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That isnt my experience. Colonialism is frequently presented as one/all of.
Yes it was extractive, but still more competent than the natives.
Yeah, but we civilized them.
They killed themselves in civil wars after we left anyway.
Worst of all, even in 2025, Colonial powers have little remorse for their actions.
France still lays claim to the 150 million in Haitian ransom. The British refuse to accept blame imposed on Churchill for the Bengal famine. The portugese inquistion was famous for grotesque torture in Goa. The Spanish straight up genocided the entire now-world despite knowing it was their germs causing it. Not many apologies to go around.
Yes, they werent as effective as communists or nazis at killing. And they werent as comically cruel as imperial japan. But, these were still fairly fucked up periods for the colonized nations. IMO, Pretty close to slavery.
[citation needed]
The first microscopes capable of seeing "animalcules" date back to 1674, and as late as ~1850 we still have people like John Snow and Ignaz Semmelweis still fighting an uphill battle with their controversial theories of "cholera can spread in drinking water" and "doctors should wash their hands in between examining corpses and delivering babies".
Back in the 1500s understanding of disease was so bad that we still don't even know which diseases were responsible for the majority of New World deaths. The earliest massive plague was smallpox, but the dozen-odd plagues of "cocoliztli" are still named by that generic Nahuatl (Aztec) word for "pestilence" because nobody knows which of a half dozen candidate germs were the actual cause.
For that matter, some diseases spread so much faster than the conquerors who first transmitted them that we don't know how bad the death toll was! In hindsight we believe that a lot of European colonist reports of "gosh, look how beautiful this unspoiled wilderness is" in North America were from people describing recently-carefully-tended forests whose caretakers had just been devastated by epidemics.
This isn't to excuse any of the colonists' deliberate crimes, of course. After the rest of his Patuxet tribe had been killed by an epidemic, the proper way to treat Squanto should have been sympathy and charity, not abduction. Some of the colonized nations' treatment was "Pretty close to slavery", and some was literal "we'll take you to the slave market to sell now" slavery.
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I don't know where you grew up, what media you consume, or who you're talking to, but this is not my experience whatsoever. The first time I encountered anything like an opinion that colonialism wasn't an unalloyed evil was in spaces like this one. In school we spent a lot of time hammering home the point that colonialism (and American slavery) are the worst things that have ever happened excepting the holocaust.
'Decolonization' is a popular buzzword all over the place.
If you don't mind me asking, about what time period were you in school? I only got the slavery part and some whispers of "Columbus was evil actually", around 2002-2008ish. I first heard the word decolonization somewhere mid-late in the 2010s. Just trying to pin down an approximate timeline here.
90s and in California. Granted 'decolonization' wasn't a thing at the time but now the local school has it painted on their walls.
Figures it was California, though I'm surprised that this was in the 90s. I guess I shouldn't be though, just because I wasn't old enough to be aware of it doesn't mean it wasn't there. New York metropolitan area for me.
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Okay. Even granting all that, what now? Blame current-day Europeans for the sins of their forefathers? Spend all of eternity re-heating old grievances concerning harm done by dead people to other dead people? Try to conclusively settle that which is impossible to settle, so that the next generation can turn around and call a foul and claim that the settlement was in itself unjust, so our descendants can all have another go at the merry-go-round?
The colonial powers of yestercentury don't exist anymore. You can go and extract apologies from the current French, Spanish, British or Belgian governments and what the hell are those worth? The people in charge now and the people who live in those countries now aren't the same people who committed whatever crime happened in the colonial era. It's trivially easy for them to apologize; especially in the current environment of "colonialism bad, europeans bad, africans good" in which you can thus put yourself on the right side of history, no matter whether there is any substance to the subject matter of the apology.
And that's completely eliding the question of whether we need to also account for the good the colonial powers may have done if we already weigh up the bad. Let's say there was no good, for argument's sake.
What would you want us Germans to do? Kowtow even further to Israel? Bend over backwards a little more to accept our great German guilt?
Fuck. This is the Friday Fun Thread?
And even if you, for the sake of argument, assume Erbschuld is a thing, you're still a long way from actually establishing a connection to the current countries. As far as I know, my ancestry is entirely lowborn small-scale local farmers and workers, with a small admixture of lowborn inter-european wage immigrants. Let alone me, wtf do my ancestors have to do with what some aristocrats got up to? Why do we have to pay penance & higher taxes now to assuage your guilt?
Another fun aspect is - what about the former colonial powers the current countries of which have enjoyed significant immigration from their former colony countries? Have those immigrants now also assumed part of the guilt?
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