Single counterexample for single counterexample: Belgium's Leopold - not sure if Western colonialism is so much better (and notice I didn't even bring up "western India")
Not so much better but better in general compared to the middle eastern/eastern colonialism.. westerners have good competiton that the atrocities will be self corrected by itself but middle eastern/eastern colonies needed external western support like Korean war, hiroshima/nagasaki.. main example I can think of opposite is china under deng but there too deng had become relatively capitalist to fix the issues.
Yeah for the ones who get colonized, western ones were better than eastern ones. Japanese ones would've made Britishers look like kids when they were occupying eastern India.
You just put Russia and Japan as "Eastern"; they have nothing to do with each (and I would consider both as more Western than Eastern regarding imperial/colonial matters) other nor with China. China is a massive country that has always been massive and rich. Their style is more like the tribute systems they had before, as it is being observed in the BRI and other projects.
I understand China but in no way were japan and Russia close to western. IJA, MAO and soviet union makes westerners look like chuds. Russians still have the wagner group shit which is nowhere near what western countries have currently.
First, sadly, the west is full of similar examples, like Leopold II in Congo, Nazi Germany, the Bengal and Irish famines in the British empire, transatlantic slave trade... Not to talk about similar genocides perpetrated by third nations but with the support of the west like the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66. I see quite a lot of similarities. The West is not a moral example of anything at all, but the opposite.
But second, Russia is not Eastern, it was more European than anything else until the Soviet Union. And Japanese Empire drew inspiration in the Western nations, even if they took it a even more horrible twist. So blaming this on "the East" is racist and reductionist.
Western countries have good internal competition that the atrocities they commit can be stopped by themselves whereas middle eastern/eastern ones needed external support for reformation famously hiroshima, deng reforms, soviet dissolution, korean war.. west is superior in terms of liberalism and capitalism that any successful country you can think of now has roots in utilising its ideas.. this is not to downplay atrocities committed by westerners but to think that somehow western nations are worse than eastern is being in denial. Russia was more european before the communists started their revolution and made themselves anti-west. They support many kinds of anti western movements like their war crimes in Africa, support for iranian/Islamist regimes, support dictatorship of china etc. these are all happening right now.. you are talking as though churchil wantedly cause famine in India when there's limited resource and he had to take care of his country before shipping to India and there was some amount of corruption too in Bengal at that time.. I'm not saying that they're blame free but it's a complex issue with multiple causes..
even the AI that was trained on mostly using western data and infrastructure that chinese models distill and all..
Even with all the downsides of being colonized by Britain, it was still far better than being colonized by Belgium. Heck, being colonized by pretty much anybody but Belgium was better than being colonized by Belgium. Read up on the Belgian Congo sometime: it was a parade of horrors.
GP was making a relative comparison; pointing out that both were bad in absolute terms does not negate the point. -2 is still greater than -17.