The people colonizing those lands certainly cared at the time, and they used such beliefs to justify a lot of pretty awful acts. Given that the modern, western world is built on the legacy of colonialism, it's important (at least to me) to understand whether those motivating beliefs were true.
IMO, we’re all the same species, our history is littered with awful and good people, and lots of flawed people in between. The retelling of history can be a bit one-sided at times, but it’s sometimes unhealthy to fixate on it as an ongoing cause of problems today.
If I knew that everything I have is built on genocide, I would feel pretty wrong.
Those who do not are probably a bit strange imho.
Well, isn't it? Human history is a bloody affair from the first days of farming to today. History is a long series of wrongs. How shall we undo them?
Possessions are depreciating assets. Even more when people don't know how to use them.
That won't be a solution but more of a bandaid over the long term if the goal is to reach fairness (equality).
When a country such as France helps installing the son of a former dictator at the helm of a country in 2022, I think there is a deep unadressed issue, for instance.
If I knew that everything I have is built on genocide is called human history.
And I have a feeling that if the victims had been more lucky as to be the winners, they would have made more or less the same things.
It's a question of being humane and restablishing fairness of opportunities amongst human beings.
The status quo might be appealing but it can feed needless conflicts between people, sometimes on the sole basis of skin complexion.
I understand that burying one's head in the sand can be appealing but that still shows a lack of accountability and a reluctance to improve Humanity imho.
Looking globally, europeans were really that much more advanced (in science, warfare, medicine, logistics,...) than the areas they managed to occupy... how else would a few people on a few boats occupy whole continents? Did those people do a lot of very very bad things (from slavery to genocide) ... sure. Was there some luck involved? Sure... the romans were more advanced than the occupying tribes and they still lost. But generally, the more advanced groups were the winners.
The rest of the Europeans living up in the North tried to do worse, not to assimilate the enemy culturally to build a bigger Empire, but to truly genocide it.
It is accurate to say that there are groups who revise history to achieve the purposes you describe.
It would perhaps also be accurate to say that revisionists who propose histories that are more socio-politically palatable would be more generally successful.
IMO democracy is the least-worst political system, so no “excuse” is needed there, either.
The short answer is: a lack of humility. Humility, which is a readiness to accept the truth (forget the common misconception which construes it as a kind of theater of lowliness), is need to accept history as it was. It is needed to accept the causes of things as they are or were, without rashness. Pride, which is antithetical to humility, leads people toward delusion, toward either chauvinism or denial and therefore away from the truth and toward agendas and what they want rather than what is in a way that is divorced from reality. So you can have chauvinists who will use their civilization's successes as a pretext to dominate others, and you can have envious people who belong to generally unimpressive civilizations and cultures who cannot accept the inferiority of their historical record according to various measures. We all know this to be the case, but we are often conditioned to fear admitting the obvious (we may be wrong in the details, but I have in mind the general principle that cultures and civilizations may be superior or inferior to others according to various measures). There is nothing to be gained from this prideful status game. If some culture or civilizations can teach us something valuable that isn't found in our own, however small or large, what conceivable reason could there be to refuse to learn from them? The only reason is pride.
So, it is not insignificant that some cultures and civilizations thrived while others did not. The fruits of a civilizations are useful clues, though naturally clues that require wise interpretation. And there is no reason why one cannot be grateful for the accomplishments of his ancestors, but this is gratitude, not bragging or condescension. Charity motivates a desire to share these fruits with others. And indeed, the colonial era was a period when that did happen, even if lots of bad things also happened. We lack the ability to accept that societies are mixed, that there are bad actors and good actors. The current anti-colonial narrative is characterized by a kind of embarrassingly anti-intellectual, reductive, boorish simplemindedness. That colonialism benefited the colonized in certain ways does not contradict the valid criticisms of what occurred during that era. Pointing out the positives is not colonial apologetics. The world is not a comic book in which the world is neatly divided into good and bad people, into good and bad groups.
To me it’s weird because it’s so unimportant. Who cares which groups of who were advanced or not and what they were doing back then. Anyone who feels better or worse about themselves because of this is weird.