again, the mongol horde, the calpihates, the roman empire, are ancient. i can't stress this enough - they have no relevance

Only the Roman Empire, out of your examples, are ancient. The Mongol Horde and Caliphates were squarely medieval, and the Ottoman Empire lasted well into the modern era, contemporaneous with much of European Imperialism. The fact that you honestly believe that going back a few centuries in history makes these immense polities "ancient" and irrelevant is beyond insulting- it's downright terrifying.

you can only understand the influences of say, the mongol horde, in this abstract, and maybe intellectual sense. you can't feel it when you walk around your towns crumbling houses and infrastructure because the british destroyed your nations ability to support itself economically. there's no 70 year old women who remember their relatives being massacred by the romans like there are now, right now, in india, whose relatives were killed in say, the amritsar massacre , or maybe more directly, the partition of india into two countries. romans who were rewarded for war crimes died millenia ago, whereas the man behind the massacre in amritsar was considered a hero by the british public, got 26,000 pounds for it too. this is recent history. who do you think has a more direct influence on the way the world is today? the western imperialism and colonialism that only ended in the second half of the most recent century? or the mongols? if you think it's the mongols, then you aren't thinking.

You can understand the tangible effects of these past civilizations, absolutely. As you implore me to walk around crumbling houses from colonial periods, I invite you to visit, say, Cappadocia or Samarkand and understand there is a palpable continuity of culture that includes great atrocities.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is considered to be the greatest man in all of Turkish history, worshiped to an almost fascisistic degree in the modern republic. He was also responsible for the Armenian genocide and horrible, horrible repression. Throughout history you can find people who were regarded highly by one group and ignored for their atrocities; I've had long discussions with ardent supporters of Pinochet.

this is the key thing. nobody talks about the romans or the mongols because they're not relevant anymore. people who lived through the worst of the british, the europeans, and the rest are still alive. they are still feeling it directly. they're real people who actually went through it. they pass this onto their children, and they pass that knowledge onto their children too.

The population of Iran took centuries to recover due to the slaughter they faced at the brunt of the mongol horde. Conflict in the middle east stems directly from the Ottoman Empire's millet system, which, contrary to popular belief, was what originally brought together culturally disparate tribes into polities that war within the boundaries of contemporary middle-eastern states. The black death might not have even made it into Europe without the Mongols, and without it, we would not have had the beginnings of modern society; the depopulation of Europe caused by the plague directly gave rise to contemporary mercantilism, capitalism and made the individual worker so valuable that the industrial revolution made economic sense.

so you live in america? again, the key is, geographically, where you live. i thought that was pretty clear there.

Currently, and for most, but not all, of my life. I have attempted to maintain a global worldview throughout my life, which has been helped by me living and visiting many places throughout the world.

of course, there are plenty of modern non western people who went through modern, non western atrocities. and even modern, non western colonialism! not only that, i can be more specific - korea. the occupation of korea by japan was an atrocity. how about china? the nanjing massacre in china was an atrocity. you might notice that in east asia, rather than just blaming the west for the state of the world and negative feelings to the west, they also blame japan, the same way the rest of the world blames the west, because japan's crimes were definitely in very recent memory, and are still felt today. and not just that, but the treatment by japanese officials and conservatives in japan to their crimes is so flippant and disrespectful that it just pisses everyone else off - this is how so many people in the world today feel about the west. imperial japan was an atrocious, monster state that committed the same crimes as the west - it just did them in less places.

To me, I am not sufficiently convinced that the issues with western colonization are unusually widespread for large empires, nor were they uniquely brutal. We are human. We are brutal, cold, callous, monstrous. If you paid attention to history that stretched back more than a century, you'd be aware of that. What Japan did to Korea, China and other areas in their co-prosperity sphere was terrible; but no different than the Qin or Joseon. What makes their actions shocking was that they happened recently, because we like to pretend we live in an era that's above barbarism, though plenty of evidence shows that is not the case.

"pack animal" is an evocative, imprecise term - it's not meant to mean "literally a pack animal" but meant to describe the quality of labor and living conditions and treatment received by the slaves. to be a chattel slave is not qualified by simply being property.

Chattel slavery means precisely "human property." Any further qualities are the fault of your own connotations. Chattel slavery ranged from luxurious (though, of course, still dehumanizing and deplorable) to squalid. It's your fault for assuming that all slavery everywhere took the same form as that of the American south.

but on the note of the transatlantic slave trade - that's special in that it destroyed much of africa culturally and socially and economically. it lasted four centuries and is at the heart - the relatively recent heart - of racism in america today, much more directly than the mongol hordes.

Pretty much all of the slaves brought to the New World came from south-western Africa. Beyond clear cultural continuity (the proliferation of syncreticized Yoruba traditions throughout the Americas, along with pidgin languages) this has been confirmed by genetic testing. The trans-atlantic slave trade cannot be blamed for the issues of, say, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Algeria, etc. Africa is a big place. The mongol hordes had negligable and distant impact on modern America, yes, but that is not to say that they have not left their mark in the areas closer to their power center; the Middle East and Central Asia. As I said earlier, there are still peoples in Afghanistan who are seen as a literal slave-race, a tradition started and continued during the mongol conquests.

this was germ warfare, another crime of the west.

Yeah, no. You admonish me for being ignorant of history but you don't know that most of the Americas had been wiped out due to a plague that hit right after first contact was made in 1492- and bear in mind, this first contact happened in the Caribbean. This is also disregarding the historically proven but poorly documented viking settlement of Vinland, who could have been the original vector for this plague in 11th century. Your examples of smallpox blankets being used come from three hundred years after the Columbian exchange. Again, think of history; our knowledge of disease is much more developed now than in the 18th century. The same was true for the 18th compared to the 15th century. Not to mention that the natives that were being given smallpox blankets were the few remainders (estimates state that the population of the Americas declined by 90% by 1620) who had already proven resistant to the diseases that Europeans brought with them.