Douglas Murray drops bombshells during discussion of Western reparations and heirloom grievances: 'Some of us are simply a bit bored of hearing people ripping at closed wounds'

Spectator columnist and author Douglas Murray recently dropped brass tacks on his fellow "Piers Morgan Uncensored" panelists, denouncing the ongoing efforts by opportunistic ideologues to simultaneously extort Western nations over the crimes of the long dead and ignore the cold reality of universal guilt.

Murray stressed that people no longer want to be enmired in divisive and destabilizing debates about historically remote grievances, particularly not when victimhood can invoked by anybody willing to look back far enough.

"Some of us are simply a bit bored of hearing people ripping at closed wounds and then crying about their hurt or their presumed hurt, because everybody could do this," said Murray. "Where would you end if you did that? The answer is that you couldn't end, because nobody is alive who has actually suffered the hurt, and nobody is alive who did the wrong."

"If we were to play this fairly, we would at least look at all of the countries around the world that engaged in the slave trade who are simply not interested in any form of reparations," continued Murray.

The Ottoman Empire, which has been whittled down to the Republic of Turkey, was among the guilty parties Murray cited as presently having no interest in assuming blame or responsibility for its history of violence, genocide, and slavery.

He also cited "all the Arab countries who not just traded far more slaves and across the Atlantic but castrated all the men so that there wouldn't be any more African slaves after them. They worked them to the bone. I see no interest across Africa in paying reparations for selling their brother and sister Africans into slavery or for working them to the bone to the present day. ... There is slavery across Africa today. In fact, there are more slaves in the world today than there were at the height of the transatlantic slave trade."

According to a September 2022 U.N. report, nearly "50 million people were living in modern slavery: 28 million in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriages."

Extra to shared guilt, Murray noted that those presently fitted up as antagonists in today's "grievance competition" could similarly claim victimhood, as "a million Europeans were stolen by North Africans over the course of decades of the North African Barbary pirate slave trade."

The BBC indicated that in the first half of the 1600s, "Barbary corsairs — pirates from the Barbary Coast of North Africa, authorised by their governments to attack the shipping of Christian countries — ranged all around Britain's shores. In their lanteen-rigged xebecs (a type of ship) and oared galleys, they grabbed ships and sailors, and sold the sailors into slavery."

Between 1530 and 1780, as many as 1,250,000 Christian slaves were reportedly taken and held in Tripoli, Tunis, and various Moroccan towns, but predominantly in Algiers.

Murray's comments on Morgan's show echo those made in his 2022 book, "The War on the West," wherein he defended America and the rest of the Western world from various blood libels and acontextual accusations.

"The forgotten history of slavery, like colonialism, is not the history of what the West got wrong but the history of what the West got right," he wrote, noting that long after the English-speaking world banned slavery, various nations continued trafficking in human beings — including Middle Eastern and African nations where the slave trade survives today.

On the issue of reparations, Murray highlighted how the West's abolition of slavery and its global efforts to enforce that decision were not without significant cost, both in terms of blood and gold.

Just in the case of British abolitionism, "Between 1808 and 1860, the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 African slaves. They also lost a huge number of personnel themselves. More than 1,500 men of the Royal Navy were killed in action during this period."

Even if equivalencies could be struck and balances owed properly determined, Murray pointed out the grievance competition would still have no end.

"If America were to find a way to pay reparations today, why would the same demands not rearise two centuries later, as they have done in relation to Britain? If the great reparations machine were to pour out money, why should it be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?" he asked.

"We appear to be in the process of killing the goose that has laid some very golden eggs," Murray suggested in his book.

On Piers Morgan's show, he suggested that the very nations responsible for those "golden eggs" are the same "put through this struggle session."

"Britain, like America and France, are the most desired destinations for migrants worldwide and have been for centuries," he added. "It's not because we're racist but because we're better. It's because we're good. It's because when we see racism, we actually call it out and recognize it as a sin. Try finding that across Africa. Try finding that across the Middle East or in China. Nobody would hear."

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