but it's not like secularism stooped the muurdering

Yup; I had a similar conversation with a lib I know who insists that religion is the cause of all wars and oppression in the world and thinks that when I mention secularism being guilty of similar that I'm talking about China or North Korea (those are a whole other bag of worms I decided not to get into cause it would've taken us WAY offtopic), instead I pointed out that France prided itself on being secular for ages and their colonialism was utterly barbaric, and pushed French supremacy (killing local languages and cultures for example, which is why so many countries in Africa speak French as their main language), and this was not related to religion at all; ultimately capitalism is very adaptive and would use either religion or secularism to murder nations and rob their resources. The French, back then as well as now, believe themselves culturally superior to so many nations they've brutalized and colonized; the violent British treatment of India didn't come from a religious stance, it came from a cultural and racial one. Certainly in both North and South America people were oppressed because of religious differences (even recently, during the coup in Bolivia, the woman responsible referred to the indigenous population as Satan worshippers which.....is both stupid and makes no sense), but then even with Israel, as people have pointed out previously, you have atheists (I hate this; I keep misspelling this the first time because 'i before e except after c') who don't believe in God who still consider themselves God's chosen people, which makes zero sense.

It's all about resources, really

You put the people who are already under your thumb someplace, they displace the locals and steal their shit

Then they send the stuff back to you, they get a cut of the profit and you continue the process until you've stripped the land bare and have to repeat it

All the land we stole and murdered for sucks.

I mean lots of it was very nice land managed by the original inhabitants in ways that adapted to the climate and conditions. It mainly sucks for colonizers because they tried to basically just transpose their western methods of construction, farming and civilization in general onto the new territory.

They didn't send their best to the new world, they sent who they didn't have room for. Makes me think of the first waves of indentured servants to the Caribbean, mostly Irishmen who absolutely withered and cooked in the heat of the sugar cane plantations. It's the origin of the term "redneck" as far as I know

The land was settled in order to extract resources back to the home country. Only the schmucks and undesirables actually went out to live in the colonies. To the extent that bourgeois settled too, it was for upward mobility, and they deemed themselves entitled to wealth for bracing the so-called savage lands.

After centuries of settlement, and after the formal end of colonialism, the descendants of the original white settlers have lost connection with their own history. They must make up a new one which imagines that capitalism is natural, that the settled land was pristine before they arrived, and that the country was founded on principles of liberty rather than exploitation and genocide.

It's not about having a place to live, it's about the desire to murder, colonize, and taking peoples' homes by force.

I live in temperate-ass northeastern United States, and I have to put on sunscreen ALL the time.

SUPERIOR WESTERN MORALITY

"We brought democracy!"

"But they're dead now; who's the beneficiary of this democracy?"

"......We are!"

Like bringing chips to a party but killing everyone there and defending it by saying 'I brought the chips!'; like yeah but you killed everyone and you're the only one who ate the chips. We normally arrest people who do that.