Yes, nowadays genocide is not popular but the colonial empires were not lost in the 21st century.

For an example of present guilt and post-war brutality

For there is something peculiarly chilling about the way colonial officials behaved, most notoriously but not only in Kenya, within a decade of the liberation of the concentration camps and the return of thousands of emaciated British prisoners of war from the Pacific. One courageous judge in Nairobi explicitly drew the parallel: Kenya's Belsen, he called one camp.

The uprising by a secret sect, the Mau Mau - impoverished Kikuyu demanding the return of their fertile lands - led to the deaths of maybe 20,000 men and women, many after torture and internment. Thousands more died in the violence that tore apart Kikuyu families on opposing sides of the dispute.

With the tacit consent of ministers at Westminster, a British administration in colonial Kenya chose to behave as if Africans had no human rights. Rattled by a handful of murderous attacks on planters, they tried to face down the rebels using the empire's default setting of brutality. Castration, sodomy, rape and beatings were everyday weapons in its unremitting defence of the rights of the white settlers.

Can you point me to a post-war conflict in any of the colonial empires where the empire folded because they did not like to be assholes anymore?

A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!