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> I find it a bit condescending

Cool.

> when we try to pin all of the blame on western influence in the past, when these people are quite capable of fucking up their own lives without your help thank you very much.

Guess we'll never know because of all the rape and pillage.

I'll never understand how people come to so deeply fetishize the subjective that they're entirely willing to cast off the shackles of the objective.

How is it not western supremacist thinking? This is simply the other side of the "all of the advances of the modern world are the result of superior western society", all of the problems of the world are the result of superior western society.

To be brutally honest, I find it more condescending when people try to downplay the brutality and devastation colonialism enacted on the various native populations while trying to claim it was the victims of colonialism that were truly at fault.

Generally speaking, wiping out large amounts of any population whether intentional or not is probably going to have negative multigenerational effects.

The amazing book 1491 calls this Holmbergs mistake: that the indigenous people lined in a static world and didn't have the agency to make their own mistakes.