Ukraine

[Heinrich]

The U.S. was quite brutal against Native Americans as the country expanded westward in the 19th Century including government intentional, premeditated brutality.
Similar atrocities can be attributed at various times to the British, French, Spanish, Germans, Portuguese (Dutch?).  Of that list it's my impression that the French were the least brutal, but that's not saying much.
I'm happy to be corrected.  (Like I said above, limited education on the matter)

Don't forget the Belgians.

  The worst!

They really did a great job slipping their genocide under the fence. Worse than the Holocaust and I never heard about it.

[Parsifal]

Don't forget the Belgians.

  The worst!

They really did a great job slipping their genocide under the fence. Worse than the Holocaust and I never heard about it.

That's because King Leopold II treated the Belgian Congo (as it was called then) as his private fief.

[pinkpunk]

That's because King Leopold II treated the Belgian Congo (as it was called then) as his private fief.

To be pedantic, it was the Congo Free State. It became known as the Belgian Congo in 1908 “when public pressure and diplomatic manoeuvres led to the end of Leopold II's absolutist rule and to the Belgian Parliament enacting an act to annex the Congo Free State as a colony of Belgium.”

Under Leopold II's administration, the Congo Free State became one of the greatest international scandals of the early 20th century. The Casement Report of the British Consul Roger Casement led to the arrest and punishment of officials who had been responsible for killings during a rubber-collecting expedition in 1903.

Of that list it's my impression that the French were the least brutal, but that's not saying much. I'm happy to be corrected.  (Like I said above, limited education on the matter)

Even in the Congo…

A similar situation occurred in the neighbouring French Congo, where most of the resource extraction was run by concession companies, whose brutal methods, along with the introduction of disease, resulted in the loss of up to 50 percent of the indigenous population according to Hochschild. The French government appointed a commission, headed by de Brazza, in 1905 to investigate the rumoured abuses in the colony. However, de Brazza died on the return trip, and his "searingly critical" report was neither acted upon nor released to the public. In the 1920s, about 20,000 forced labourers died building a railroad through the French territory.
— Scramble for Africa, Colonization of the Congo

The Algerian War of Independence was pretty brutal, as I was reminded by a programme on the World Service, The shadow of Algiers.

See also "French president refuses to apologise for colonial crimes committed in Algeria" .

There was also the First Indochina War.

The acquisition of their empire wasn't painless either.

Between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Algerians, out of a total of 3 million, were killed within the first three decades of the conquest as a result of war, massacres, disease and famine. French losses from 1830 to 1851 were 3,336 killed in action and 92,329 dead in the hospital.
— French colonial empire, Algeria

This surprised me. 1905?

In 1905, the French abolished slavery in most of French West Africa. David P. Forsythe wrote: "From Senegal and Mauritania in the west to Niger in the east (what became French Africa), there was a parallel series of ruinous wars, resulting in tremendous numbers of people being violently enslaved. At the beginning of the twentieth century there may have been between 3 and 3.5 million slaves, representing over 30 percent of the total population, within this sparsely populated region."
— French colonial empire, Civilising mission

It might be interesting to read about Albert Londres.

(We members of the "Anglosphere" seem very self-absorbed. We know what we did, but seem uninterested in what others did.)

[Parsifal]

Thank you pinkpunk.  I like getting that stuff right.
You appear to have done a fair amount of research.  Most interesting details.
(I know about Algeria and Indochina, but thought that the other colonialists were even worse.)  Oh!  Forgot about the Japanese.

As Socrates(?) famously said (or was it Aristotle?):
"I love being proven wrong because then ignorance is purged from my soul."

[pinkpunk]

You appear to have done a fair amount of research. 

As far as reading Wikipedia counts as research…

(Reminds me of the old joke about "le temps perdu à la recherche".)

Forgot about the Japanese

A quick scan of Korea under Japanese rule suggests no egregious brutality, but forced labourers certainly suffered and resistance was treated harshly.

Apparently Koreans were better treated than laborers from other countries, but still their work hours, food and medical care were such that large numbers died. This is clear from the 60,000 Korean laborers that died in Japan out of the near 670,000 that were brought there in the years 1939 to 1945. The total number of deaths of Korean forced laborers in Korea and Manchuria is estimated to be between 270,000 and 810,000

(5,400,000 Koreans were conscripted.)

Many Koreans became victims of Japanese brutality during the colonial period. Korean villagers hiding resistance fighters were dealt with harshly, often with summary execution, rape, forced labour, and looting. Starting on 1 March 1919, an anti-Japanese demonstration continued to spread, and as the Japanese national and military police could not contain the crowds, the army and even the navy were also called in. There were several reports of atrocities. In one instance, Japanese police in the village of Teigan, Suigen District, Keiki Prefecture (now Jeam-ri, Hwaseong, Gyeongggi Province) herded everyone into a church, locked it, and burned it to the ground. They also shot through the burning windows of the church to ensure that no one made it out alive. Many participants of the 1 March Movement were subjected to torture and execution.

They behaved very badly in China but it's not clear whether that counts as colonialism rather than war.

As Socrates(?) famously said (or was it Aristotle?):
"I love being proven wrong because then ignorance is purged from my soul."

The quotation seems unknown to the internet, but that might just be the way you paraphrased it.

I enjoy educating myself.

[Parsifal]

As Socrates(?) famously said (or was it Aristotle?):
"I love being proven wrong because then ignorance is purged from my soul."

The quotation seems unknown to the internet, but that might just be the way you paraphrased it.

I enjoy educating myself.

I'm sure he said it in Greek.  (Who knows what the translator did?)
If I come across the source I'll post it.

[pinkpunk]

I'm sure he said it in Greek.  (Who knows what the translator did?)
If I come across the source I'll post it.

I'm sure he did. I'm not sure there's that much variation in the way these things are quoted.

My money's on Socrates. It's just the kind of annoyingly self-satisfied thing he might have said — according to Plato.

[pinkpunk]

This is from 2020. It's a bit of an eye-opener.

Victory Day and Russia’s war cult

One of the loudest Kremlin TV propagandists, Dmitriy Kiselev, has recently proposed erecting a monument to Russian imperial general Pyotr Krasnov who served under the Nazis and hailed Hitler’s onslaught on the USSR as a liberation war against the communists and the Jews.

Dmitriy Kiselev is guy who threatened to drown the UK with a radioactive tsunami (with Ireland being collateral damage)

[Parsifal]

[pinkpunk]

More Russian TV:

«Even on Kremlin-controlled state TV one pundit has had enough of nuclear threats: "Be calm, comrades. Next comes WWIII. The nuclear war is coming... Is that a normal approach? Is that the way to work with public opinion? People are getting worried!"»

And Vladimir Solovyov talks about "demilitarizing NATO" as the next task.

https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/statu...etXxIPHCCA

[Luckydog2020]

Good to see their football team give a great performance in yesterday's World Cup qualifier v Wales, nice to see the respect the got from the Welsh crowd.

[pinkpunk]

Oh, what fun!

Ex-Putin Adviser Uses BBC Interview to Threaten the U.K. With Nuclear
Apocalypse

The full interview lovely Mr Markov can be heard starting at 2:14:20:

BBC Radio 4, Today, 21/09/2022

He's utterly barking.