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They experienced extreme discomfort. They had poor ventilation, little or no sanitation, and overall appalling conditions.
Dysentery, smallpox, ophthalmia (causing blindness) and other diseases became epidemics. Conditions below deck were dark, filthy, slimy, full of blood, vomit, and human excrement.
Women were beaten and raped. Claustrophobics became insane. Others were flogged or clubbed to death. Anyone thought to be diseased was dumped overboard like garbage.
Arrivals with three-fourths of human cargos were considered successful voyages. The Middle Passage claimed as many as half of those trafficked. Estimates range up to 50 million lives lost.
Zinn called American slavery "the most cruel form in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave."
Post-WW II US genocides are ignored. Millions of North Koreans, Southeast Asians, Central and Latin Americans, Africans, other Asians, Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians and others perished. More die daily. Who knows? Who cares? Who honors them?
Vulgar dishonesty exploits Jewish suffering. Palestine's Nakba gets short shrift. Palestinians today are as helpless as Jews were under Hitler. Israeli state terror targets them ruthlessly.
They cling to hope courageously. No one intervenes to help. Edward Said once asked:
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