Comment on Anti-racism be like
BrokenGlepnir@lemmy.world 5 months agoI hope you’re willing to learn because that is historically incorrect. The first nation to abolish slavery was Hati around a decade before the first European country (Denmark). That is if we are talking abolish and keep abolished in all territories controlled. Persia is possibly the first country recorded to have used slaves but they would have periods of “abolishment” which were probably good for causing slave revolts in new areas they were thinking of conquering. Arguably the first country to have and to abolish slavery.
MacNCheezus@lemmy.today 5 months ago
Ah yes, if we pick and choose our definitions, we can get pretty much any outcome we want, can’t we.
Haiti didn’t abolish slavery as much as revolt against it (by killing all the slave owners), and they didn’t even manage to keep it abolished for very long, as it’s currently one of the worst countries on earth with regards to child slavery.
Is that really the hero you want to choose?
BrokenGlepnir@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I didn’t say they were hero’s but by your definition here no one had ever abolished slavery.
MacNCheezus@lemmy.today 5 months ago
I suppose that once again depends on definitions. There’s likely a reason people often use the term “wage slavery” these days even though on paper, salaried workers are by no means slaves, since they can quit whenever they want to, but that doesn’t mean that in practice, people don’t end up in situations that feel like slavery anyways.
Debt slavery is another one that gets thrown around, even though the possibility of declaring bankruptcy and thus getting off the hook for only a fraction of what you owe is technically available. It almost seems as if slavery is part of the human condition, and if not externally imposed, people will find a way to self-impose it in one way or another.
Either way, it seems silly to suggest that only the slavery imposed by one particular group of people on one particular group of other people is morally objectionable, and I’m also not entirely convinced that erasing any reminders of it does anything at all to right that wrong. At some point, it must be possible to look back at the past and say “well, that was awful, but at least we’re over it now”, but that isn’t possible if you erase any and all traces of it, is it?