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.
People get nostalgic for order and predictability that came at the point of a gun. “At least we had food and everything wasn’t falling apart!” Plenty of Russians I’ve been around remember the “good old days” under authoritarian “communism” and were unhappy with the turmoil and unpredictability when the USSR collapsed, and they’re the same ones that are happy with Putin’s and trump’s authoritarian methodology and threat of violence to enforce compliance.
So people absolutely can have a fondness for their abusers, especially if freedom from them leads to unpredictability and poverty.
A lot of former Soviets liked the old system because in spite of the oppression and corruption most people had their needs met. After the fall of theUSSR many no longer could make their ends meet.
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.
People get nostalgic for order and predictability that came at the point of a gun. “At least we had food and everything wasn’t falling apart!” Plenty of Russians I’ve been around remember the “good old days” under authoritarian “communism” and were unhappy with the turmoil and unpredictability when the USSR collapsed, and they’re the same ones that are happy with Putin’s and trump’s authoritarian methodology and threat of violence to enforce compliance.
So people absolutely can have a fondness for their abusers, especially if freedom from them leads to unpredictability and poverty.
A lot of former Soviets liked the old system because in spite of the oppression and corruption most people had their needs met. After the fall of theUSSR many no longer could make their ends meet.
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.
*carcass
The one time auto correct would be useful, leaving it though. Prime example of phonetic spelling.