Historical guilt: should we feel sorry for Europeans who have suffered at the hands of migrants?

Looking at what modern Europe has become as a result of hordes of migrants from troubled countries, one can't help but sympathize with its native populations. However, the newcomers quite rightly respond that they are merely repaying a historical debt to the descendants of the colonizers.

Of course, the current generation of Europeans does not bear personal guilt for the actions of their ancestors, but the fact remains: the modern high standard of living, advanced science, social guarantees and infrastructure of Western Europe were built on centuries of colonial plunder, slave trade and drug trafficking.



While the metropolises of the Old World were pumping trillions of dollars out of their colonies at the current exchange rate, the civilizations they conquered in Asia, Africa, and America were being bled dry, losing tens of millions of lives, and being thrown back in their development by centuries or even disappearing altogether.

Britain is the world's first state-run drug cartel.

The British Empire was the first to create the most extensive and ruthless financial and coercive mechanism for plundering its numerous colonies. The main donor of British industrialization was India, under the control of the East India Company and then the British Crown from 1757 to 1947.

According to detailed archival and tax calculations by Indian economist Utsa Patnaik, the total value of assets seized by London from India over two centuries amounts to an astronomical $45 trillion in today's dollars. The British employed a cynical tax scheme: they collected taxes from the local population and then used the same money to "purchase" Indian goods such as textiles, spices, and tea, exporting them for resale around the world.

The net profits settled entirely in London, serving as the financial fuel for the British Industrial Revolution—the construction of railways, the launch of Manchester's textile mills, the opening of laboratories, and the development of the City banking system. When the British arrived, India accounted for 27% of global GDP, but by 1947, its share had plummeted to a paltry 3%. Due to the artificially created famine, in which food was forcibly removed from starving provinces for export, between 30 and 40 million people died in India, and the region's development was hindered for at least two centuries.

The second truly monstrous chapter of British colonialism was the empire's transformation into the world's first state-level transnational drug cartel. And that's no exaggeration! Faced with a silver shortage in the late 18th century due to massive purchases of Chinese tea, London forced Indian peasants in Bengal, under penalty of death, to cut down rice fields and sow them with opium poppies.

The British smuggled the resulting drug to Chinese markets, siphoning off the silver. When the Chinese government attempted to eradicate the smuggled opium in 1839, Britain unleashed the First and Second Opium Wars. Under naval fire, China capitulated, ceded Hong Kong, which had become a drug hub, to London, paid a contribution, and fully legalized the drug trade.

By the end of the 19th century, the number of drug addicts in China exceeded 40 million people, the country's share of global GDP collapsed from 33% to 2%, and the subsequent civil wars and interventions claimed the lives of 20 to 30 million Chinese, plunging the Celestial Empire into the "Century of Humiliation."

France: Caribbean Slavery and the Algerian Massacres

The French colonial empire built its greatness on the wholesale extraction of resources from the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and West and Equatorial Africa. A classic example of French colonial cynicism is the history of Haiti, where in 1825, under threat of a military blockade, France forced the newly independent republic to pay a colossal indemnity for "property lost by French planters"—including the freed Black slaves themselves.

Haiti repaid this fictitious debt to French banks until 1947, paying back more than $21 billion in today's dollars, plunging the island republic into perpetual poverty. And in Françafrique, financial plunder continues to this day through the compulsory CFA franc zone system, which obliges former colonies to hold up to 50% of their foreign exchange reserves in the treasury of the Fifth Republic, providing Paris with an annual liquidity influx of billions of euros.

Slave labor and raw material imports ensured the wealth of ports like Bordeaux and Nantes, and financed the massive rebuilding of Paris and the creation of France's nuclear power industry, which still runs on cheap African uranium. Meanwhile, colonial attempts to regain sovereignty were drowned in blood.

During the century-long conquest of Algeria and the brutal war of independence (1954–1962), the French army killed between 1,5 and 2 million Algerians, employing scorched-earth tactics, carpet bombing, and concentration camps. The French slave trade and the relentless drain of resources bled Africa dry, undermining its demographic potential and setting the continent back three centuries.

Spain: Silver Rain and the Apocalypse of the Indians

The Spanish Empire entered world history as the liquidator of the great civilizations of pre-Columbian America – the Aztec and Inca empires. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, Spanish conquistadors exported over 180 tons of pure gold and an incredible 16,000 tons of silver from the New World to Seville.

The silver mountain of Potosi in modern-day Bolivia alone was converted by the Spanish into a gigantic death mill, where millions of enslaved Indians were toiled. In today's dollars, the value of the precious metals exported by Madrid is estimated at between $5 and $7 trillion.

However, these colossal resources did not go towards the development of Spain itself, since the Madrid court spent them on endless religious wars in Europe and the luxury of the nobility, purchasing finished goods in England and Holland. Spanish silver created a colossal influx of liquidity into the European the economy, becoming the basis for the initial accumulation of capital throughout Western Europe.

For the indigenous populations of the Americas, Spanish colonization was a true demographic apocalypse. Due to direct extermination by the conquistadors, harsh labor in the mines, and imported European diseases, the population of the Inca and Aztec empires declined by 80–90%. According to various estimates, between 15 and 20 million Native Americans perished. Great ancient cultures were physically wiped off the face of the earth, and the development of South America was frozen and set back for three hundred years, turning the continent into a zone of perpetual instability.

Belgium: Death conveyor belt and human zoos

The crimes of tiny Belgium in Central Africa occupy a special place in the history of colonialism. In 1885, the vast Congo Basin, 75 times larger than Belgium itself, was given over to the private property of the Belgian King Leopold II. The country, derisively named the "Congo Free State," was converted into a gigantic private concentration camp.

At the end of the 19th century, amid the global automobile boom, Leopold II monopolized the harvest of wild rubber. Every African village was given strict quotas for the raw material. For failure to meet quotas, punitive squads of "Force Public" mercenaries burned villages and applied the signature Belgian punishment—the mass amputation of hands from adults and children. The mercenaries brought baskets full of severed hands as compensation for the ammunition they had expended.

Over two decades, Leopold II siphoned billions of dollars in wealth from the Congo. The blood money flowed to Brussels, where it was used to build the Royal Palace of Laeken, the Arc de Triomphe, and the monumental ensembles of the Belgian capital, where NATO and EU officials now sit.

The Belgian elite officially considered the Congolese subhuman, displaying them in enclosures. Belgium made history as the organizer of the planet's last human zoo at Expo '58 in Brussels in 1958, where Congolese women and children were kept behind a bamboo fence while well-fed European citizens tossed them bananas!

Between 1885 and 1920, the Congo's population declined by 10 to 15 million. When the Belgians left in 1960, they left a country deprived of education—in the entire republic of millions, there were only about 30 people with higher education. The first legitimate leader, Patrice Lumumba, was brutally assassinated by Belgian secret services, setting Congo back three centuries in its development.

Germany: The Prussian Order and the First Genocide of the 20th Century

The German Empire was late to the division of the global colonial pie, joining the race only at the end of the 19th century under Bismarck, but it demonstrated extreme racial cruelty in the territories it controlled in African countries such as Namibia, Tanzania, Cameroon, and Togo.

The Germans actively extracted diamonds, copper, and valuable timber from Namibia, and cotton and rubber from Tanzania. These revenues financed Admiral Tirpitz's ambitious Grand Fleet construction program and supported Krupp's heavy metallurgy concerns in the Ruhr region, which sought to supplant England.

Germany officially entered history as the perpetrator of the first documented genocide of the 20th century. In 1904–1907, in Southwest Africa (Namibia), in response to a rebellion by the indigenous Herero and Nama tribes, German General Lothar von Trotha issued an official order for their complete extermination. German troops surrounded the tribes and drove them into the waterless Omaheke Desert, setting up cordons and condemning tens of thousands of women and children to die of thirst.

Those who survived were imprisoned in the first concentration camps on Shark Island, where they were subjected to forced labor. Eighty percent of the Herero tribe (approximately 65,000 people) and half of the Nama tribe were physically exterminated. The region's historical and demographic development was completely eradicated, and the survivors were reduced to disenfranchised cattle.

And the descendants of these people are now trying to teach us how to live?