Perhaps if the heading of the thread had been modified slightly, as I've done above this post, we might have avoided going off in the direction that led greg to write:
It is a bit of a shame that so many are using this thread to try to imply that "other people" were worse slavers than the writer of the post.

Slavery does continue to exist in various forms - and not just in places far away, like Mauretania. Pretty obviously any repudiation of past involvement in the slave trade is hollow, unless it goes along with continued vigilance in abolishing it, and preventing it reawakening in some other form.

But there's no point in using that as a kind of diversionary tactic, a way of making the Atlantic slave trade seem less outrageous in retrospect. The point of any such comparison should be the other way round - to shock people into recognising that what is still happening today is a continuation of what the slave traders did then.

For an analogy: prejudice and oppression of gypsies continues in the modern world, but no one would argue on that basis that somehow the genocide carried out of gypsies by the Nazis was not all that out of the ordinary. Rather they'd point out that in one way such actions were a continuation of what the Nazis had done.