I feel like there's just a sort of willful ignorance with a lot of people about what, exactly the effects and legacy of colonialism and the various forms of historical slavery even are or how these get carried forwards. Like yes, the Romans were monstrous genocidal slaver fucks who visited countless horrors on many different people for centuries, but in between that and now you have two thousand years of those same peoples becoming Romans too, forming their own states, having their own self-determination, and building empires in the image of the Romans to pillage the rest of the world. They aren't suffering because a hundred generations ago one of their ancestors got crucified by some inbred Roman aristocrat when for at least the past several centuries their ancestors have themselves been beneficiaries of empire.

I feel like libs also feed into this by focusing on the specific character of historic horrors more than their legacy, like focusing on how completely fucked chattel slavery in the US was instead of on the still fucking ongoing legacy of white supremacist terror and hegemony, on the century of pogroms to enforce white supremacist rule that followed the de jure end of chattel slavery, with the largely-still-present systemic recreation of slavery through the rent and debt slavery of the sharecropping system and the establishment of racialized prison slavery. And it's the same with colonialism, where it's still enforced with violence and the relationship between the periphery and imperial core is still brutal extraction at gunpoint so its legacy is still alive and well, but some of the specific most extreme horrors of colonialism have been ended as widespread practices so people act like it's as dead and gone as the horrors the Romans visited on their victims when it's not.

It's like people just think that historic wrongs existed up until they didn't and that whether they were kept going through other, similar means or if they were reversed and done away within generations doesn't matter.