Who needs to pay reparations? Think again

Reparations: Who owes? A practical conundrum: Of course we can't re-write history, nor can we trace back ever instance where one group of people enslaved another group, e.g., African tribes enslaving other African tribes and selling them to countries/cultures...that eventually freed those slaves. That said, ask these questions: Would those descendants of those enslaved in Africa be in a better way had they never been enslaved? Instead of being enslaved, what if their captors simply killed them, or kept them as slaves for themselves, in areas where slavery persists today? Would they even have survived? Would they be willing to be re-settled back to the pace from where they were enslaved?

'Most of us are tired of it': Douglas Murray slams 'sick' calls for slavery reparations

Jul 5, 2023. Author Douglas Murray has slammed people who engage in a kind of "grievance competition" and cry about the "hurt" they've suffered as a result of slavery centuries ago. "All history has consequences and ramifications ... if we were to play this fairly we would at least look at all of the countries around the world that engaged in a slave trade who are simply not interested in any form of reparations," Mr Murray told Sky News Australia's Piers Morgan. Mr Murray claimed slavery persists in Africa today and that there are more slaves globally than during the height of the transatlantic slave trade. "So some of us are simply a bit bored of hearing people ripping at closed wounds and then crying about their hurt, or presumed hurt," he said. "Nobody is alive who has actually suffered the hurt and nobody is alive who did the wrong." He added it's always the "more virtuous" countries, such as the United Kingdom and United States, that are presented as "the worst countries" over this issue.

"It's sick and most of us are tired of it."

And who can forget Don Lemon being schooled on reparations when he thought he had posed a "gotcha" question to a well-prepared and deep-thinking Brit? Watch it here.

More here. And here, from Unherd, with key excerpts below:

As this debate has reignited, fed by activists and unopposed by enfeebled institutions, so others have — quite reasonably — begun to point out that slaving was not by any means only a British or American practice. In the 18th century – the period in which “Rule, Britannia!” was written — Barbary pirates from North Africa made frequent raids on British territory and British ships. Until the Royal Navy put the pirates out of business, historians have estimated that between one and one and a half million Europeans were seized by Moors and taken or sold into slavery.

Why is there no cause for reparations from the states that engaged in these practices? Why has there been no call for reparations from the descendants and families of those who were taken? And why has there been no sustained campaign to denigrate the history and cultural practises of the people now living in the countries of North Africa? If there is going to be an ongoing attack on societies which led the way in abolishing the slave trade ought there not to be an attack — surely of far greater ferocity — against those countries who gave up slave-trading most unwillingly?

To ask the question is to return to one of the most curious aspects of the modern Western masochistic mindset, the way in which more than one generation have been educated to believe that only their countries ever behaved reprehensibly in history. Were this not so it is impossible to explain why the ignorance over the actions of the Barbary pirates is so total. To take just one example, in the mid-sixteenth century Barbary pirates raided the island of Lampedusa and carried off its entire population into slavery. Why should the current inhabitants of that island not demand recompense from the current citizens of Algeria? Likewise with Baltimore in Ireland, whose entire population were enslaved in 1631.