A country that believes it has never done any wrong is a country that could do wrong at any time. But a country that believes it has only done wrong,… - Douglas Murray

In the modern interest in slavery, very little attention is paid to the fact between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries Barbary pirates (that is, Muslim pirates mainly from North Africa) carried out constant raids not just on European ships but against coastal towns and cities across Europe... The people captured — all white Europeans — would then be either used for ransom or sold into slavery. Over the years during which the Barbary pirates operated, it is believed that they stole as many as one and a quarter million Europeans from their homes. Of course, there is no movement of reparations for those people or their descendants, and no European has seriously suggested trying to find out where any bill for compensation should be sent.

If somebody has the competency to do something, and the desire to do something, then nothing about their race, sex or sexual orientation should hold them back. But minimizing difference is not the same as pretending difference does not exist. To assume that sex, sexuality and skin colour mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything will be fatal.

Guilt, as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner has diagnosed it in his book La Tyrannie de la pénitence, has become a moral intoxicant in Western Europe. People imbibe it because they like it: they get high on it.