After some ruminating on it.
I think a stunning amount of people quietly have internalized a weird false understanding that they conflate the american civil war with colonial conflicts and power in some sort of anachronistic clusterfuck, and without actively even knowing it. They well and truly think it in those terms, they think that every single region and people colonized probably "Won a war/fight" for their independance as a result.
The pitched theorized summary: The american civil war is like a founding myth for their understanding of international intercultural and racial relations and the notion of independance with some bleedover of american independance "lore".
The notion of signing documents or tabled discussion or simple operational attrition and moving on never comes to mind because it's not in the culture war cinematic universe. It has no sizzle and it would sit oddly in their mind to know about incidents where people just one day "Stopped" doing a hecking colonism and nobody- to their limited understanding, seemed to actively "do anything" to make that happen
I bet you a crisp five bucks that a shocking amount of these types of people when pressed, would answer that of course they beat the yt savages out in all of the major ex-french and english colonies if you asked why they stopped being colonized actively outside of the cases where it might be true like Haiti and Zimbabwae.
Because what realy happened by and large clashes with their media tinted understanding of cause and effect and A vs B.
A stunning amount of people haven't actually read or absorbed any information or recognize patterns, and fundamentally don't understand the unique quibble and oddity of the target of their global hatred with their axe to grind with the eternal anglo/huwite man.
Their perceived enemy simply gets bored, their enemy has mercy, their enemy understands sunk cost fallacy and or feels bad eventually or decides it's a bunk venture to play civilization builder for people who are actively doing everything in their power to not have running water and functional argiculture and move on.
Their enemy also recognizes when people are simply no longer willing to play ball like India or that it's not productive anymore and just fuck off. India never had a defining major conflcit or decisive battle, they just gradually were wrote off as independant in another slow burn which also conveniently coincided with the brits being strained and spread thin because of that whole pesky world war 2 thing. (1939 to 1945 for WW2 VS Debatably 1919 to 1947 for that whole India situation)
And you'd think that Gandhi single handedly signed the damn thing in the same year he started the movement based on cultural perception.
Another relevent thing to note:
Giving an enemy mercy that surrenders was always an option and not genociding your opposition is the last thing on the mind of most any other people.
(IE: There are still natives left to complain in white nations, because of that little nagging detail that nobody else tends to leave any of theirs around is one such uncomfortable truth.)
Which segways into the other important distinction, Who the fuck else on earth demographically speaking, could endure a years long bloody extended conflict with anyone else, and after it was over, dust themselves off and look your leaders in the eye and more or less say to them...
"Need any help rebuilding?, yes even the guys we were fighting. But you gotta pinky promise not to pull that kinda shit again."
Because the west has done that shit, several times. If you count Japan and every country/region in the Marshall plan beyond just "Europe" as a catch all umbrella.
I'm not going to pad this section out any further with anything regarding africa and letting people inherit infastructure either.
Empire of Dust conveys all that better and in more detail than I can.
Add to the little detail that the internment camps for the japanese during the war were only that and not something more sinister, and had a "Okay we're done go and be citizens again" expiration date already puts the hu'wite devil at statistically impossible odds of intent and outcome VS the rest of the world since china is a nice shiny new example of what other people tend to do with theirs.
The Japanese of course aren't strangers to what they've done in a similar position either.
What am I getting at? What's the point of all this rambling and contextualization? I'm a fucking aging blowhard for one, but more importantly IMO
TL;DR: The heart of the theory, The people who smugly and derisively call the west collectively - The white devil boogieman colonizer. Who to their perception is a persistant global threat, while simultaneously tacitly believing that they simply "Beat them" before and that they're just a humiliated and deposed villain at the moment.
It's likely a major reason why they feel so comfortable doing it.
An entire attitude is based on a misunderstood association with the entire notion of independance itself.
Because there are likely swathes of people who associate the entire concept with physically fighting for it and winning.
Mostly in part because there are too many people who literally can't parse reality itself without an expert to repeat it, a movie to show and not tell it or the extent of their research starting and ending with "Reddit/Chat/Grok is this true?"
