Like the kind that made you stop and think for a second about how stupid the person advocating it is. For me, it’s the classic “The biggest mistake in recent history was the Allies not pushing into Russia after the fall of Berlin.”
There’s just a level of imperialist arrogance and blood thirst in there that makes my skin crawl. The worst thing in human history was that the US didn’t immediately betray the Soviets and wipe them out until they were sure communism was done for.
It is a simple one really: that imperialism brought civilization, technology, and relative prosperity to the natives (some youtube channel that “debunked” communism said this)
Sounds more or less like modernization theory, which is indeed absurd. Yet the empire’s court economists and political scientists continue to write about it in an effort to make it seem serious and believable.
Of course! They have to create agents of capital from amongst the workers, and that means proclaiming the “benefits” of imperialism.