If it is agreed that everybody did bad things in the past, then it is possible to move on and even to move beyond it. Who wants to litigate a past in… - Douglas Murray

It is clear that some unfair ledger has been created, one in which the West is treated by one set of standards and the rest of the world by another. A ledger in which it seems that the West can do no right and the rest of the world can do no wrong. Or do wrong only because we in the West made them do it.

Racism is not the sole lens through which our societies can be understood, and yet it is increasingly the only lens used. Everything in the past is seen as racist, and so everything in the past is tainted. Though, once again, only in the Western past, thanks to the radical racial lenses that have been laid over everything. Terrible racism exists at present across Africa, expressed by black Africans against other black Africans. The Middle East and the Indian subcontinent are rife with racism. Travel anywhere in the Middle East — even to the ‘progressive’ Gulf States — and you will see a modern caste system at work. There are the ‘higher class’ racial groups who run these societies and benefit from them. And then there are the unprotected foreign workers flown in to work for them as an imported labour class. These people are looked down upon, mistreated, and even disposed of as though their lives were worthless. And in the world’s second most populated country, as anyone who has travelled through India will know, a caste system remains in vivid and appalling operation. This still goes all the way to regarding certain groups of people as ‘untouchable’ for no reason but an accident of birth. It is a sickening system of prejudice, and it is very much alive. Yet we hear very little about this. Instead, the world gets only a daily report on how the countries in the world that by any measure have the least racism, and where racism is most abhorred, are the homes of racism.

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.