Though I think it is useful to study their motives (as historians have in fact been doing for generations) to build theories of how and why societies turn fascist. Very timely.
If something can be condemned in its own right, it should be condemned.
You're introducing a conflation here. In this sense it is impossible to assess anything that happens anywhere, because who knows what the ultimate causal chain looks like. Wasn't WW2 pretty good? Maybe when Hitler set up the General Government in Poland he disrupted a lot of criminal activity, prevented a lot of harm by moving people around. Maybe experiencing the war prevented Nikita Khrushchev from becoming the next Hitler. The outcome of the war encouraged European cooperation. Maybe it will turn out to have been key to world peace by 2100. Maybe if a time traveler went back and killed Hitler as an infant, every human would be dead today. Who knows, right? Maybe you should visit my home and smother me in my sleep, just in case all's well that ends well? I can't say how the ultimate balance of things lies, so is it really reasonable
not to kill me?!
Again, ontologically meaningless speculation. It's just not a valid means to understanding the world.
And you're whitewashing British colonialism again. "Definitely some downsides" is partial and moralistic language. Why is this sort of evaluation intrinsically acceptable but the opposite, that it was particularly bad in scope, scale, and intensity, that the prevalence of imperialism is not exculpatory, and that there were long-term costs
not acceptable, even on the basis of evidence? The problem is you don't speak on principle, a bad principle which as I have established is logically incoherent, but out of nostalgia or identity-based legitimation. Our disagreement lies not in whether it is possible to judge colonialism, but in how harshly or leniently it
ought to be judged.
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