sylla1

Even for radical apologetic standards, that couldn't be any more ridiculous & absurd to the Nth degree.

First, not even you can pretend to ignore that for your unilateral "consensus at the time" you are conveniently & olympically igoring the literally millions on the victim side; it could hardly be any problem even for you to find any amount of hard evidence on what they did unsurprisingly find "wrong" (to say the least) on all the colonialism business.

Not that all the minoritarian conquerors' side would have been as blindly apologetic as your last post either, not by a long shot, but for the sake of the analysis of of your naive argumentation let just ignore such minute detail for a moment, OK?

Under such nice & comfortable ethical standards, any apologist of the Holocaust could equally argue that the conquerors' side of their own time most evidently "did not think it was wrong" either, huh?

No wonder you may not be "bothered"; good luck with such deep ethical argumentation...

beorna

I don't want to paliate the german behaviour in their colonies, but fourth and especially behind Belgium, c'mon that is bar of every reality.

beorna

The worst behaviour was stopped, but business went on as usual.

Bismarck

I think most South Africans would dispute that they were 'given' the right to independence: most would consider that they won the right by fighting for it.

WeisSaul

You're in Mexico, a product of imperialism and colonialism. A country that still disenfranchises its native American population in quite the same fashion that you accuse the European imperialists of doing to their colonized peoples.

sylla1

Hardly surprising from a nation emerged from colonialism; your point being?

BTW, you still you don't know my nation, just my current location.

Ancientgeezer

South Africa as a whole became independent in 1910, Cape Colony and Natal were self governing before that.
The franchise and the constitution changed with many ups and downs as did many European countries between 1830 and 1910. The South Africa of 2012 is the same as the 1910 one ( less Walvis Bay and plum pudding and Roast Beef Island. It merely has a different constitution.

Belgarion

It can be argued that the reason the Indonesians were the most pro- Japanese of all the occupied peoples during WWII was due to the policies of the Dutch government.

BTW Tercio, shouldn't 'Mexican' actually read 'Spanish'

Salah

I wonder if it depends less on the Colonial power, and more on the colony. For example, I think (generally speaking) the British might have been more tolerant of a 'semi-civilized' Indian or Egyptian than of hard-core 'savage' East African, Maori, or Australian aborigine.

Sargon of Akkad

How exactly was it that there was a Dutch, Portugese, Belgian, Chinese, Spanish, Turkish, Russian, British, French, German, Italian, Brazilian, Mexican, Austro-Hungarian, Japanese and American Empire? (Manifest Destiny is a blatantly imperial attitude)

This is an international consensus. While I'm not saying there weren't anti-imperial voices amongst these nations, but these people were clearly in the minority.

That's amusing, since I didn't mention a nation. To whom was I being nationalist?

I'm sure you're weeping into your keyboard as you type that.

What exactly do you mean, I'm "ignoring" them? If the tables were turned, they'd have done the same thing, it is natural for those that have power to express it. Are you suggesting they were a bunch of tree-hugging flower children until the Europeans arrived or something?

Also, you realise we're talking about historical events that happened generations before my lifetime, and most people who are now alives' lifetimes? I can't get emotionally invested in things that happened to people who died hundreds of years ago. So I look at colonialism through the lens of a historian, and see colonialism for what it was: a historical event. That's all.

I am not justifying colonialism, that would imply I think we should do it now. I'm not, you're jumping to conclusions because I'm not prepared to attempt to shut down discussion based on my irrational emotional response to the word, like you are. If you're not, just stay out of this thread. It wasn't a thread titled "should we beging colonising places again?" it was a thread discussing the historical event of colonialism, something you clearly can't do as you're far too emotionally attached to the thing, whereas I'm not.

Er, no, and I don't see the validity of the comparison to Nazi Germany. I feel precisely the same about the Holocaust as I do about colonialism as I do about the Assyrian conquests: it was a bad thing, but it happened. I'm not responsible, I'm not connected and therefore I don't have any kind of emotional response to it.

Oh grow up. You must spend hours weeping for the Carthaginians! How do you get through your day knowing that practically every Assyrian king was a genocidal maniac?! Throw your hands to the sky and wail in grief for me, Sylla, because I'm a bit busy to be honest.

What you both don't seem to understand is that nobody is actually on the other side of what you're arguing, because what you're arguing isn't at all relevant.

Nobody thinks that colonialism is something that should be reinstated, any more than anyone thinks gladiatorial games should be reinstated. Do you understand? We just want to talk about what happened in an objective historical light, not as if we're going to start reconquering your country.

Now stop trying to shut down discussion on colonialism because of your irrational emotions.

To the OP: France, IMO. They seemed to actually treat their colonies with a measure of respect. Britain's rule seems to be more bureaucratic, concerned with the rule of law and that commerce continues, but not so much concerned with the actual people of the colonies.