Slave descendants seek satisfaction
Slave descendants seek satisfactionFor many foreign visitors, Copenhagen's cosy cobblestone streets, gabled town houses, and stately palaces may be a charming reminder of Denmark's colonial past. Some of the charm, however, may be lost on Shelley Moorhead, who arrived in Copenhagen on Sunday. Moorhead leads a campaign to raise awareness about Denmark's 175-year record of slavery in the former Danish West Indies, the source of a considerable part of the country's wealth and splendour in the colonial era. 'Danes ruled a slave regime that lasted from 1673 to 1848,' he said. 'If slavery existed, there also existed a mentality that allowed that institution to exist.' Danish slavery began when Christian V and the West Indian Company decided to boost Denmark's economy with spices, tobacco, cotton, rum, and sugar. When Danish and Norwegian workers proved useless for labor in the country's Caribbean colonies, St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. Jan, African slaves were shipped in to do the work for them. At least 100,000 people were transported alive from what is now Ghana, and an equal number is believed to have perished on the long journey over the Atlantic. The figures grant Denmark the dubious honor of a seventh place in the rank of the world's biggest slave-trading nations - right after the United States.
posted by Unknown @ 7:46 PM
3 Comments:
In America, they claim a similar thing, that they are owed the 'fair back wages' of their ancestors. It hasn't got much traction except from the extreme moonbats. Where does it stop? You can just keep going back in time and finding where your 'ancestors' were not given a fair shake.
axis--
David Horowitz (frontpage) had a list of 10 reasons why reparations aren't owed. I like this one the best:
"Only a tiny minority of Americans ever owned slaves. This is true even for those who lived in the ante-bellum South where only one white in five was a slaveholder. Why should their descendants owe a debt? What about the descendants of the 350,000 Union soldiers who died to free the slaves? They gave their lives."
I always think it's good that people learn about the history of their countries, both glorious and not so glorious. Slavery certainly seems to be one such less glorious part of Danish history that Danes should lear about. Nothing wrong about that.
You could even take it a step further and say that Denmark, as a nation, "owes" these people or this country something. Not in a legal sense, but in a moral sense.
I'm all in favor of general reparations, like Germany to Israel after WWII, but not individual 'reparations', which implies that individual persons are entitled to a certain amount of money.
PS. Just to get is straight, slavery/slave trading during the 1700s was more about opportunity than morality.
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