this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2026
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The argument isn't that Tibet once had slavery at some point in it's history, but that Tibet had slavery up until the PRC ended it. There are no states in the modern day that practice slavery or serfdom in a comparable way (you could argue things like "wage slavery," but that's still significantly different from chattel slavery or serfdom). Slave states do not have the right to exist, and any nation without slaves has the right to invade a slave state and free the slaves. That's not an unreasonable standard, it's a standard that exists today.
If you believe that's objectively true then I suspect you need to ask yourself "why aren't governments everywhere banding together to obliterate the actual slavery going on inside their borders?"
Those discord user account compromises and social media accounts asking for gift cards to avoid releasing your personal whatever aren't legitimate businesses and the people performing those actions for them are not free to quit or even leave the buildimg they "work" in.
Okay, you could maybe argue that's one-off tourist kidnapping by criminal parties at scale, but then we have blood diamonds. How is it they still exist?
Vegas hotels getting regular visits from cops as the drugs wear off early and the occasional girl escapes from the room she's being held in, the fact that the superbowl is the world's largest human trafficking conference, large portions of haiti under the current regime, slavery is EVERYWHERE and whoever is feeding you that line and placing the onus at a governmental policy level is trying to distract you from reality and hand-wave away anything that doesn't line up with their own agenda.
The world banded rogether to eliminate CFC's because of the ozone hole.
It's clear we CAN all cooperate, so I posit you should be asking yourself: when reality doesn't line up with the convenient point-proving "statements of fact" someone is pushing your direction, what does someone stand to gain from misrepresenting reality with quotable sound bytes?
Human trafficking is illegal everywhere. It still happens, but does so in the shadows. If a nation can just accuse another of not doing enough to combat human trafficking, that's subjective by how much is "enough," and the scope of it is hard to prove in an objective and indisputable way. Any nation could accuse any other nation and it would be a free pass whenever anyone wanted to go to war.
I'm talking about having an official stance of legalized chattel slavery or serfdom.
I dunno. A lot of societies are getting away with severe bonded servitude on the premise it's not as bad as the North-Atlantic slave trade.
Considering the US' effort to keep slavery going with extra steps continuing to this day and getting worse, I'm eager to hold accountable every society that tries.
I'd be okay with China freeing the slaves in America.
I'd be thrilled if the international community defined and enforced labor standards that aligned with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights — including the rights to food and a home — which would eliminate the business practice of offshoring production to exploit unprotected labor pools.
You are curiously fixated on China. I presume you reside there?
Point being, national sovereignty doesn't outweigh wanton cruelty. It's the same argument with the Confederacy, "States' rights? States' rights to what?" No state that employs that kind of system has the right to exist. The Union defeating the Confederacy and freeing the slaves, even if it wasn't total liberation, was completely justified and made a marked improvement in countless people's lives. Yes, there is still more to be done, but the world is a better place because slavery, as an institution, was ended by force.
Tibet was still feudal at the time. Their liberation, arguably just forced modernization, involved losing regional, cultural, and socioeconomic self determination in an arrangement that very much resembles imperial or colonial exploitation and political suppression. Slavery of the entire polity to replace slavery of the poor, if you will.
Just another nation-state doing what statists do.
Yeah, and growing up I heard the exact same talking points about the Confederacy. How states should have the right to decide whether they want to be in a union or not, how ending slavery was the real slavery, how it was authoritarian for a central body to tell us who we couldn't enslave, how Southern culture was lost by the North imposing it's ways on us. Just another nation-state trying to control the little guy. I've heard it all before.
If there is some rationale that can actually justify bemoaning the lost cause of the Tibetan slaver theocrats, it's probably for the best that I'm not clever enough to see it, because I'd have used it to justify the beliefs I was raised with and might not have ever become a leftist in the first place.
It's completely absurd to speak of "self-determination," especially "socioeconomic self-determination" regarding a literal slave theocracy. What, you mean the "self determination" of the theocrats? Because the serfs didn't have self-determination to lose in the first place. Again, there's no shortage of people in the South who would bemoan the "carpetbaggers" and the loss of Southern "socioeconomic self-determination" (though they might use different terms), completely glossing over the fact that slaves had zero socioeconomic self-determination under their system.
You are the one who's adopting a statist perspective by treating the serfs and their lords as one entity with unified interests, when if you look at if from a class perspective, they had diametrically opposed interests, with the interests of the serfs being in line with the interests of the Chinese people and the revolutionaries. Which is why so many of them supported them (in spite of the slaver theocrats' attempts at religious indoctrination).
Of course, another reason is their shared history. Tibet had been part of China for hundreds of years, which is why it's still claimed as part of China by the ROC. During the brief period of chaos following the collapse of the Qing, it emerged alongside countless other warlord states that were opposed by both the nationalists and communists, as well as anyone with half a brain who could see that the division is exactly what allowed them to be invaded by the Japanese despite them being a much smaller foe. In fact, during WWII, the US military produced a film that states that point explicitly.
China would have been wrong to have not freed the Tibetan serfs. Perhaps that liberation was imperfect or incomplete, just as the liberation of slaves in the US was, but it was still a step in the right direction that massively improved the quality of life for the vast majority of Tibetans.
Well there are so many points of historical and political-economy analysis that fundamentally differentiate the medieval feudalism of the himalayan plateau societies from the colonial chattel slaver system of the early USA that it is too much to address here.
But let's not pretend that Tibet was liberated from a cruel economy and then given a path to self determination and control over immigration. It was annexed and is being settled like other settler-states. If the remnants of all former empires laid claim to their former conquests the world would burn.
Most nation-states have slavery-by-another-name running inside their prison systems, including China. Fuck that weak excuse. Geopolitics and centralized power did this, not that heroic myth that is just a variant of manifest destiny. Slavers liberating slaves, pfft.
Truly Tibetan slaves and American slaves are apples and oranges, I say it all the time, lol.
Do the former Confederate states have control over immigration, or is that handled at the federal level? Do those states have "a path to self-determination," including a path towards secession, or towards reinstituting slavery? No, they are, quite correctly, bound by federal laws and follow the same rules as everyone else. Should we treat the Union reestablishing control over the Confederacy as, "an empire laying claim to its former conquests?" They had been a part of the Union for a much shorter time than Tibet had been part of China.
Yes, and the Union had prisons too. This doesn't change the fact that ending the formal institution of slavery was a major, important step that materially improved the lives of the freed slaves. You're dismissing all progress unless it instantly creates a perfect utopia overnight. This was a big one I heard, "The Northerners were hypocrites because their factories had harsh conditions."
So far, I have yet to hear an argument that passes the, "Can this be used to justify the CSA" test, and as the CSA was unjustified those arguments must be wrong. You say that the systems were different, and yes, that's true. The question is whether they were different in any relevant way. They were both cruel systems of involuntary servitude.
All of your arguments are just justifying cruel, inhumane, oppressive, authoritarian systems, and twisting words around to present it as "anti-authoritarian." My upbringing has innoculated me against that sort of thing.
This one doesn't ring well. It is one thing if the oppressed people themselves asked for help, but otherwise its just an invasion. No nation has a 'right' to free slaves.
Wtf, lol?
The PRC had considerable help from Tibetan serfs. I know that was true. The communists didn't just all come from China.
What population of slaves in history has not welcomed their liberators? What population of slaves in history has been permitted to petition someone to come free them?
"We better not liberate this concentration camp, they didn't invite us"