Douglas Murray Shreds Concept of Reparations: 'The More Virtuous Countries Are Represented As the Worst'
Reparations-mania has reached the point where lawmakers in a state which never had slavery — California — have proposed taking money from people who never owned slaves and giving it to people who never were slaves. And while that’s the closest this concept has come to becoming law, it’s certainly become a totemic issue to the left, both here and in other Western nations.
British author and conservative commentator Douglas Murray thinks it’s rubbish. Appearing on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” on Tuesday, Murray tore into the “grievance competition” reparations campaigners are engaging in, noting that most activists don’t look to every nation involved in the slave trade for reparations and instead create a narrative where “the more virtuous countries are represented as the worst countries.”
While the move for reparations isn’t quite as loud in the United Kingdom as it is in the U.S., it’s still a major issue on the political left. According to the U.K. Guardian, the issue took up headlines earlier this year when members of an aristocratic family traveled to the Caribbean nation of Grenada in March to apologize for their role in the slave trade and called for “the British government to enter into meaningful negotiations with the governments of the Caribbean in order to make appropriate reparations.”
Shortly thereafter, prominent Labour MP Clive Lewis said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak should enter negotiations with Caribbean leaders on reparations, saying the matter wasn’t just the obsession of “so-called woke extremists.” In April, King Charles III said he supported research into any ties the British monarchy might have with the slave trade; in a speech last year, before he was monarch, the Guardian noted he told leaders of the U.K.-led Commonwealth of Nations that “I cannot describe the depths of my personal sorrow at the suffering of so many, as I continue to deepen my own understanding of slavery’s enduring impact.”
“That process has continued with vigour and determination since His Majesty’s accession. Historic Royal Palaces is a partner in an independent research project, which began in October last year, that is exploring, among other issues, the links between the British monarchy and the transatlantic slave trade during the late 17th and 18th centuries,” Buckingham Palace said in a statement.
Yet, King Charles has never owned a slave. Neither has MP Lewis or PM Sunak. The same can be said for every leftist wearing the hair shirt of reparations-talk in the West.
But, as Murray pointed out in his appearance on Morgan’s program, it’s hardly just the West that should be looking at its role in the “grievance competition” reparations-boosters want to engage in — especially as, in the U.K., “all of this was addressed two centuries ago.” (The Slavery Abolition Act was passed in U.K. parliament in 1833.)
“Everything has consequences. All history has consequences and ramifications,” Murray said. “But you know, 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.
“The Ottoman empire, 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,” Murray noted. “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,” Murray continued, noting that “there are more slaves in the world today than there were at the height of the transatlantic slave trade.”
According to CNN, a report by non-governmental anti-slavery organization Walk Free estimates there are roughly 50 million enslaved people in 2023. Black historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., meanwhile, places estimates of the number of blacks transported from Africa via the transatlantic slave trade over a more than 300-year period at roughly 12.5 million.
“Some of us are simply a bit bored of hearing people ripping up closed wounds and then crying about their hurt, or their presumed hurt, because everybody could do this,” Murray continued, noting that “a million Europeans were stolen by North Africans over the course of decades of the North African Barbary pirates slave trade.
“Where would you end if you did that? The answer is, you couldn’t end, because nobody is alive who has actually suffered the hurt.”
“Some of us are simply a bit bored of hearing people ripping at closed wounds and then crying about their presumed hurt.”
Douglas Murray says it’s time to move on from what happened hundreds of years ago instead of demanding reparations.@DouglasKMurray | @piersmorgan | #PMU pic.twitter.com/EW3tA054bh
— Piers Morgan Uncensored (@PiersUncensored) July 4, 2023
Murray had one other salient argument to make: “It’s always the countries that people want to come to who are put through this struggle session.
“Britain — like America and France — are among the most desired destinations for migrants worldwide and have been for centuries. Why is that? It’s not because we’re racist. … It’s because we’re good,” he continued. “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 … so what we have is a situation where the more virtuous countries are presented as the worst countries.
“It’s sick, and most of us are tired of it.”
This is what always gets missed in the grievance Olympics: It’s the nations that sacrificed the most and have done the most to rectify wrongs committed centuries ago that are being asked to pay, not those who refuse to own up to past or present wrongs.
Those who are against the concept of reparations — particularly if they’re white — are asked to politely refrain from stating their opinion too strongly when the matter comes up. It’s not just because of privilege or because one doesn’t want to offend delicate woke sensibilities. It’s because the very idea of transferring wealth based on race and a historical iniquity that hasn’t existed in the United States for over 150 years and the British empire for almost 200 doesn’t hold up well under any kind of serious scrutiny.
If one needs more evidence, perhaps we should go back to a time not so long ago when Don Lemon was a man still in the employ of CNN and still in the business of witless opinion-making. Upon King Charles’ ascent to the throne, he asked royal commentator Hilary Fordwich about “those who are asking for reparations for colonialism … some people want to be paid back. Members of the public are wondering, ‘Why are we suffering when you have all of this vast wealth?’ Those are legitimate concerns.”
This is what happened next:
CNN’s @DonLemon tells royal commentator Hilary Fordwich the royal family should pay reparations — immediately regrets it pic.twitter.com/LotCfBoAym
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 20, 2022
And this isn’t just because this is Don Lemon, the guy who once suggested Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 might have disappeared into a black hole. It’s that this logic only appeals to the kind of people who might entertain the idea that MH370 disappeared into a black hole because it’s simply absurd.
The nations that have given the most to put an end to the slave trade are then asked to turn around and give more to ameliorate the damage done by the slave trade. All others are to be ignored. Which is to say that this isn’t about the slave trade at all, but about weakening the moral standing of the West by asking for virtue-signaling ransom money.
But, by the very act of asking for that ransom money, the left puts the lie to the idea that nations like the U.S. and the U.K. are iniquitous and racist — because those are some of the few places that engaged in the transatlantic slave trade where this request would even be seriously entertained. The rest of the apparatus that enabled this evil — and the countries that still benefit from it today — would, and do, laugh it off. It is, as Murray put it, “a situation where the more virtuous countries are presented as the worst countries.”
And yes, we’re getting tired of it.
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