The United Nations General Assembly, led by Ghana, recently passed a resolution by a 123-3 vote declaring that the “transatlantic” slave trade was the “gravest crime” ever committed against humanity. The resolution demands “reparatory justice” for “Africans and people of African descent” due to its “scale, duration, systemic nature, and brutality.”
Why focus just on the transatlantic slave trade? Because the United Nations is engaged in a long-running con to extract reparations from the West by accusing it, and specifically the United States, of perpetrating the most nefarious crime in history.
Of course, anyone with even an elementary grasp of history is aware that slavery was a near-universal institution practiced by people of every race and creed in every part of the world, going back to the first tribal societies. Every ancient empire across the globe put its enemies into bondage. There were more slaves in the “birthplace of democracy,” Athens, than free citizens.
Indeed, Africans were victims of Arab slave traders who engaged in the longest and most brutal campaign of human bondage known to man, lasting somewhere from around 1,300 years from the 7th to the 20th century. The bustling central West African marketplace for human beings was up and running until 1873, when the British forced the local sultan to close it.
The East African slave trade went on far longer than the trans-Atlantic variety. Didn’t the Islamic slavers engage in “abhorrent barbarism?” Was their business not an “enduring injustice against humanity?” There’s no way of knowing how many Africans were robbed of their freedom by Omani sultans who built bustling slave-trading city-states like Zanzibar, but historian Ronald Segal, author of “Islam’s Black Slaves,” puts the number anywhere between 10 to 20 million, a number that fails to account for the sub-Saharan Africans who were used as servants and plantation slaves throughout Islamic North Africa for centuries.
When will the Turks repay the descendants of the estimated two million Greeks, Serbs, Hungarians, Russians they captured from Europe between approximately 1500 and 1700, and forced into slave labor, military service, and sexual servitude, often subjecting them to all manner of brutality, including castration?
When do descendants of Europeans of the Mediterranean coast in Italy, Spain, Greece, and elsewhere obtain their reparations from the Islamic raiders of the Ottoman provinces of Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia, who enslaved somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million Europeans between 1530 and 1780?
How about the Slavs, who were snatched by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, by Viking raiders who then sold them to the Ottomans and Islamic fiefdoms in Central Asia? Where do they go for an apology?
Yes, the ancestors of every Islamic nation that voted in favor of the UN resolution condemning transatlantic slavery placed human beings into captivity themselves. But slavery was also widespread across the African continent long before the Europeans or Arabs ever arrived. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of Africans who later ended up being swept up in the global slave market were grabbed by interior tribes who sold them to more powerful African coastal rulers, who then sold them to European and Muslim traders who transported them around the world.
Asian peoples were subjected to bondage that was every bit as barbarous. Chinese warlords and emperors oversaw old-fashioned chattel variety for thousands of years. Slavery wasn’t abolished in China until 1910, a half-century after the American Civil War — and again, this was only due to efforts to modernize and align with Western norms.
Then again, there’s still slavery being practiced in communist China in labor camps filled with Uyghurs in the Xinjiang province. In North Korea, state-mandated forced labor of citizens is widespread, as well.
In India, various forms of slavery persisted into the 20th century despite the best efforts of the British. The Japanese racial supremacists practiced slavery, forced labor, and sexual servitude throughout their history, right through World War II. They, too, were stopped by the West.
The vital distinction between West and the rest is that slavery persisted in the Asian, African and Islamic world long after it was outlawed in the entirety of the Christian world, including in the U.S. The Saudi sheiks only abolished slavery in 1962, nearly a century after the U.S., largely due to Western pressure. Sudan and Oman didn’t abolish slavery until the 1970s. Mauritania was the last nation to abolish slavery in 1981, though the practice persists across swaths of the Islamic world.
If the Muslim-majority nations want to “remedy past tragedies and their consequences,” there’s plenty in the historical record to keep them busy.
If any nation is deserving of “compensation,” it might well be the Brits, who expended great treasure and lives combating the international slave trade. Surely, the British navy did more to stop the selling of human beings than all the corrupt nations in the United Nations demanding reparations. The British Parliament outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and outlawed slavery throughout its colonies in 1833. Its effort to quash the transcontinental slave markets was driven by theological-minded abolitionists, though the morality of slavery had long been debated among Christian thinkers.
Yet, the resolution, as one popular social media “pan-African” personality, Dr. Kenon, put it, “shifts the conversation from ‘was slavery bad’ to ‘what are you going to do about it?’” I’ve yet to meet a single sane person who contends that slavery wasn’t “bad.” That conversation was ended long ago by Europeans. Yet, Dr. Kenon argues that once we acknowledge something is a “crime against humanity” it enters the same category of “genocide” and “war crimes, a ”historic wrongdoing that demands “repair not just remembrance.”
Well, the U.S. paid that tab with approximately 700,000 dead Americans who perished fighting in the nation’s bloodiest conflict. No other country in history has ever gone to war against itself to free its slaves.
This fact escapes the self-flagellating modern Left. At the height of the post-George Floyd racial hysteria, when the American left had embraced wild historical revisionism to justify their increasingly racialist worldview, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) delivered a speech on the Senate floor in which he argued that the U.S. did not “inherit slavery from anybody” but “created it.” This pseudohistory has metathesized among progressives, who place white supremacy as the central idea of the American project.
Many young leftists function under the impression that the United States was the most extraordinary slave-owning society in history. The New York Times’s “1619 Project,” for example, still taught in high schools around the country, perpetuates the fiction that one of the primary reasons colonists declared their independence from Britain in 1776 was to protect the institution. One can regularly see progressives claiming that the United States was “built” on black servitude, when slavery would later become a moral and economic drain on the nation.
One wonders how many kids being fed the lies of the “1619 Project” are aware that native tribes of North America engaged in widespread slavery long before Europeans ever landed here? Even once they did conquer, native tribes participated in capturing and selling members of other tribes to settlers.
How many young progressives recognize that in the broad historical perspective, the U.S. played a minor player not only in slavery but in the trans-Atlantic iteration? Most estimates find that, among the African slaves who survived the brutal Atlantic Ocean journey, somewhere around 4-7% of the estimated 11 to 13 million slaves that were sent to the Western Hemisphere ended up in what was to be the U.S.
Far larger numbers of slaves were sent to Spanish, Portuguese, and French settlements across the Western Hemisphere. Of course, the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas also enslaved (and sacrificed) men and women from weaker tribes for centuries before Cortez and Pizarro landed in the Western Hemisphere. Around half of Brazil’s population is descended from the five million slaves that were brought to the former Portuguese colony. Portugal abolished slavery in 1869. Spain officially abolished slavery in its colonies, such as Cuba, in 1886.
Trans-Atlantic chattel slavery, was, need it be said, depraved, stripping human beings of their agency, humanity and life. It was driven by malice and greed and sustained long after humankind knew better. None of that means Europeans have a genetic disposition towards bigotry or that the United States is a racist outlier among peoples.
And, no doubt, most progressives would be happy to embrace this blinkered pseudohistorical history and engage in performative, and sometimes literal, bending of the knee. Contemporary Americans, however, have absolutely nothing to apologize for.
Many of the founders were hypocrites, yes, but the ideas they championed, our inheritance, was invaluable in creating a freer world. No other nation has people of as many colors, creeds, and faiths living in relative peace within its borders. Certainly, none of those pressing for reparations. As Thomas Sowell once pointed out: “People made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America.”
No one is a slave in the U.S. today. The same can’t be said for other places in the world. Still, there hasn’t been any resolution adopted by the U.N. General Assembly or the Human Rights Council specifically condemning any Islamic-majority state or African nation for their role in the slave trade, much less the ongoing modern version of the practice. There hasn’t been a single U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning the concentration camps in China.
In addition to reparations, the principal reason for this con job, the U.N. resolution demands nations involved in the transatlantic slave trade offer “full and formal apology,” “rehabilitation,” “satisfaction,” “guarantees of non-repetition and changes to laws,” and “programmes and services to address racism and systemic discrimination.” Only then, the U.N. contends, will the “persistent historical and structural inequalities” that still exist be mended.
“Many generations continue to suffer the exclusion, the racism because of the transatlantic slave trade which has left millions separated from the continent and impoverished,” Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Ghana’s U.N. representative explained.
Well, the only country that has officially apologized for their role in transatlantic slavery was the Netherlands, which was heavily involved in slavery in Ghana, and established an approximately $200 million fund for “social initiatives and projects” in the region. It won’t do much as long as nations like Ghana allow mass exploitation, forced labor, and human trafficking.
THE EXPERTS PREDICTED CATASTROPHE. ARGENTINA IS BOOMING
Only the United States, Israel, and Argentina voted against the ahistorical resolution. Cowardly European nations all abstained, lest they upset leftist contingencies and their growing Muslim constituencies.
The U.N. has been a largely useless organization for many decades, perhaps its entire existence. Not long ago, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the U.N. faces “imminent financial collapse” due to record unpaid dues, chiefly by the U.S. Well, we certainly have no duty to prop up an organization run by a mob of Islamist theocrats, tinpot dictators, communist tyrants, and fascists more interested in coddling the world’s worst actors and smearing the freest than nurturing world peace. Like other reprehensible institutions, we have a duty to destroy it.
David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) is a senior writer for the Washington Examiner.