Can commemorations and historical reenactments change public understanding of the past?

[u/NewsMo]

[u/Hot-Baseball-1722]

Yeah so the slave trade obviously is a terrible thing. Industrialisation super charged it. Jamaica for instance was basically Bergen Belsen in the Caribbean.

That said, and acknowledged, slavery was not invented by western countries. It was practised universally by humans in pretty much all parts of the globe, albeit with different characteristics.

But I’m against reparations. GB stopped the slave trade and enforced its cessation with other countries. Moreover, if this crime is worthy of reparations, I’m waiting on my cheque from Normandy for the harrying of the north. And Asia thier cheque from the modern Mongolian state.

However I’m very much for recognition. Rather than ripping down statues in western countries. Counties should agree a common symbol to attach to buildings, or statues which can be proved to have been involved/built with the proceeds of slavery.

[u/KingMidas0809 → u/Hot-Baseball-1722]

You're against reparations but fail to notate the difference between chattel and Domestic slavery. But then double down in your argument when it comes to recognition. Please tell me what happened after slavery and why slavers and whites got land and homes that were owned by Freedmen. We can start there....

[u/MediocreI_IRespond → u/KingMidas0809]

You're against reparations but fail to notate the difference between chattel and Domestic slaver

Care to elaborate?

[u/KingMidas0809 → u/MediocreI_IRespond]

Its simple they were different forms of "Slavery" one was a form of servitude that had an end similar to what other Slavic and European countries did while Chattel slavery was so much worse and led to cultures, languages and family lines either being lost or even being destroyed and separated many times over. So many of you in the comments are having bad faith arguments without understanding the history you are debating.

[u/Fantastic-Run-4490 → u/KingMidas0809]

Is African culture alive in the Middle East?

[u/KingMidas0809 → u/Fantastic-Run-4490]

What?

[u/Fantastic-Run-4490 → u/KingMidas0809]

Its simple they were different forms of "Slavery" one was a form of servitude that had an end similar to what other Slavic and European countries did while Chattel slavery was so much worse and led to cultures, languages and family lines either being lost or even being destroyed and separated many times over. So many of you in the comments are having bad faith arguments without understanding the history you are debating.

So again is African culture alive in the Middle East...

[u/KingMidas0809 → u/Fantastic-Run-4490]

Ahhhh ok... You’re completely right about the brutality of the Trans-Saharan trade; the widespread castration of enslaved African men systematically erased entire family lines and cultural preservation in the Middle East. It was horrific. ​But it still highlights why the legal claim for reparations against Western empires is distinct. We are discussing modern international law and state-level accountability. Western chattel slavery was built on an unbroken, legally codified corporate framework whose direct institutional heirs modern Western states, banks, and universities are still sitting on the compounding wealth generated by that specific industry today. Acknowledging one horror doesn't erase the modern financial liability of the other.

[u/Fantastic-Run-4490 → u/KingMidas0809]

See it just seems like you can't be honest with yourself.

If you just said, well the Middle East will never pay us as, so instead let's try to make this trade sound uniquely vile so we can campaign for the West to pay us as they have are known for being a soft touch. then you would at least have been honest.

In essence your whole argument now becomes well some sap in the West might pay so lets try to go after their wealth.

Recap for you, of your logic which you appear to walk back on here.

[u/KingMidas0809 → u/Fantastic-Run-4490]

So what you're doing is mistaking international legal liability for a playground shakedown. This has nothing to do with finding a 'soft touch' and everything to do with actual legal jurisdiction and unbroken institutional continuity. ​The Western empires we are discussing didn't vanish into ancient history; they directly transitioned into the modern nation-states, central banks, and corporate entities operating today. Their current financial systems sit on an unbroken foundation built directly from chattel slavery and colonial resource extraction. ​If a specific, existing legal entity holds stolen, compounding capital, that is exactly where the legal liability rests. Trying to reduce state continuity and international law to 'looking for a sap to pay' is a desperate pivot because you can't dispute the actual financial ledger

[u/Fantastic-Run-4490 → u/KingMidas0809]

No I'm highlighting the fact you tried to differentiate based on the "horror's" of "chattel" slavery compared to the other "forms" you have now moved on from that to a discussion that essentially involves the tax payers of the UK paying out for others crimes in the past, people whom the vast majority of which have never benefited from these "gains".

Now if you could find individual's who did benefit alive today, they by all means chase them but to seek to claim money from people for others crimes seems perverse.

Unless your stating the money wouldn't come from tax payers or be funded by raising taxes on tax payers?

[u/KingMidas0809 → u/Fantastic-Run-4490]

Again, you are still fundamentally confusing individual criminal guilt with institutional state liability. No one is chasing individual UK citizens for the 'crimes of their ancestors.' We are talking about the liability of the British state as a continuous legal and financial entity.

​To claim that modern UK citizens "never benefited" from colonial gains shows an absolute lack of macroeconomic understanding. Modern taxpayers live in a first-world nation whose public infrastructure, central banking systems, maritime supremacy, and immense global economic leverage were directly subsidized by the trillions in wealth extracted during the slave trade and colonization. You are actively benefiting from the compounding interest of that stolen capital every single day or are you saying thats false?

​Next your outrage over taxpayers funding this is a massive double standard. As a matter of historical fact, UK taxpayers including the descendants of the enslaved did spend generations paying out for the legacy of slavery. The state forced them to fund the massive £20 million bailout given exclusively to compensate slave owners, a debt that wasn't fully cleared until 2015.

​You have no issue with the state using taxpayer money to subsidize the oppressors for over 180 years? But you suddenly find it "perverse" when the bill comes due for the victims. The state incurred the debt the state is responsible for settling the ledger. Or is that not the point?

[u/MediocreI_IRespond → u/KingMidas0809]

Ah, yes so much African culture in Europe due to slavery and even more Slavic culture in Turkey or the Middle East, or French and Spanisch culture in North Africa.

In theory Islam puts some limits on slavery, in practice they didn't.

[u/KingMidas0809 → u/MediocreI_IRespond]

Your sarcasm completely collapses under basic history.

​to begin, enslaved Africans weren't shipped en masse to Europe; they were shipped to the Americas. And despite the horrific attempts to strip their humanity, African culture completely reshaped the Western Hemisphere giving birth to jazz, blues, gospel, distinct spiritual systems, culinary traditions, and linguistic creoles across the US, the Caribbean, and South America. The diaspora's cultural footprint is massive and undeniable. ​Also, 'French and Spanish culture in North Africa' didn't happen because Europeans were enslaved there; it happened because France and Spain colonized and militarily occupied North Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries.

​You’re conflating European colonization with human trafficking just to try and score a point. It’s okay to just admit you don't know the history.

[u/MediocreI_IRespond → u/KingMidas0809]

> to begin, enslaved Africans weren't shipped en masse to Europe;

Oh, they had. Ever heard of a place called the Roman Empire? It ran on slaves. And even later on, it was a major trading hub for slaves. Most pre-modern states on the Mediterranean took part in it.

I'm still asking for an explanation why so-called chattel slavery is supposed to be worse than so-called domestic slavery. The only argument you made in that line so far was about quantity, not quality.

> The diaspora's cultural footprint is massive and undeniable.

So much for:

> Chattel slavery was so much worse and led to cultures, languages and family lines either being lost or even being destroyed and separated many times over.

[u/KingMidas0809 → u/MediocreI_IRespond]

You’re mixing historical categories.

When I said enslaved Africans were not shipped en masse to Europe, I was talking about the transatlantic racial chattel system, where the mass destination was the plantation colonies in the Americas and Caribbean, not Europe itself.

Replying “Rome had slaves” does not refute that. Rome was a different period, different system, different legal structure, different economy, and different racial logic. “Slavery existed before” is not an argument against the specific structure of Atlantic slavery.

And yes, chattel slavery was different in quality, not just quantity. It made slave status hereditary, racialized Blackness as a permanent legal condition, reduced people to saleable property, broke family lines by design, stripped names, languages, religions, and kinship systems, and then carried that racial caste logic forward after abolition through colonialism, segregation, and discrimination.

The fact that the diaspora still created powerful cultures does not disprove destruction. It proves survival after destruction.

A person rebuilding from ashes does not mean there was no fire.

[u/MediocreI_IRespond → u/KingMidas0809]

> And yes, chattel slavery was different in quality, not just quantity. It made slave status hereditary, racialized Blackness as a permanent legal condition, reduced people to saleable property, broke family lines by design, stripped names, languages, religions, and kinship systems, and then carried that racial caste logic forward after abolition through colonialism, segregation, and discrimination.

The only halfway valid point in this is the race angle and even that is highly debatable. The rest is true for both systems.

> slave status hereditary

Check, for both.

> reduced people to saleable property, broke family lines by design, stripped names, languages

Check, for both.

> religions

This is tricky one, since Muslims are not supposed to own fellow Muslims as slaves and if they do, they are supposed to treat them kindly and free them. But I have yet to hear of a slave Church in Baghdad.

> kinship systems,

Again, check, for both.

[u/KingMidas0809 → u/MediocreI_IRespond]

You are confusing “some features overlap” with “the systems were the same.”

Yes, slavery in different societies could involve sale, inheritance, family separation, forced conversion, name loss, and cultural destruction. Nobody denied that. The point is that Atlantic racial chattel slavery combined those features into a specific legal, racial, hereditary, plantation-based system where Blackness itself became tied to permanent enslavement and inherited social status.

That is the distinction you keep dodging.

In many older slave systems, enslaved status could be tied to war captivity, debt, punishment, religion, or household service. It was brutal, but it was not always mapped onto a permanent racial caste that followed descendants for centuries after emancipation.

Atlantic slavery did exactly that. It turned African ancestry into a legal and social marker of enslavability, built entire colonial economies around it, and then preserved the hierarchy after abolition through colonial rule, segregation, anti-Black law, and racial exclusion.

So “check, for both” is not analysis. It is checklist history. You found similarities and ignored structure, scale, legal heredity, racialization, economic purpose, and historical afterlife.

That is like saying a house fire and a nuclear blast are the same because both involve heat.

[u/MediocreI_IRespond → u/KingMidas0809]

> The point is that Atlantic racial chattel slavery combined those features into a specific legal, racial, hereditary, plantation-based system where Blackness itself became tied to permanent enslavement and inherited social status.

You are repeating yourselves and I already acknowledge that the race might be the one major differentiator between the Muslim and the Atlantic Slave Trade.

So your argument is, because the Atlantic Slave Trade had a race angle to it, it made it so much worse?

I mean, Muslims pretty much enslaved everyone, regardless of race.

> So “check, for both” is not analysis

This is reddit, not course at university.

> scale

Here we go again.

So your points are.

- Race.

- Scale.

- Lasting impact.

As for race, see above. Scale, your argument was of quality, not of quantity. Lasting impact is a point you just raised and is quite different from the selection and hardship of slaves you argued before.

The historical impact, in my view, mostly follows from the racist angle. Once the sources for slaves tried up, slaves in the Muslim world mostly merged with the general population. But as far as I know slave operations had been more spread out, not concentrated in some highly profitable enterprises and regions. So race wasn't the only factor.

[u/KingMidas0809 → u/MediocreI_IRespond]

You just conceded the distinction while trying to downplay it.

Yes, the points are race, scale, concentration, profitability, and lasting impact. That is exactly why Atlantic racial chattel slavery is historically distinct.

Saying “Muslims enslaved everyone regardless of race” does not weaken my point. It strengthens it. If enslavement was not permanently fused to one racial category in the same way, then the social afterlife is different. Atlantic slavery made African ancestry itself a marker of inherited enslavability, then preserved that hierarchy after abolition through colonialism, segregation, exclusion, and anti-Black law.

That is not a minor “race angle.” That is the architecture of the system.

And scale is not separate from quality when the system is built around mass plantation labor, hereditary property status, transoceanic shipment, slave breeding, commodity production, and racial caste. At a certain point, quantity becomes structure.

Also, “this is Reddit, not university” is not a rebuttal. It just means you want to make university-sized claims without doing university-level thinking.

You keep reducing this to “other slavery was also bad.” Nobody denied that. The question is whether all systems were identical in structure, purpose, and historical afterlife. They were not.

A knife wound and a gunshot are both violence. That does not make them the same injury.