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by adventured 3077 days ago
My point primarily is that, the discussion about reparations, is almost universally isolated to how much the US Government should have to pay. It almost universally excludes the nations that dominated the slave trade, such as Britain. Various rich, powerful European nations benefited massively from the economic output of the vast slavery they initiated and maintained, while suffering essentially none of the consequences, leaving the young US nation (and obviously numerous other nations in the Americas like Brazil or Haiti) to deal with those consequences ever since.

There's no scenario where you can propose the Netherlands should compensate slave descendants in the Americas, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars or more, where you're going to convince them to even have that conversation. People of the Netherlands today will simply tell you they had nothing to do with it, and should not be held responsible for past sins, and that's the end of the conversation (unless you want a small token sum to wipe away the guilt and grievance).
2 comments
lostlogin 3077 days ago
New Zealand’s problems due to colonisation stem almost entirely from the British government. It should be them paying to fix it and not New Zealand, with liability for actions that New Zealand pays for starting from when we governed ourselves. However this isn’t going to happen - Britain will never pay, so fixing it ourselves is the only course that repairs the damage that can be repaired. The sooner action is taken the better.

It’s simpler here because much of the harm done relates to land theft. Working out who you repay when people don’t necessarily know where they were kidnapped from and what they lost is not the same.

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JPKab 3076 days ago
You didn't mention the African kings and chieftains who sold the captured members of rival tribes to the Europeans in exchange for guns and rum. The is a key link in the slave trade that is ignored in these discussions. If you think Europeans were walking into jungles and capturing slaves themselves, you are sorely misinformed.
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