this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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I hate point 3 whenever it's used by someone. I've seen it used to defend people who had slaves too. It's like, you know that there were anti-slavery people even back then, right? Heck, there were anti-slavery people back in Roman times.
So if they could see the wrongness of slavery as wrong then, then no one else has that excuse.
It's just that people don't want to admit that a large amount, if not an outright majority, of people in history were bad, evil people. Most people were not good. Or, at the very least, they had little empathy for others outside their immediate family.
Mhmm, not to mention that the argument also erases the perspectives of everyone who was the target of terrible attitudes & institutions, and their allies. Certainly there were FAR more enslaved in the US than slave owners & all those working in the slave trade combined, yet somehow the views of a tiny minority who directly benefitted are the ones we're supposed to regard as the default?
That and, even the most ardently pro-slavery people of any era knew fine well that they would not have been cool with it had they or their loved ones been enslaved.
True. In Germany, there are still criminal procedures held against and sentences passed on former guards of concentration camps, even though they are close to a hundred years of age. Because even though it was "normal" and even legal back then, it was never okay and always crimes against humanity.