Well for everyone in the US it is a good thing, no colonialism does equal no USA after all.
I see I need to define my terms.
When I say colonialism, I'm talking about the use of superior force, used or threatened, implicitly or explicitly, to have a coercive, exploitave relationship between a greater and subservient nation.
This usually took the form of occupation and/or puppet governments; starting the 60's, someone n Elgland compliments the US for reinventing colonialism as 'economic colonialism', which isn't entirely the same.
The British could have created, well, 'colonies' outside my definition had they peacefull co-existed with the natives. They didn't exacly 'occupy' the natives; they either co-existed, or killed them.
There wasn't really much colonialism per se, just neigbor and genocide.
And the most violent takeover of land, the largest genocide of a native population and the most ruthless methods all come from there...
I'm not keeping score. It was very bad, but not so much 'colonialism'; I don't think there's all that much debate whether the Europeans were good for the natives.
In fact, the natives were good for the Europeans. The founding fathers were much influenced by the governments of the natives in designig ours.
In particular the Iroquois, with whom Benjamin Franklin lived for a period to learn abtou their politics.
Smallpox infested blankets is a thing that the Americans today think of as an act of heroism.
Very few do. For what it's worth, I'm not sure how widespread a practice that was.
It's quite funny how the young americans are taught, that they saved Europe from the Nazis even though Roosevelt said that they would never go to war, well before the attack and then the declaration of war by Germany on the US, i suppose that is when you said to yourselves, hey, let's go save Europe?
Theres a funny story about WWI, too. It involves a US president saying we will not get involved and then getting in at the last minute.
There's an awfully big misunderstanding about WWII by most Americans, as there in most participants (maybe not England?), as I've posted here before.
Remember my thread asking what percent of the allied casualties were US, English and British? Not many have any clue it's 2 or 3% each.
Or the nukes you dropped because Japan would not give up their emperor, well they didn't give up their emperor afterwards either but that was a-ok then. It's not like the US got a new toy they wanted to show off or anything like that, nah, not at all, it saved millions of lives dropping the nukes, yeah.
I need to re-check the history on the peace offer with maintaining the emperor being real. If it was and ignored, what a terrible waste.
There was a terrible war mindset that had taken over by then. People like Howard Zinn havewritten of the mindset war brings, the desensitization, the dehumanization.
The nuclear weapons were just not that big a deal to use.
Sadly, that didn't change for a long time. The US had a scanfdalous hair-trigger first-strike nuclear use policy in the 50's, with authorization delegated to commanders and by them to lower commanders, where aggression by the Soviets with conventonalforces could trigger a complete nuclear response by the US - with the nuking of every realy city in China as part of the plan even though they had nothing to do with it - and the primary motivation was to save on our conventional military costs.
That should be a war crime.
It's as if Germany would say that we have become a great nation because of Hitler and we only killed those Jews to save people, it would have been the exact same thing, equally untrue lies spread but in the case of the US, no one cares.
When i grew up i thought the US was an exemplary nation, that has changed, with information the lies start to crackle and with the Iraq war the US showed it's true ugly face. The US will do as it pleases, all other supported reichs have done the same but when you review history that is where they have all failed. Push the EU closer towards each other and you are no longer a super power, with a larger economy, population and a military that has been used to being deployed overseas the EU could rather swiftly become a power that outdoes all other current powers.
Some irony in the US and the EU, home of the WW's and much other fun, sort of switching places.
For fucks sake, the US needs Spec Op from the UK to do the ground work as it is, the Seals or Deltas are not good enough for that.
Be careful what you wish for. Ever hear of Blackwater/Xe? You want them to get more funding?