Quote:
Originally Posted by Khan_Han
(1) I can sense your intollerance!
(4) What was the Anglo-saxons doing when the Ottomans were "invading" Hellenic territories? Weren't they invading Africa and India in a bid to exploit their resources? What were they doing with African children? Taking them back to Britain for Slave labour!!
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If I may interject here, Western nations do acknowledge that their former colonial exploits were negative and brutal, and most importantly unacceptable, in the modern world. The entire "Imperial age" history went thru a complete revision in what is taught at schools and the legacies of things like the triangle trade, the colonization of the new world, Africa, Australia and countless other nations and cultures is not something regarded with beaming pride nowadays.
Most people see the attitudes and worldviews in that era as a huge veil of a flawed, racist, cultural supremacy manifested in a sense of paternalism from which the alterior motives was pure greed and exploitation of foriegn subjects, one part nationalism, another part religious, final part animal.
I noticed with Turkish posters here and elsewhere they have the same familiar reluctance to concede the negative aspects on what was essentially their own "colonialism"........preferring to argue the merits of a paternal relationship with former holdings under the Ottomans.
So I agree yes, the Imperial powers where more far reaching and worst, but most western people, academics, scholars can accept and acknowledge the views of those who were oppressed, enslaved and exploited. Alot of Turks on the net, I've notice, cannot in the slightest confront their own "skeletons in the closet", so to speak.
I see the victim card being drawn alot, claims that the Empire was being attacked and underminded on all sides and such..............name any empire in history that wasn't.