The reverse isn’t much better. I’m Dutch, and if you go to Indonesia, outside the cities there will often be people pointing out what awesome things the Dutch built “for them”. It’s super weird when the people your country exploited and abused start thanking you.
Indonesian person: "Oh, the town well, yeah the Dutch built that for us, but we can’t maintain it, so now we walk down to the other well to get water. The Dutch were so nice to us. "
My brain: “Yeah, I can see how that totally makes up for a century and a half of murderously harsh exploitation and killing 200.000 indonesians when you tried to be independant”
My mouth: “Oh, that’s… nice?”
Now, I get that everything the Dutch did kinda gets snowed under compared to what the Japanese and the Americans did in the span of a few decades, but I grew up when our history books moved from a half-page “And then there were some police actions in the East Indies, and suddenly there was Indonesia” and towards a somewhat more realistic picture.
The reverse isn’t much better. I’m Dutch, and if you go to Indonesia, outside the cities there will often be people pointing out what awesome things the Dutch built “for them”. It’s super weird when the people your country exploited and abused start thanking you.
Indonesian person: "Oh, the town well, yeah the Dutch built that for us, but we can’t maintain it, so now we walk down to the other well to get water. The Dutch were so nice to us. "
My brain: “Yeah, I can see how that totally makes up for a century and a half of murderously harsh exploitation and killing 200.000 indonesians when you tried to be independant”
My mouth: “Oh, that’s… nice?”
Now, I get that everything the Dutch did kinda gets snowed under compared to what the Japanese and the Americans did in the span of a few decades, but I grew up when our history books moved from a half-page “And then there were some police actions in the East Indies, and suddenly there was Indonesia” and towards a somewhat more realistic picture.
Folks do it with Rome so its nothing new, the carcus of empires are far more noticeable than the corpses of the folks used in the foundations.