonialist bloodline did not personally participate in colonization, that individual should indeed not be punished for colonialism. However, they should not be allowed to reproduce in order that their bloodline, which
did participate in colonization, be eliminated. This solution alone is fair to both the individual who did not participate in colonization and the bloodline (carried by the individual) which did.
In 2015, then-British Prime Minister David Cameron had said that the country would not pay reparations, instead calling for Jamaica and the U.K. to “continue to build for the future.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_CameronHe has also referenced the German Jewish ancestry of one of his great-grandfathers, Arthur Levita, a descendant of the Yiddish author Elia Levita.[21][22]
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/jews-have-nothing-in-common-with-us!/Back to main article:
There has also been legal debate over the extent that countries involved in historical abuses can be held responsible for reparations in the present, with some scholars noting that while slavery is morally abhorrent, it was not illegal internationally when the transatlantic slave trade began.
Reparations activists, however, argue that the focus on slavery’s once widespread “legality” dismisses how enslaved people suffered under the practice and gives too much weight to Western legal ideas. “European countries behave as if the law said that Africans were not people, African societies were not recognized as societies,” Bohardsingh said. “The only law that they are having a conversation about when they bring up international law is European law, which allowed for the taking of people from another continent, enslaved them, and then said ‘Well, our law said that slavery is legal, so it is legal.’”
“The question is whose law are you going to judge the legality of slavery by?” she added.
Good point, hence the parallel need for:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/issues/legal-decolonization/Because we will not sound too convincing in arguing against the moral validity of Western law when formerly colonized countries (including Jamaica) themselves still use Western law!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_of_JamaicaThe judiciary of Jamaica is based on the judiciary of the United Kingdom.[1] The courts are organized at four levels, with additional provision for appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. The Court of Appeal is the highest appellate court. The Supreme Court has unlimited jurisdiction in all cases, and sits as the Circuit Court to try criminal cases. The Parish Court (formerly known as the Resident Magistrate's court) in each parish hears both criminal and civil cases, excluding grave offences. The Petty Sessions are held under Justices of the Peace, with power to hear minor crimes.[2][3]
Jamaica is a common law jurisdiction, in which precedents from English law and British Commonwealth tradition may be taken into account.
Only when we ourselves have ceased to rely on Western law in arbitrating our own internal disputes can we claim seriously that Western law is wrong.
Back to article:
“Tokenistic gestures are not reparations at all,” said Kehinde Andrews, a professor of Black studies at the U.K.’s Birmingham City University and author of “The New Age of Empire: How Racism & Colonialism Still Rule the World.” He added that these sorts of announcements and programs are “worse than nothing because they pretend to be something and people celebrate them as progress.”
“We need to be careful with what is labeled and called reparations, because it can actually do more harm than good,” he said.
Anything other than prohibiting all colonialist bloodlines from reproducing should be regarded as a tokenistic gesture.