ONE-SIDED REPARATIONS: If it were Ever the Other way Round...

By YouveBeenGreeked | Some Random Thoughts. | 3 Mar 2025

There's often a large call in many western countries today for reparations to be paid to... well, vague, non-western countries I guess because of actions committed by our ancestors. The narrative seems to be that European and American history is brimmed full with slavery, imperialism, crusades, colonialism, xenophobia, racism, sexism, ismism and other isms. Many people even seem to believe that slavery began in 1619. In fact, up to a point, when you googled "when did slavery begin?", the first results you'd get would be directly related to slavery in America beginning with the founding of Jamestown in 1619. And a lot of politicians even rely on the votes of people because of reparations, either because they're White and feel guilty, or because they're not and are being promised free money, so if you didn't vote for them then you were either unapologetically racist or a race traitor - shame, guilt and, in the end, threats got many into positions of power via narrative.

The fundamental issue with this is simple: Whites of today have never, do not and will never own slaves, and non-Whites of today have never, are not and will never be slaves.

It's a very pagan-like way of thinking to say that one person should be punished because of the actions of someone - who may or may not be related to them, but who's skin pigmentation was pretty similar - who lived about three-hundred years ago. It's like some kind of Medieval feud in a film, where some general isn't trusted to lead an army because their grandfather lost that battle that one time. It treats people as collectives to lump together in lazy categories - usually doing so with a socio-political agenda in mind - because mentally grouping people who share one characteristic together is easier and often more humbling than treating people as individuals.

Now hopefully, this is all obvious to anyone - treating people as individuals and not making past or present judgements on someone for immutable characteristics. But what's even more absurd about this is that those negative aspects of a people's past is not unique to Europe, White people and/or the West. In fact, when you scan through world history, it wasn't only as common elsewhere, but also happened for much longer and under harsher conditions, and Europeans were often on the receiving end as well. It's a universal that's affected the world, and asking one group for reparations won't solve anything if it goes both and all ways. Like I say, all of these civilisational negatives are found everywhere throughout human history, and with that in mind, here's a quick time lapse:

1. SLAVERY IS OLDER THAN CIVILISATION - The notion of capturing another person from a rival tribe and making them do work for you in exchange for minimal food to keep them alive for work is much older than the notion of agriculture, walled settlements and governments. Anyone, no matter how small a group they are a part of, saying that Europeans invented slavery is missing this key issue that spans tens of thousands of years.

2. STATE SLAVERY BEGAN IN AFRICA - Yes, the first state in world history to introduce slavery into its laws and institutions was an African nation. Famously: Egypt. Now this isn't to say that the idea of state-enforced slavery wouldn't've emerged in other parts of the world without the Ancient Egyptians, but it's absolutely worth noting.

3. THE LONGEST RUNNING SLAVE TRADE - To a lot of people, the Atlantic Triangle's roughly 250 year span is an extremely long period. But compared to other slave trades, it's mediocre at best. In fact, the longest running slave trade in human history was the Korean slave trade, lasting from the first century AD up until the late Joseon period in 1894.

4. PRE-COLONIALIST EUROPE - Notably, ancient Greek and Roman society was run by slaves; Athens used slaves in every aspect of their society and Spartans were outnumbered by their slave population by as much as five-to-one, and Roman Italy famously was one-third slaves - that's two million slaves serving four million Romans. Despite Greeks and Romans knowing of steam power, there's an argument stating that Greece and Rome never had an industrial revolution simply because they had already invested so heavily in slavery. But Rome wasn't a unique world power if its time: Parthian and Sassanid Persia lay to the East, the Kushites dominated central Asia with their empire, Mauryan India dominated the subcontinent, and the Han Chinese state dealt in slaves too. And in fact, the word "slave" comes from the mass enslavement of Slavic peoples (Russians, Ukrainians and Poles today are Slavic) into these and other empires of antiquity and the Middle Ages.

5. THE BIBLE IS ANTI-SLAVERY - Yes, there are verses in the Bible telling readers how to treat their slaves as decently as possible, and many interpret this as evidence that the Bible is a pro-slavery document, further stating that the West was built entirely on slavery. Firstly though, Christianity is not a Western religion, but a WORLD religion, emerging from the Middle East. Secondly, what matters most is context: the Bible was written for people from a time where slavery was as normal to them as central heating and electricity is to us; we expect it to work for us all the time on command and get frustrated when it doesn't. The truth is that the Bible was written for these types of people in a world run by slavery, so outright saying to just free slaves, to put it one way, would not have gone down well with the audience of the time.

6. THE ISLAMIC CALIPHATES - Christianity spread throughout the Near East and into Africa then Europe via peaceful conversion, especially as the majority of Christians in those regions were heavily persecuted by the Romans. As soon as Islam emerged in Arabia in the early 7th century, it expanded into these regions by the sword, enslaving non-believers and non-converters or imposing head taxes on them. The result by only a hundred year's time was an unbroken slave trade that lasted for at least seven-hundred years, expanding from the Iberian and African coasts of the Atlantic to the borders of the Indian subcontinent. The total death toll in Africa alone was 112 million Africans, from 150 million Africans being enslaved overall, exponentially more than the Atlantic Triangle. Despite how many Blacks were enslaved in the Atlantic Triangle, Blacks remain a large minority in the West today, which can't be said of in Arabia or the Near East; boys as young as eight years old were castrated and often left to die so that their populations remained low, with life expectancy being anywhere from 1 in 10 to 1 in 30, while young girls were made to be concubines.

Europeans were certainly not sparred, with 1.5 million European and American seamen alone being enslaved between 1530 and 1780 alone. The Mediterranean coastlines of Spain and France were deemed uninhabitable for centuries, with European castles being born solely out of a necessity for allowing those living by the coast to quickly retreat to fortified coastal settlements, with many Italian and Spanish coastlines being abandoned almost entirely. Thousands of English, French and Spanish ships were lost to Islamic and Barbary pirates over the centuries, European fishing industries were left in ruins, and many cities, once Christian, were taken over permanently. Four of the Five major centres of Christianity were taken over by Islamic forces: Antioch (Turkey), Jerusalem (Israel) and Alexandria (Egypt) were all conquered by the early 7th century AD, with one of the remaining two - Constantinople - famously being taken in 1453 by the Ottoman Empire, ending the Roman Empire, while the city of Rome itself being the last of the five major Christian centres to remain, although it too has been raided and looted by Islamic forces over the years.

(Children from Africa and Europe were not sparred...)

7. THE CRUSADES - Many who cite the Crusades as reason that reparations should be paid don't know anything about them. They know some European powers travelled with knights to the Middle East to fight Muslims, but that's about it, and not only is it vague as all Hell, but isn't entirely correct. They don't even know how many Crusades there were, when they took place, which Crusade was fought against who, and why they even started to begin with. In truth, the First Crusade of 1095 was a delayed response to what had at that point been over 450 years of Muslim expansion and enslavement. The Middle East's Crusades would last until 1272, spanning just under 200 years, a minute timespan compared to the Muslim Slave Trade, which still lasts in forms today. In fact, many crusades were called against other Christian states, including the infamous Fourth Crusade, which while initially targeting Egypt, soon became an attack against the Roman capital of Constantinople, taking and sacking the Holy City in 1204 and breaking the empire in pieces between the crusading states.

8. EUROPEAN COLONIALISM - Essentially, this period lasts from 1415 to 1999, from the beginning of the first European colonial power to the end of the last. (Coincidentally, both of these are attributed to the Portuguese Empire). But the Atlantic Triangle lasted from 1519 to 1815, dominated in large part by Spain and Portugal. In fact, when it ended, slavery in the Muslim world only increased; the notion that Europeans got a hold of their slaves by capturing them or invading other states is in stark contrast to the truth, which is that Europeans were in dealings with local American and African kings, chiefs and leaders - ruling states who viewed slavery as a fundamental part of their institutions and one they would never wish to end - to sell off their own people, and this only started as a result of so many slaves under Muslim rule being so prominent throughout Africa. Many of the areas that Europeans purchased their slaves from simply went back into Muslim dealer's hands instead once European slavery ended.

9. EUROPEAN SLAVERY WAS NOT ALL WHITE ON BLACK - The common picture with the Atlantic Triangle is one of Whites enslaving Blacks, and anything else being incorrect. In truth: 1/2 of all slaves in the Triangle were WHITE, the majority of these being IRISH. The Irish made up the largest ethnic group in the Triangle, yet no one calls for reparations for the Irish. The other common notion is that pretty much every White European / American today should be ashamed of their past, because they are all the descendants of slave holders. In truth: in the US overall, at the height of the US's involvement in the trade, 1.4% of Whites owned slaves, 6% in the Southern states. Now that's still a lot of people overall, however in comparison to freed Blacks who owned slaves? That figure is 28%; in 1830, one town in Charleston USA had 407 Black slave owners alone.

10. EUROPEANS ENDED SLAVERY - This is the biggest point that needs making: while the West is highly criticised for its involvement in slavery, despite it being a near-eternal universal, it was Britain and the West that ENDED the practice on a global scale once and for all. In 1787, William Wilberforce was quoted as saying,

God Almighty had set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the Reformation of society.

He went on to dedicate his years as an MP to ending the slave trade, with Britain experiencing a hold-up in their attempts thanks to the war in Europe against Napoleon between 1803 and 1815:

In 1807, Britain finally voted 283 to 16 to abolish slavery
In 1809, the UK government mobilised the British navy to search ships - British or foreign - for slaves to free
The following year, parliament decreed slavery as a felony punishable by 14 years of hard labour
In 1825, a bill was passed to make slavery punishable by death (so here's 200 years to THAT, I guess!)
In 1833, slavery was abolished altogether by parliament, followed 3 days later by Wilberforce's death. By this point, 700,000 British slaves had been freed, and Wilberforce had spent 59 years combatting slavery, stating in his last years,

Thank God that I’ve lived to witness that day in which England is willing to give £20 million sterling for the abolition of slavery!

11. MODERN SLAVERY - It wouldn't be until 1942, 1962, 1968, 1976 and 1980 that Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Peru, India and Mauritania respectively made slavery illegal. In fact, today, slavery is bigger than ever before, with more slaves existing right now than at any other point in human history - over 46 million in fact, over 18 million of which are in India alone. China still has internment camps that affect over 5 million souls, North Korea is keeping 2.6 million people in slavery, another 2.3 million in Pakistan, and another 2 million in Indonesia. Per 100,000 people in North Korea, 104.6 are slaves, and it's 90.3 in Eritrea. Over a dozen states still have slavery as a common part of life today, including Uzkekistan and Libya, which has had open-air slave markets since the overthrow of Gadaffi...

... The point I'm trying to make is not that these states should be made to be ashamed of their identities, pasts or cultures like we see often in the West today. It's about those who do do this applying the same laws to the rest of the world if that's the game they want to play, which they'd never do because that would put them in danger, and it's a lot easier to criticise a developed nation that already agrees with your stance on slavery. My point is that reparations for past wrong-doings should not be a thing - you don't improve the present and future by getting back at people long-dead and putting innocent, uninvolved people of today at a disadvantage for something they had no part in, and never would if given the choice. If we want to move forward as a species and a civilisation... yes, learn from and acknowledge your nation's past, but learn about it from other countries as well.

Obtain a balanced view, don't generalise people because of their skin colour, treat people as individuals and not part of groups, and attempt to move forward despite a universally horrible history. The past was often oppressive - don't be one who seeks to hold us back further.

Anyway, stop reading, go outside.

CIAO.