I will happily point out that pride in the former empire is exactly what's driving Russian aggression in the Ukraine at this moment.
Everything to do with colonialism = bad is such a boneheaded simplification, thank god there are academics brave enough to look at it from a non-hysterical perspective
Also pride leading to invasion is a non sequitur, Germans can be proud of Autobahns without wanting to invade Poland again
European colonialism. Take a look at Wikipedia's article on Muslim-colonized Spain, and it's almost nothing but praise. The entire opening section doesn't even mention the slavery of non-Muslims that was practiced.
Under the Caliphate of Córdoba, al-Andalus was a center of learning, and the city of Córdoba, the second largest in Europe, became one of the leading cultural and economic centers throughout the Mediterranean Basin, Europe, and the Islamic world. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Andalus
Also it’s just “Ukraine”, not “the Ukraine”.
In en-gb "the Ukraine" is the established form; without "the" it sounds strange. There's no academy that dictates acceptable form for English language. Do you think it's unclear? Is there a good reason to be a language fascist on this point?
The “the Ukraine” form was used to refer to Ukrainian territory being part of the USSR or the Russian empire in the past. But the language seems to have evolved now to omit the article.
Also I don’t think I’m being a fascist about it at all.
Of course it was driven top-down, but I don't see how that has any bearing on anything. The US didn't invade Iraq because there was some kind of grassroots fear of it in particular, and the English didn't get an empire spanning half the world because some blokes down at the local thought it was a swell idea.
I had thought the revolution was to destroy all that, remove the czar, bring in autocratic states, etc.
I feel like there is a distinction here but I can't easily point to it. But they were very anti-empire afaik
The ideals of the exceptional Republic make it the perfect overseer of the implementation of its system upon inferior nations that lack the vision or commitment to find and implement the perfect ideals. My impression from how it is coverred in the US is that the UK's early colonialism was simple feudal empire (the Queen is pleased with your venture) and late colonialism was of the Republican empire sort (they need our assigned administration to at least become a poor model of us).
(If you mean Napoleon, he was of course defeated and Austria setup a plan to contain France's ambitions, but his colonial aims could already be seen in his short lived satellite government in Switzerland.)
That is a peculiar definition of "colonialist".
For instance, the ancient Romans colonized Great Britain, despite the fact that the Romans and the Britons were both "white". The Arabs colonized Spain, despite the fact that the Arabs were "non-white" (by some definitions) and the Spaniards were "white". The Mongols colonized a whole bunch of areas, of pretty much every ethnicity that exists in Eastern Europe and a large swath of Asia. And so on.
Because what some ruler calls him- or herself isn't really a useful category.
If you accept this definition, the USSR was an empire in the exact same sense the Romans or the British were, they just instantiated the template a little differently.