Whose Suffering Counts? | P.H. Bloecker
bloecker.wordpress.com · Essays on Life, Literature & Ideas
Whose Suffering Counts?
Slavery, the Holocaust, and the dangerous arithmetic of atrocity
Gold Coast QLD Australia, 25 March 2026
The UN General Assembly voted yesterday on a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity. 123 nations voted in favour. Three voted against: the United States, Israel, and Argentina. 52 abstained — among them all 27 members of the European Union and the United Kingdom.
The resolution is non-binding. It is political. And its most dangerous word stands in the superlative: the gravest.
Because a superlative implies a ranking. And a ranking of human catastrophes inevitably raises a question that nobody in that chamber spoke aloud — but that everyone present heard:
Is the slave trade worse than the Holocaust?
And is that even a question we are permitted to ask?
I. Frankl and Benjamin Were Jews
In recent days I have been writing about Viktor Frankl and Walter Benjamin — two Jewish intellectuals from the German-speaking world, both caught in the machinery of the same annihilation, both witnesses to the absolute limit of human barbarism. Frankl survived Auschwitz. Benjamin died fleeing it, in a hotel room in Port Bou on the Spanish border, on the night of 25 September 1940.
Israel voted No yesterday. That is not coincidental. The Israeli delegation read the same subtext every attentive observer read: the phrase gravest crime against humanity is an implicit hierarchy. And that hierarchy positions the slave trade — deliberately or not — above the Holocaust in the moral order of priority of the international community.
That is politically explosive. And philosophically untenable.
II. Can Crimes Against Humanity Be Ranked?
The question is not academic. It has real consequences — for reparations claims, for international jurisprudence, for whose history appears in school curricula and whose pain becomes law.
The historian Yehuda Bauer, one of the foremost Holocaust scholars of the twentieth century, argued throughout his career that the Holocaust was sui generis — a singular crime that could not be placed in a sequence with others. His argument: for the first and so far only time in history, a modern industrial state deployed its entire bureaucratic, military, and technological apparatus with the explicit aim not of subjugating a people, not of exploiting them, but of biologically erasing them from the earth entirely. No economic motive. No territorial logic. Annihilation as an end in itself.
The transatlantic slave trade followed a different — no less brutal — logic. The enslaved were valuable precisely because they were alive and could work. The horrors were immense: dehumanisation, the destruction of families, the erasure of cultures, the creation of an inherited poverty that remains structurally operative today. But the goal was extraction, not extinction.
Does that distinction make one worse than the other?
Most serious ethicists answer: the question itself is the error.
Every human face presents an absolute, irreducible demand. You cannot weigh one face against another.
— Emmanuel Levinas, Holocaust survivor and philosopher
Elie Wiesel was more direct still: he refused all comparison. Every genocide, he argued, is unique to those who suffered it. To rank suffering is to diminish all suffering simultaneously — to treat the victims not as human beings but as data points in a comparative exercise.
This is also Frankl’s implicit position. His entire framework of Logotherapy rests on the absolute uniqueness of each human life and each human suffering. The logic of the will to meaning forbids the ranking of catastrophe — because meaning is not comparative. It is singular, concrete, unrepeatable.
III. The Colonial Motherlands and Their Abstention
And yet — the EU abstained. Britain abstained. The official argument was legal: the formulations in the text were too complex, the juridical implications too unclear, the respect for the subject matter too great to vote yes.
That is diplomatic language for: we are afraid of the consequences.
Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Denmark — these are the colonial motherlands. They did not observe the slave trade from the sidelines. They invented it, financed it, gave it legal frameworks, and ran it for four centuries. The wealth on which European industrialisation was built rests to a considerable degree on the bodies of enslaved Africans.
They know this. And that is precisely why they abstained.
Because a Yes would have meant: we acknowledge. And acknowledgement — as they learned from Germany’s post-war history — leads to reparations. Germany has paid billions to Holocaust survivors and the State of Israel since 1952. Not one European nation has paid a cent in reparations for slavery.
That difference cannot be justified on moral grounds. It is political, geographical — and racist in its consequences, even if no one in the chamber was willing to use that word.
IV. Money Does Not Heal — But Silence Destroys
My deeper objection to reparations in the form of financial transfers is a different one. The slave trade was so catastrophic in scale, duration, and civilisational destructiveness that no financial transaction can calibrate it. Four centuries. Millions of human beings. Generations of broken genealogies, erased languages, destroyed cultures, compounding poverty that no cheque can reverse.
A payment is also a receipt. And a receipt carries the notation: settled and closed.
What would actually help is what no Western government is seriously offering: debt cancellation for African and Caribbean nations, structural trade reform, and above all honest historical education in European and American classrooms. None of that costs what a cheque costs. All of it costs more politically.
Healing is medicine. Healing is acknowledgement. Healing is the naming of truth — without subtext, and without superlatives.
V. What Actually Happened in New York Yesterday
Yesterday in New York, 123 nations said that the slave trade was a crime. That is right and necessary and long overdue.
But the word gravest was a political mistake. Not because the slave trade was not immeasurable in its horror. But because superlatives in the language of suffering always set victims against one another. And because this particular hierarchy — this is the bitter subtext — serves precisely those who abstained from everything: the colonial motherlands, who want to say neither Yes nor No, because both cost them something they are not prepared to pay.
Benjamin’s angel of history stares back at the wreckage. The EU looked away yesterday.
Frankl would ask: what attitude do the heirs of perpetrators take toward unavoidable historical truth?
The answer New York gave yesterday was: we abstain.
Both crimes were absolute.
Both were total for those who suffered them.
The ranking is not philosophy, it is politics.
And the politics reveals, with uncomfortable precision,
whose suffering Europe is prepared to name, and whose it is still not.
P.H. Bloecker is a retired Director of Studies and has been writing about education, literature, and the lived life since 2015 at bloecker.wordpress.com and bloeckerblog.com. He lives on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.
Trained in German language and literature, American Studies, and linguistics at the Freie Universität Berlin, he worked across Germany, Namibia, and Queensland over a forty-three year career. He writes from the intersection of German Idealist philosophy, critical theory, and lived experience across three continents.
approx. 950 words
phbloecker.wordpress.com
© P.H. Bloecker 2026
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being
self-evident.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher
You must be logged in to post a comment.