chapotraphouse

Precisely. This is horrific, but it is also pretty standard colonizer shit but in 2023 in contrast to a hundred years ago, There's been no actual societal development since the time of Leopold II, it's just that the Western nations were forced to stop doing it due to violent uprisings (but got the last laugh - though hopefully won't for too much longer - by trapping them in debt).

Until 1908, Leopold ran Congo as a venture for personal profit. Using a private army that included Congolese orphans, the king and his agents drained the land of resources, killing elephants for ivory and tapping trees for rubber. Congolese families were forcibly moved and their members separated and enslaved, leaving as many as 10 million dead, by some estimates. Leopold’s enforcers became infamous even among European colonial powers, so much so that in 1906, the king, denying accusations of atrocities, admitted that “most likely cruelties, even crimes” had been committed.

If for whatever reason direct colonization was seen as possible or desirable and could be re-established (which it probably cannot), then the West would collectively return to committing these atrocities and back to the good old "We are bringing Western enlightenment to these savages, even if we have to kill a few million people to do it." All the idealistic notions of sovereignty, and allowing the people of a country to rule over it instead of from a metropole, and so on and so forth (though obviously the validity of these principles in the present day is pretty much void due to neoimperialism - but the point is that the West says they support those things most of the time); those principles would quickly be removed, and the talking heads on television would be tasked with overseeing the transition and letting the audiences know that it's fine to be a bloodthirsty imperialist, if anything it's our duty.

There would be nothing - is nothing, in fact - stopping Western nations from doing direct, extreme, colonizer violence to other countries again, no philosophical or religious rule or command, no overriding sense of morality or justice. The only thing stopping them from turning every country on Earth into Gaza is the threat of overwhelming violence in return, and that the current arrangement is seen as sufficiently profitable such that the violence is undesirable. Well, and recently, the fact that their weapons stocks are running out and they're rotting from the inside due to finanacial parasitism.