Agreed on many points. The fixation on North America in many ways downplays the sheer scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This was a massive movement of people from one hemisphere to another. It's on a different geographic scale from the Barbary slave trade.

My understanding is that Greeks are well aware of their history with Turkey and there isn't really a shortage of (especially right-wing) Greeks who make a big stink about it.

Maybe one million Europeans were kidnapped and sold into slavery . Many European states waged war or paid tribute to free those slaves.

Contrast that with 15 million African slaves who were moved across the ocean and had almost no chance of being freed. Add onto that, the transition from the trans-oceanic slave trade to the system of slaves being born into slavery generation after generation.

They're completely different.

Some pirates kidnapping Europeans and selling them into slavery is very, very different from Europeans kidnapping and transporting African slaves thousands of miles away to work on colonial plantations.

No one is downplaying the Barbary slave trade. But it's incomporable to the trans-Atlantic trade.