Quote Originally Posted by Pannonian View Post
Why should it need to excuse it? It was par for the course for empires and kingdoms back then. No-one blames the African chiefs for enslaving African continentals in the first place, they only blame the British for transporting and using them. Hell, when we stopped the practice and started forcing slavers to release their captives (and who else in history did this before us?), we had to resettle them in out of the way places so they'd be safe from the original continental slavers. As for telling the Brits to suck it up, we do. We admit our history of using slaves and in inhumane conditions. We admitted that back in the 19th century. That's why we stopped doing it. To atone for our previous sins, we progressively stopped slavery, freed all remaining slaves in the empire, stopped other countries from transporting slaves, and resettled all those we'd captured from slavers wherever we could. All the later bits are being ignored, even though we were singularly principled in doing this at a time when slavery was the norm. Instead, we're asked to go back to the first sentence, "we used slaves in inhumane conditions", and ignore everything else.
No, you just have a tendency to come across as people who ignore the first sentence and talk about the latter part all the time.