Nothing needs to be equated. We don't get to ignore the more painful or unpleasant parts of our history by pointing fingers at other countries and saying they did something worse. Nor is an awareness of that part of history a personal attack on anyone's self-identity, as it so often is taken.
Well, which do you think is more humane? Being kept a slave your entire life (and if you're female, you're probably going to be raped a lot) or being put in a camp where you're likely to be executed or starve to death after a few months (and if you're female, you'll probably get raped a few times as well)?
On the great scale of "badness" one is really bad while the other is extremely bad but they are both in a similar ballpark. That said, more needs to be said about how black African tribes/proto Kingdoms took a very active and profitable role on the slave trade. Basically, one tribe would conquer another, sell the slaves to western slave traders (slavery was well established in most of Africa) trade them for guns, money, and manufactured goods then go out to conquer more thus establishing their own kingdoms and gaining more slaves to sell.
That would most likely be for all of the western hemisphere of which most did not go to the US or even colonial proto US. Brazil was by far the largest importer. Speaking of out right murder in Brazil the average life span for a slave was only 1-2 years due to disease and over work with malnutrition. Being sent to a Brazilian sugar plantation was pretty much a death sentence. Thus the need for a never ending supply of imported slaves from Africa.
And only a small number of them were ones who escaped slavery. There were also a number of "undesirables" who worked for the Nazis. Some of them even survived until after the end of the war.
What's your point? At the end of the American Civil War millions of former slaves were free. Would they have been better off if they were murdered in 1860? By your reasoning they would be.
Who said that? Way to miss the point. Was it intentional? You spoke about the numbers who died in transit and then I pointed out that only a fraction of those could be attributed to the US or colonial slave trade. Still bad but factually true. That is called putting things in perspective historically not an attempt to excuse anything just to make sure the historical facts are known. You were simply factually wrong to try to claim all or even most transit deaths had anything to do with the US. Live with it. I imagine being a slave was terrible no matter where you were but being able to live a relatively long life vs everyone dying in 1-2 years probably was better. I know I would take dying 20-30 years from now vs dying in one year. Also knowing that most slaves were captured by blacks, enslaved by blacks, and then traded by blacks does kind of provide valuable historical nuance to the slave trade beyond "whitie is evil". Also, it is simply historically factually true. The slave trade made some blacks rich kingdom builders and turned others into slaves. Like most of history there were winners and losers. Learn to love or at least understand history in all of its messy complexity.
Another interesting bit of history is that the west Africa trade probably goes back much further than we have historical records for. In the early 00's British archeologist were excavating a medieval rubbish pit, basically a town dump from the 11th to 12th century, and among the many surprising things they found there was a well preserved banana peel. Someone had eaten the banana and then thrown the peel into this medieval rubbish pit. The nearest place bananas were grown was in tropical west Africa where they made up an big part of the local indigenous tropical agriculture. That means someone sailed to west Africa, got some bananas there some how, sailed back to 11th century England, ate a banana and then threw the peel in a rubbish pit. That means some pretty long distance world trade was happening before such trade even entered the written record. Surely, the west Africans did not just give valuable food free of charge (though maybe the English travellers took it by force) and likely they, out numbered, decided to trade. That means something made in medieval England is likely around to still be found in tropical west Africa if someone looks hard enough in the right places. Hell, Pliney the elder claimed to have circumnavigated Africa sailing south from Morocco and ending up in Eygpt during the mid Roman period. He even wrote a book about it.
Only to armchair moral philosophers; and certainly not to any actual holocaust-Jew. I won't even ask for you to list a single black centurion, never mind a black bi-centurion. And though you've tried before, rarely has a nonsense point be so poorly made. For e.g., does that moral relativism you've developed give blacks a free pass to, say, oppress jews? Or be assholes? What pass exactly are you giving away for free in your "suffering outweighs" scale? And where do the Armenians fit into this thesis? Or how do you rate a little girl locked in a nutjob's basement for 20 years and subject to depravations, certainly suffering more than some anonymous black person who was subject only to the agony of existence in bloated and fat rich US today (assuming they were a "sellout" and lived like US Asians, Hisapanics, or whites)? [And good golly, why the fuck don't the jews get credit for the full 'five thousand years of suffering' shtick, I mean, they gotta be joking, right, to expect credit for all that?]
One could be forgiven for lots of things, but admitting you got it wrong will do more to make people inclined to forgive you than just doubling down on the bullshit.
Wow, you sound stupid. Do you want me to quote his post where he implied all of the deaths in transit were some how the fault of Americans?
for thinking that I did claim "all or even most transit deaths had anything to do with the US." No. Actually one couldn't be forgiven for that. All you have to do is read the post.
Don't tempt him. He'll just repost something with the right keywords. Remember: He can't read. It's not a phase, stance, or ruse. He just can't.
No, it doesn't. That's a Muad Dub argument to try to split hairs and mitigate our own responsibility in all of that. Th British could have said no and left it at that. They didn't. And not only did they go all in on that, they eventually got to the point of just stealing people when they couldn't buy them.
Oh, I'm aware that there were others, I didn't realize that one was in my own backyard. My high school has class photos from its first graduating class of 1899 through about the mid fifties in our auditorium/cafeteria. About a third of the graduating class of 1941 was Japanese. That was zero the following year.
