Mmmmmm how about the nations and companies who profited the most off of it?
Yes, we are looking at you, BP.
I’m norwegian and I support this message. We grew our riches by extracting luxurious poison from the earth, intoxicating the world. It’s time for rehab
On the other hand, if countries like UK didn’t have the consumption demand to buy these resources there’d be less environmental damage because of less extraction.
No, no it’s their fault for making it. Just like Africa should of never of had all those juicy natural resources and available slaves. It was their fault.
Most of the slaves were captured by Africans in wars fought for slaves. European slave raids happend, but mostly Europeans just bought the slaves from African leaders. That is one of the reasons Africa is so fragmanted today. As more local power mean more potential targets to raid and the smaller you are the less you have to share the wealth from the slave trade.
I strongly, strongly suggest you revisit some of the preconceptions that led you here. I was going to instinctually retort, but instead took 5 minutes to read the relevant Wikipedia article on the topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa#West_Africa. It is clear that the topic is more nuanced than I originally thought, so thank you for bringing that to my attention, but it’s a crude and broad brush to imply that most slaves already existed in slavery prior to the Atlantic trade. There is also a significant difference between slaves in Africa who were exchanged between local groups in a wholly African context, versus slaves chained up and flung across the Atlantic with a 12% mortality rate and forced under a European slavery conception.
I suspect your response has rubbed others the wrong way, as it did myself, so consider this an attempt to find a common ground for dialogue - whatever the history of Africs prior to the Atlantic Slave Trade, I think we can agree that what happened was utterly grotesque and an atrocity upon the history of our common humanity.
I have a feeling nations like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and America won’t warmly embrace a British exPM’s idea for a tax on one of their greatest resources to subsidize foreign nations. Especially when it’s framed as their reparations for harming the world.
The. British are also silent when it comes to paying reparations for their own misdeeds overseas, which unfortunately strips this statement of credibility.
I found this quote from him pretty rich because of that:
“These producer states have done literally nothing to earn this unprecedented windfall. It represents one of the biggest ever transfers of wealth from poor to rich nations.”
We complain about the countries that extract the oil and the countries that burn it to make products, but ignore the fact that they do it for us…
You won’t ever see politicians telling individual people to stop buying so much crap though, because that’s their right and it would hurt the economy…
They’ve spent millions to keep us dependent on oil and killed innovative projects, they should pay a tax
