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Comment by jollofricepeas | Hacker News Reader

Exactly.

This is something that leaders from Africa and Latin America have talked about a lot.

Western democracies love using the appearance of moral superiority as a diplomatic tool while turning a blind eye to their own corruption and failings (ie. United Fruit, JP Morgan Chase, Boeing, gun violence, police brutality)

1. It’s cheaper to whitewash (ie. affirmative action) than effect change (ie. reparations for Haiti, descendants of slaves in US)

2. It perpetuates the good guys vs bad guys myth /propaganda at home that makes it easier to wage war and disenfranchise “third-world” countries.

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I don't think this should be the focus.

Slavery is abolished in the west and currently existing slavery should be a primary focus-- whether it's a western company participating in a possible slave market, or Saudi participating in it-- such entities and individuals must obviously be destroyed, and immediately.

How we deal with morality and history is a separate question and of less interest.

Slavery is most certainly present in the West. The US penal system uses slavery.

Here’s a source with more information about the US penal system using slavery.

- https://www.vera.org/news/slavery-is-still-legal-for-two-mil...

Additionally, it’s also estimated that the US has at least a half million people in domestic servitude as stated in the article. This does not include sex trafficking which is a separate issue.

Slavery is definitely not abolished in the West. It is rife in the UK and Europe.

It is certainly abolished.

There are of course Roma beggar-gangs who have travelled to Sweden and who practise some kind of forced labour system on their members, but this is not something officially permitted and to the degree that this is a phenomenon it is only possible because of the foreignness of these gangs the the difficulty of Swedish policemen to genuinely understand what is going on.

When we have access to experts we try to break these things up and to prosecute.

Furthermore, we are not in any way reliant on these groups, since they are, as I have mentioned, beggar-gangs. They do not offer any service, but beg for money outside supermarkets and on trains.

Slavery is abolished on paper, but there are more than enough well-known instances where we still have slavery or slavery-like conditions... Italy is estimated to have 50k people in agriculture, mostly in tomato picking, and a further 95k in prostitution and domestic labor [1] as a result of a lot of undocumented immigrants being exploited, Spain's agriculture modern slavery is smaller but still existent [2] and known for at least a decade [3], even Germany has massive issues [4] with estimates going up to 167k people [5].

We may not have overt slavery any more in the Western world, but covert slavery and human trafficking? Absolutely.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/20/tomatoes-italy...

[2] https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/26136/strawberry-picker...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/feb/07/spain-salad...

[4] https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/moderne-lohnsklaven-in-...

[5] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/schneller-schlau/mode...

For the purposes of discussions like this, abolish should be defined as: to repeal the statutes creating the institution of slavery.

It is a stepping stone toward greater legal rights, and not an all-or-nothing goal.

Genuinely curious, who would pay reparations to Haiti? France? How much would need to be paid and how would it be administered to make a dent in Haiti?

At least, the sums extracted from Haiti and corrected into 2022 money should be part of the conversation. It’s much less murky than reparations in the US. Slave owners in Haiti were both black and white, and foreign policy toward Haiti was directly punitive to demonstrate an economic cost for other potential slave uprisings.

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