Quite often, Western European countries (Spain, Portugal, France, etc.) are accused of building their economy via the slave trade in the Early modern era. All this is presented as the work of the "evil European man", whose descendants today have a culture of guilt...

...shoved down their throats. But, are those accusations correct? Well, let's find out!

I) West European economies were NOT built over slavery and/or the slave trade. In most of the countries, people did not own slaves and slaves were not employed in any sort of...

... state-sponsored works. Slavery existed only in colonies, not in Europe per se.

II) Slave-capturing campaigns were NOT launched by any state, but by pirates and privateers.

III)The money that West European states spent into building the colonies far exceed any...

... financial gain made from the colonies.

IV)The institution that encouraged expeditions into the "new world" and later in Africa was the (((catholic church))). All the "spanish" (in reality, moors and jews who had nominally been converted to christianity) conquistadors...

... had priests beside them and churches and monasteries were immediately built when a land was annexed/subdued by the conquistadors. Later, when Protestants also started colonizing, protestant priests encouraged the elimination of indigenous peoples, because of their...

... refusal to accept christianity.

V)White (id est of European descent) people were not the majority of slaveholders in the New World. The first slaveholder was Anthony Johnson, a free black. Furthermore, slavery in the Americas became race-based only in the last decades...

... before its abolition. Most of the so-called "white" slaveholders were jewish and, in the American Civil War, the side of the slaveholders (confederacy) had a jewish Secretary of foreign affairs (Judah P. Benjamin) and the biggest jewish cemetery in the world.

VI)Many of the lands that were colonized had also a penchant of engaging in piracy. For example, Berber piracy was a factor from the Middle Ages and lasted until the 19th century, when France took Algiers in order to stop the enslavement of millions of Europeans...

... Arab slave traders had reached even Iceland. Practically, it's uncountable how many Europeans ended up in Algiers as slaves, but judging from the time frame and the geographical scope, they surely exceed four millions...

VII)If there was a state that based...

...its economy of slave trade and slavery itself, that was the Crimean khanate, itself a vassal state of the Ottoman empire. From the early 1500s until 1783, at least 20000 people were sold annually as slaves in Kaffa alone. Tatar slave raiding was even more harmful...

...than the onslaughts of the Golden Horde. And, as you can guess, a very privileged caste in the Crimean khanate were the Karaites (jews who spoke a Turkic dialect). The population of Crimea consisted of 75% enslaved population, so the millions being sold were only...

...a fraction of those captured, since slaves from Poland, Lithuania and other European countries were used as chattel for agriculture. One can only estimate a death toll for them, but I guess that since, unlike colonial law, Tatar law did not forbid killing or maiming...

...of slaves without reason, then we can say that it wasn't lower than the death rate in southern plantations.

IX)Even if those points I made are passed by, I shall remind you that, when "white" slave traders passed by Africa, African chieftains often sold their own people...

...to the foreigners. I don't know if this happened when Arab traders also passed by, but we shouldn't forget that Islamic states in Africa were also very unkind to the indigenous peoples. The most surprising thing is that there is no talk of the "evil Arab man" and...

...no one speaks of "Turkish guilt". And, if you ever mention the role of (((a specific Middle-eastern tribe))) in this business, you are an "apologist of crimes against humanity".

The tl;dr version: the whole talk of "white guilt" is another lie-propaganda by...

...the well-known enemy. Any time you are faced with this particular lie-propaganda, feel free to reply using what you learned here.

NB:pics are used for educational purposes. Me using them doesn't mean I endorse what they show.

Thanks for reading.

Dixi.