[throw51319]

I'm not. I feel the need to show being realistic about the past instead of having an emotional response. "Omg people conquered other people, that is bad!" Very infantile view of a complex world/history, where every single group in every single nook and cranny of every continent has done this in the past.

[JoeAltmaier]

Hm. Whom has America conquered? Puerto Rico I guess. Any others?

[eesmith]

Putting aside questions of what it means to "buy" the Louisiana Territory and then use military force against the indigenous peoples, one obvious one is the Spanish-American War, where we got Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippine Islands.

We then had to fight the Philippine Republic for control of the country, in the Philippine-American war.

[ianleeclark]

> I feel the need to show being realistic about the past instead of having an emotional response.

What's wrong with an emotional response to an atrocity? Is it irrational to cry over the Holocaust because, hey, the Tsars didn't some pretty bad pogroms, too? No, emotional responses are perfectly fine and are a normal mode of thinking. Your fetishization of reason is dangerous and echoes the same rhetoric that enabled these atrocities: oh, they're not people, they're savages because X, so cut off their hands if they don't bring enough silver. The correct response here is to denounce colonialism, not to say, "oh, hey, it's not that bad because other people have done bad things."

[dang]

Please don't do flamewars here.

[throw51319]

Haha you're putting words in my mouth. Of course I have an emotional response to events of the past, usually negative like most people. I'm just separating that from the historical and factual response, and understanding the difference between the two.

The point is that it wasn't just Europeans that have done bad things in the past. It was every type of person. And now we can collectively move past with the lessons.

[dang]

Please don't do flamewars here.