Vrede too wrote: Sat Apr 16, 2022 2:30 pm
O Really wrote: Sat Apr 16, 2022 10:28 am
I do.
Oxford defines "genocide" as "the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group"
The UN defines it as " a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part."
The "one estimate" of 15 to 20 million deaths may be suspect, since many other estimates of the total number of transatlantic market slaves was about 12.5 mill, but in any case the fact that a large percentage may have died or for some reason killed in transit or after enslavement doesn't show intent to destroy. Negligence, maybe. Uncaring, for sure. Cruel, of course. But no intent to take out the whole group.
Wiki also has this article:
Genocide of indigenous peoples
If you search "slavery" in it, the word appears throughout as an element of the genocides that were perpetrated. The entire existing economy and culture of West Africa was destroyed by the slave trade, and many many communities and tribes were wiped out. Does it count as "intent" when this was the predictable result? Idk, but I won't dispute the semantics when people say that it does. It's an ongoing dispute:
Was slavery genocide?
No, slavery was not genocide. It was awful to be sure, but calling it genocide is either just more lazy history, or some attempt to make slavery sound worse by attaching other horrendous words to it. Slavery was bad enough on its own without mixing it up with genocide.
Possibly slavery in the Caribbean could border on genocide as the slaves in this tropical environment were worked all year and had a life expectancy of under 7 years as a worker slave.
Whereas slaves in this country worked seasonal crops and were needed year after year. They lived a lifespan not that dissimilar to whites.
https://geriatrics.stanford.edu/ethnome ... evity.html
"Despite the harsh living conditions of slavery, reconstruction and twentieth century separatism, Black older adults in the United States have continued to grow stronger and live longer. Some estimates placed the average longevity of Blacks at 21.4 years of age in 1850, with the average longevity for Whites at age 25.5. The combination of lower living standards, greater exposure, heavier labor, and poorer medical care gave slaves a higher mortality rate than whites. In 1860, 3.5 percent of the slaves and 4.4 percent of the Whites were over sixty. The death rate was 1.8 percent for the slaves and 1.2 percent for Whites (Stamp, 1965, p. 77).
These conclusions should not be accepted uncritically. The findings are based upon comparisons of aggregate data collected at the national level by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1850. Mortality data at the state level, for example in Virginia, for the same year did not show the same results. Savitt (1978, p. 201) found evidence that “more slaves than whites died of old age” between 1853 and 1860 in four Virginia counties. This suggests that some Black older adultslived longer than older Whites, at least in those counties. It was also reported that there were more centenarians among Blacks than Whites in 1850 (Savitt)."
http://www.csun.edu/~sjs25580/history.h ... for%20them.
Caribbean sugar plantations (British, Dutch and French)
"These slaves were worked to the bone, literally. Their life expectancy was only four to seven years. Unlike other colonies that had slavery, the sugar islands had no African women because the labor was just too tough for them. In fact the labor was too tough for the males. Many were worked to death because it was cheaper to work them until they died and just go buy more instead of working them fewer hours for them to stay alive. These slaves were labored for ten or more hours a day, would have to sleep in shabby huts, were only given starchy diets, had to work in horrible conditions, and were beaten when they didn’t work hard enough or would do something wrong."
Trump: “We had the safest border in the history of our country - or at least recorded history. I guess maybe a thousand years ago it was even better.”