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Note that all this modernization was not driven by any internal desire to adopt western ideals and concepts, but at the point of British and French guns. The marriage of loudly professed noble ideals and naked looting was and remains the hallmark of the western civilizational project - we’ve not so much sold the world on the merits of modernity as looted their houses and then blamed them for not recognizing the wisdom of putting locks on their doors lest uncivilized people take advantage of their naïveté.

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Confusing how a group resolves internal heterogenity with how it deals with outsiders reveals a misunderstanding. There is nothing particularly contradictory on issues such as a separation of church and state or republicanism with foreign policy. In fact they're entirely different categories!

Yes, except the West consistently used its professed internal principles to justify its external actions, and also didn’t adhere to those principles particularly well or consistently internally either. If one believes the principles to be sound - if one thinks the world would be a better place were they applied universally - then the western colonial project ought to be more widely recognized as a source of shame, but any time one discusses the “triumph of modernity” over the last two centuries, that hypocrisy is either ignored or justified and the march of progress is treated as some kind of universal law or natural process, as opposed to an act of widespread violence. We still treat people who don’t adhere to our notions of modernity as backwards, and we still fail to acknowledge the violence by which we enforce our lofty ideals.

You'd have to specific about which ideas are being used to justify colonialism and where their lineage is, racism after all was one such justification, yet it was rooted more in classical antiquity era thinking than debates regarding German Idealism. Economic interests are another, but once again, that's pretty explicit and consistent.

I mean, it’s in the article. The Siamese Kingdom put on the trappings of western modernity because the lack thereof was being used as an explicit justification for colonization under a “save the savages” type zeitgeist.

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