There are two sides to the colonialism story, Brother O’Malley.
True enough. And it's not to say that it's "all bad." But the fact of the matter is that the European colonial powers were hardly in it for altruistic reasons. (I identify the English and the French in particular along those lines)
If there weren’t two sides, Marx and Engles would never have wriiten their books, and their books would not propose solutions that are so false. Engels, I think, was a good man who was revolted by the capitalism of the 19th Century and he, like the Utopians, thought a perfect human society could be created. He supported Marx—a totally vile person by the way—because he thought that Marx had opened the door into that perfect society. Industrial advances caused so inbalances in human wealth, inbalances partially concealed by the growth of the middle classes, that Marxism quickly found support among those who looked for something better than the present order. Having lost faith in divine justice, they looked for human justice, or failing that at least the destruction of the existing order. We are contending with the Jihadists; the Victorians had the anarchists.