Reparations aren’t about justice. They’re an act of revenge.

For instance, today in America, we are no longer talking about a group of people who did a wrong paying compensation to people to whom a wrong was done. We are talking of a group of people who look like a group of people who did a wrong in the past making a vast wealth transfer to another group of people who look like a group of people to whom a wrong was done (black Americans).

And it is not just the unjustness of punishing people for wrongs done long before their time, but the madness that comes from even thinking that such a task is performable.

The transatlantic slave trade, like the far larger Arab slave trade of the same period, was only made possible because black Africans kidnapped and sold their brothers and sisters into slavery. We know this from the historical record and from the memoirs of those to whom this was done, like the remarkable 18th century slave Olaudah Equiano. Some people at the time, including Voltaire, noted that the only thing worse than the treatment of some Africans by some Europeans was the behavior of some Africans to their fellow Africans.