I was under the impression that America didn't have a monopoly on African slavery [0]. Is Cleese wrong or am I misunderstanding what he's trying to say?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Enslaved_Af...
He's correct that the UK did ban slavery within the UK rather early (or, more specifically, it was found to be illegal by the courts), and did ban it in its colonies rather early, but absolutely there was slavery in the UK a long time after the Romans, though not in particularly large numbers after the Normans. The UK was, however, the second largest participant in the Atlantic slave trade (Portugal has the dubious honour of being first).
Also, English people were never enslaved by the Normans. More or less the opposite; the Normans phased out chattel slavery, which was quite common in England when they showed up.
Or, alternatively, of course, he could be referring to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the current one) which has only existed since the early 20th century. The slavery was all under the United Kingdom of Great Britain and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland! (Of course, the reference to Romans and Normans would argue against that rather silly interpretation...)
It's fairly common for British people to fixate on the fact that the UK was largely single-handedly responsible for abolishing slavery in the west (via the Navigation Acts in particular), while somewhat discounting the fact that the UK had previously been a huge part of the problem.
And also ignoring the fact that banning the trade in slaves isn't the same as banning slavery; and ignoring the fact the when slavery finally was banned it wasn't banned everywhere; and most of the slaves became "apprentices" (ie still unpaid) for a few years before becoming free; and that reparations for slavery were paid: to the slave owners, not to the slaves.
There's a bunch of stuff about colonialism that people in the UK refuse to engage with.
The West didn't invent slavery, something that existed on every inhabited continent for thousands of years, but it was responsible for it's abolishment. Don't you think that's something to be proud of?
“What was peculiar about the West was not that it participated in the worldwide evil of slavery, but that it later abolished that evil, not only in Western societies but also in other societies subject to Western control or influence. This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time.” ― Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Er, I mean, if I was William Wilberforce or someone I suppose I'd be moderately proud of that, yes! As someone who had no involvement in it and was born nearly two centuries after the first steps, I think it'd probably be a little bizarre for me to be proud of it.
Seems totally irrelevant to whether the UK had slavery or not, anyway.
It works both ways though. By the same logic, the West shouldn't feel guilty for slavery and stop the self-flagellation.
It's relevant to what you said. You implied that people from the UK try to wash their hands of slavery by saying they played a big part in ending it. And I'm saying they are right to use that as an argument against those who ignore history and try to pin slavery soley on the West. Without Western Civilization slavery would still be acceptable today. It took the Middle East until the 1960s! to abolish slavery. And it took Western pressure.
> When I was studying law, there were three key dates. There was a legal case in which it was established, I think in the seventeen-hundreds, that slavery was wrong in the U.K. Then there was the slave trade, which I’m proud to say William Wilberforce and the Quakers did a great deal to stop. And then there was the final thing about actually using slaves in the Caribbean territories, which stopped quite some time before [the United States]. So the idea of slavery is not as carved into our conscious and unconscious as it is into an American’s.
> From the context immediately following his statement, it seems fairly clear that he meant we didn't have slavery...to the extent that it happened in the Americas
Only if you discount the colonies. (It probably is fair to say that British colonial slavery tended to be a _little_ less nasty than American slavery, mind you).
How does that square with the fact that the bulk of the enslaving for it was by Africans, by all accounts, which surely counts as participation in the vile business? (Barbary pirate slavers also ravaged the south coasts of the British Isles, as well as southern Europe.) That seems important context, which is either not known or ignored, amongst the beating up over what previous generations did.
So if he's talking about UK proper (that is, the mainland), he's not that far off, even though technically inaccurate. Slavery wasn't a big thing there like in the US, and didn't cause any kind of huge Civil War to put an end to what there is...
That said, the UK was responsible for much of the trade to the US itself, and had colonized, a fancy term for enslaved, a large chunk of the world. So there's that.
I don't know if that was his intention, but, as you said, England has a long history of enslaving nations. Even if it didn't bring the slaves back with them necessarily most of the time, they still did horrible exploitation.
(Evidently, not trying to exclude the US here; obviously the US had some pretty brutal slavery, and the only reason we haven't colonized as much is likely due to us being a much younger country).
Well, for the UK society, etc., that's the part that matters though, and I understand him as talking from that aspect. Going out and about you didn't see people in chains, and slavery being the foundation of the economy the way you'd do in the South for example, nor were you constantly reminded of "us and them" in that way.
The UK's ruling classes, on the other hand, they're of course responsible for the colonies too - and lots of other things besides...
Well, not as visibly, certainly. Slavery actually had a fairly dramatic impact on the British economy, though, both in the colonies, and later, indirectly, during the US civil war, when lack of cotton caused a major economic crisis.
Don't be ridiculous.
They took over sovereign nations and enforced their rule where they had absolutely no claim. That's enslavement of whole peoples.
And that's not even getting into forced labour, torture, rape, genocidal starvation-inducing policies, stealing of resources, racism, and so on...
Even if the former slaves did learn a valuable trade while being enslaved, and at some level were grateful for it, at the end of the day, it was still absolutely horrific how they treated.
I'm not trying to accuse you of slavery apologia, but I don't really think that just because some colonies continued to have keep the queen on their money that we can say it wasn't slavery or horrible in general.
Colonialism wasn't slavery, plain and simple. There's no argument to be had here. Calling it "basically slavery" is diminishing the seriousness of actual slavery, something which still exists in the world today.
There were good things and bad things about colonialism. As it happens the British colonies tended to maintain local customs and laws instead of steam rolling everything as some other colonial powers did. We all live with laws and customs, many of which are chosen by other people. Does that make us all basically slaves?
What does this have to do with anything? Sure, there were slaves that were treated kindly, but even if you proved that that was a majority of slaves, it really does not subtract from my point in any way, like, at all. The fact that remains that some slaves that were treated horribly still stayed in the south.
> Colonialism wasn't slavery, plain and simple.
Ok then. I guess we'll need to agree to disagree on this point. It seems like even if it's not "slavery" in your narrow definition, there's a pretty big bit of overlap between British colonization and slavery.
> As it happens the British colonies tended to maintain local customs and laws instead of steam rolling everything as some other colonial powers did.
In some places, yes, but in other places they would go around murdering a large percentage of the native populations and forcing them into labor.
> If you go and visit any of the colonies you'll find that they gained a lot from British rule and many of them are quite grateful for it.
Except for the ones that aren't, like, you know, the United States, or India. Did the US "gain a lot from British rule"? I mean, maybe, that's basically impossible to quantify, but I seriously don't know a single person in the US that is "grateful" for British rule...US schools basically teach that England was pretty evil and that's why we had to separate. While that's almost certainly propaganda and a gross oversimplification of history, the fact remains that the people of the US aren't "grateful" for the British rule, whatever that means.
What this means for the fact that the English were at one point one of the largest traders of African slaves is an education in how people can be quite selective in their morals when money is involved.
Just to be clear, the issue I'm commenting on is not what deserves the label 'racism'—it's what sort of internet discussion flamebait leads to. The existence of racism, and of differing views about it, is no reason to wreck the community one's participating in. Maybe commenters don't owe John Cleese better, but they owe HN better if they're posting here.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I'm not saying you're wrong about Cleese, I'm saying flamewars are shite. They're tedious as hell and bring out the asshole in people.
I recollect now that you posted "Please don't do this here" to me few months ago after I attributed one of Trump's action to racism, and like now you were the only one who took issue with me labeling racism by its name.
Naga Munchetty, a BBC presenter has recently been dismissed for labeling Trump as racist on air, but her dismal was overturned when the BBC decided not to be impartial about racism, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-49859060
If HN moderators believe they should run the site like Mark Zuckerberg runs Facebook, then it wouldn't be the right place for me.
"X is racist" is not very substantial discussion imo. You're contributing the very vitriol that does appear on Facebook, and bringing it here.
There may be other places for this sort of content, but it’s not here.