Abolition
From RationalWiki
Abolition is generally a term used to describe the effort to destroy slavery in the United States, in the 1800s.
[edit] Summary
To 'abolish' is to demolish a construction, institution, law or practice intentionally and purposefully. There have been many such acts of abolition throughout the course of human history. Listed below are some examples and critical assesments of those acts of abolition that have had a profound impact upon the history books. Notice that some of these assesments are extremely polemical and ought not to be considered impartial. We make no apologies for grinding our political axes here.
[edit] Slavery
As the bicentenary celebrations marking the abolition of slavery draw to a close, we recall witnessing and perhaps taking part in officially sanctioned acts of ‘remembering’ the legislation passed into law by Parliament in 1807 and the impact that the ceasing of British trade in African lives has had upon the course of human history. Commemorative acts such as these have served as nothing more than exercises in self-affirmation.
It seems that Western nations such as Britain are incapable of acknowledging the barbarity of their slave trading histories unless accompanied by the self-assurance that they also played a significant role in ending ‘it’; distancing themselves from the immoral, unethical doings of those Britons, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Americans and others that came before them, preferring instead to relish in the work that their reformed ancestors undertook in confronting the remaining pro-slavery nations that they previously collaborated with.
Being the first Western nation to abolish this practice, Britain sought to use its acquired moral capital against other Western establishments that threatened its position as an imperial power; having experienced the trauma of military defeat against the Thirteen Colonies twenty-five years previously, Britain was able to console itself in the knowledge that it at least had a moral superiority over America, as well as its pro-slavery European rivals.
Prominent anti-slavery parliamentarians, scholars and abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson have done more to re-affirm Britain’s self-righteousness than any eminent pro-slavery activist of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, contemporary Anglocentric academics such as Niall Ferguson, in keeping with the self-congratulatory line assumed by the establishment since abolition, pay lip service to British involvement in the trade, preferring instead to trumpet the ‘civilizing mission’ of the Royal Navy some two hundred years ago when, on what he calls a ‘moral mission’, it stationed a squadron in Sierra Leone with the task of preventing ‘American and European slave ships leaving the African coast for America [in order to] bring an end to the Atlantic slave trade.’
There has never been any official expression of remorse for Britain’s involvement in the commodification of African lives and never has there been any official acknowledgement by any Western nation that racism still persists as the Atlantic slave trade’s lasting legacy. As Hesse confirmed five years ago, "we cannot doubt that racism endures in the political detritus of that modernizing period of Euro-America’s racial commodification of African humanity, continuing to disturb, if not disrupt, ritual commemorations of Western democratic achievements."
