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Eat the Rich
- Thread starter Secret Chief
- Start date
What about the colonialism that was carried out in the name of abolitionism?
Where?
We've been thru this identical discussion before.
Many times, but you've never really answered most of the questions or arguments. That's okay; ultimately it's just a matter of personal preference and different philosophies on government.
I don't think you can say that one is "better" than the other, except to say it's "better" for you.
Augustus
…
It was the second phase, the idealistic and humanitarian imperialism of the abolitionists, that set the stage over the course of the mid-19th century for the acquisitive, high imperialism of the Scramble for Africa. This story, for both Britain and Africa, curiously enough begins with the American Revolution, when British forces offered liberty to any enslaved African-Americans who were able to escape their rebellious masters. When Britain lost the war, the freed slaves were evacuated north to Nova Scotia as refugees, where the question of what to do with them troubled British policymakers. The abolitionist lobby, led by Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce and prominent members of the evangelical Clapham Sect, devised the plan of transferring freed African-Americans and Jamaican Maroons to the British outpost of Sierra Leone, where they would form the nucleus of a civilising mission to convert the natives away from their slave-trading ways, and towards the light of capitalist free trade and Christianity.
By 1791, the Sierra Leone Company, run by liberal humanitarians including Wilberforce, had taken over governance of the nascent colony, initiating a process described by the historian Bronwen Everill as one where abolitionists had adopted a worldview “defined by this loose coalition of ideas: the ‘civilization’ of Africa via an end to the slave trade, adoption of standards of western life, material culture, and institutions; Africa’s conversion to Christianity; and the introduction of ‘legitimate’ commerce to simultaneously replace the slave trade, enrich the colonies and the metropoles, and inspire ‘civilized’ consumption.”
As with the humanitarian interventions of our own era, ideals of free trade, globalised capitalism, military intervention and the conversion of downtrodden natives to liberal Western ways were intertwined from the start. For Sierra Leone’s governor, Charles MacCarthy, the division of the colony’s unexplored forests into parishes run by the Church Missionary Society was the beginning of a process that would make “Sierra Leone the base from whence future exertions may be extended, step by step to the very interior of Africa”. As Everill notes, “colonisation was a developing anti-slavery ideology,” which “disrupted local economies, power structures, ideologies, and religions in much the same way that settlers in Australia or North America overcame the aboriginal peoples.”
Yet the failure of the Niger expedition radically altered the process by which the British conquest of West Africa took place. Instead of leading through example, the British Foreign Office and Admiralty found themselves drawn into an ever-widening series of military interventions to eradicate slavery at its source, which would lead inexorably, though unintentionally, to direct colonial rule. Firstly, the anti-slavery campaign of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron turned out to be almost wholly ineffective: the trade in enslaved Africans boomed over the course of its deployment as American and Spanish merchantmen, backed by their governments, refused the Royal Navy’s authority to board their slaving vessels.
Instead, the Royal Navy settled on a policy of eradicating the slave trade on the ground, sailing into coastal towns and villages to pressure their kings and chieftains to sign agreements banning the sale of slaves, and bombarding them and replacing their rulers when they did not. Bit by bit, driven by the unintentional logic of humanitarian intervention, Britain found itself the master of much of the West African coastline.
How liberals made the British Empire
You never remember the examples I gave.
Are you really claiming the Soviets & PRC
never used slave labor? Astounding.
Some reading for you....
Slave Labor in the Soviet Union
Here's a funny source...
Slave labour scandal erupts in China
I'm not interested in buying a book. However, this appears to be referring to individuals who were ostensibly convicted of crimes and were used as prison labor. This is also done in the United States, as the 13th Amendment prohibits slavery or involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. I don't think anyone would consider that to be "slave labor," though, not under those circumstances.
Your socialist workers paradise used political dissidents
for slave labor. I suppose that you could defend this as
the expression of wrongful views is criminal.
But they didn't need to be convicted of crimes....
Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia
You should correct Wikipedia using this <snicker> source.
Nothing to correct there, at least regarding the use of German POWs for labor in the Soviet Union. You may scoff at the source, but no one is denying that there were prison camps in the USSR and that counter-revolutionaries were sent there, among other prisoners guilty of crimes.
We have prisons in America, too. There's also convict labor. What does any of this prove?
Civilians are "prisoners of war"?
They made war against Russia. I think they probably went too far, although I can understand their anger at Germany at the time. That was part of what led to the Cold War, since they thought we were being too soft on Germany.
The civilians enslaved weren't soldiers.
Are you saying that it's OK to use all people for forced
labor if they're citizens of a country we war with?
Socialist values, eh.
They didn't use all people. The Allies also imprisoned numerous German civilians, so again, what does any of this prove?
I mean, I get it. You're trying to say that the Soviets were the "Evil Empire," and America was the "Savior of the Free World." Capitalists are the Jedi Knights, and the Socialists are the Sith. Your point is coming through loud and clear, but the real world is not some comic book full of superheroes and supervillains.
We didn't enslave them.
No, you're way off track.
I'm simply countering your claims of socialist purity,
& capitalist evil. Those are your issues....not mine.
Instead I look at real world examples of implementing
socialism & capitalism. I observe that socialism always
results in social, political, & economic oppression.
Capitalism has bad examples, but at least it has some
good examples....even some you might like.
This makes it the better choice for those who value liberty
& prosperity. If one values the opposite, I can understand
preferring socialism.
It might have been a different story if they occupied a third of our territory and murdered millions of our citizens. We would have wanted our pound of flesh as well. Since that never really happened to us, I don't think we're in any position to judge others to whom it has happened.
That may be true for both of us. You've spoken of socialist evil on numerous occasions.
When you say "oppression," doesn't that imply "evil"? Isn't that a moral judgment and a value statement? It's not a concrete fact, but more of a perception.
It really depends upon the nature of the State and what role it is expected to fulfill. Liberty and prosperity are not the result of a capitalist system, in and of itself. The word "capitalist" does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. However, liberty was an important concept for the Founders - at least "liberty" for white, Christian males.
And much of our early prosperity came from the aforementioned slavery and expansionism to the west, which was teeming with resources and millions of acres of arable land. I'm not saying this to bash America or lay any guilt trips on anyone; I'm not into the whole "liberal guilt" thing. But it is a fact of history.
It's also true that the U.S. economy has grown dependent upon global capitalism, which includes countries and territories which are quite different from the State which Americans live under. The labor laws are different. They have a much lower standard of living, and they work for wages which are extremely low. Our economic system is multiply-linked to the economic systems of many countries around the world, and most of the people living in those countries don't have liberty. They don't have prosperity.
I think this is a serious moral question we should consider: Why does our own liberty and prosperity depend on having to deny liberty and prosperity to so many other countless people around the world?
Loaded question.
It doesn't.
Heyo
Veteran Member
What you'll be driving in the future:Nah. Competition is great for us all.
Better products at better prices.
The infamous Trabant from back in the day....
What we drove back in the day....
Maybe not that model but that maker. And you may think that it isn't a VW what you drive but an Audi, Porsche, Seat, Bentley, Skoda, ... it doesn't matter because those already are VWs and eventually "market consolidation" will leave only one brand (under many names).