>>507567324 (OP)Obviously bad things have happened throughout history. And in the past, many of these bad things were normal or accepted. It gets more brutal the further back you go.
But at some point, as ideals of humanism and liberty began to shape western thinking, we realized that we didn't need to to bad things to live well, and that we actually probably shouldn't like the idea of doing bad things and should take a moral stand about this.
From the ground up, these sorts of ideas began a few hundred years back, but even in countries that ostensibly bore some degree of state accountability to the public, it took a very long time before these ideas actually began to shape policy.
The problem, and why we roundly condemn european colonialism over other forms of historical brutality, is how fucking long this took. Britain was still attempting to enact colonial policies into the 1950s and was only finally stopped, after half a century of pressure both from within its country and from the United States, to stop being the world's supervillain.
France was liberated from Nazi Tyranny in 1945 and immediately turned around and pursued a policy of Nazi Tyranny in Indochina, triggering a revolution that it would fight for eight fucking years--so desperate it was for the right to bayonet vietnamese babies and use their polished skulls as paperweights. France, as a nation, as a culture, as a people and as a state entity is still mad about losing Indochina today. They never chose to abandon their colonial policies, they just fucking lost and they're still seething about it.
In short, we forgive many forms of brutality in history by understanding that values were different and these things were simply the norm. We condemn european colonialism because we understand that it extended beyond the period where people fully understood what they were doing was evil, and pursued it anyways. They chose evil and history remembers them for that.