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If you’re a British taxpayer, you can at least rest assured that some of your money was going to compensate the victims of British slavery as recently as 2015.
Sorry, did I say compensate the victims? I meant compensate the slave holders.
Via @LewisHarrington
As a British taxpayer - yeah, I was aware of this.
I've even seen it twisted into "This is how moral we were - in our attempt to end slavery, because of how immoral it was - we even paid slave-owners to stop slaving! It was the only option, and a difficult decision, but it was worth it to stop slavery! Yay us!"
Like - *mate*, we once had the military might to have "owned" about 1/4 of the entire population of the Earth, and instead of saying "lolwut fuk you slaver, you see all these guns? Free the slaves or else, you bell-ends", we paid them off instead?
side-note - I've lost the link now, because it was bookmarked on twitter, but I've seen credible evidence to say that the Brits were "instrumental" in ending slavery *only when* it was in our best interests to do so.
Essentially (the details may be wrong, I'm going on memory, it's been a while), we'd recently subjugated India and had a ready supply of "not-slaves", and were in danger of being out-performed by the French who were angling at a slave colony (apologies, I don't recall exactly where), so it was in our economic interests to drum up support for outlawing slavery in its strictest sense, in order to out-perform the French.
Mark Nicoll 3.5%
@neonsnake @aral @LewisHarrington
The general public were always mostly opposed to slavery, but the aristocracy made money off it so parliament didn't do anything till the number of Lords not profiting from it was greater than those who were.
Slavery was still profitable for the empire when it was abolished, it was just no longer a significant part of the income of those in government. Partly down to morals but mostly because if you own whole countries you don't need to own individuals
@aral@mastodon.ar.ah oh FFS and of course bullshit like this happened.
Fucking lawful and proper due process bullshit.
And I bet this same kind of construct is well-alive today…
@aral That this was only payed off in 2015 means there will be living people who are very direct beneficiaries of slavery.
@aral
That's what they mean by 'great again'.
@aral @LewisHarrington like here in Brazil they did
@aral Between this and the Haitian "debts" to France et al, you would almost think that the cards have always been stacked.
@aral @LewisHarrington
Those payments were on loans taken out 200 years ago. Should the government have defaulted on those loans after everyone finally agreed that slavery is wrong? Or should the lenders have forgiven the loans?
@mcjevans @aral @LewisHarrington Don't worry, there's plenty of ghouls who don't agree slavery is wrong.
What... the... fuuuuuuu...
@aral The other way to frame this is that Braitain did in fact pay for slaves to be freed. They got their freedom. It was paid for, up until 2015.
Should they also have compensation? Of course! But takes like this always miss the *absolutely massive cost* that Britons *have paid* to end Slavery. And the fact we enforced it, physically, with the navy.
We were *all* taken advantage of by the rich. As always. And one sided narratives keep wedges in the wrong places.
@aral As a Brit, I'm glad my taxes paid for the end of slavery. That was the deal that was made, and the result was no more slaves.
And I'm also furious that payments went to other rich Brits and their institutions instead of the victims of slavery.
I want us to remember: Britain *ended slavery voluntarily when no other country did*. And we *enfoced it* and we *paid to do it*. Aim rage at the rich.