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I said it was simple, not that you would find it credible. But that's the argument.
You start giving counter-examples and you'll hear about Haiti's reparations, slaves building America, coups in LatAm, how India had X% of the world's GDP before Britain looted it, bad borders in Africa and the ME, sanctions against Zimbabwe meanwhile honorary white Japan (which was spared colonialism - somehow) was needed as a bulwark against the Soviets and so was treated relatively well. They have explanations, it's just a matter of how much you think they're cope (I've swung over to the "cope" side but I change most of my opinions an average of every eight years and I'm in the "converted zealot" stage and it's really not helpful for digging out nuance.)
It may not hold up but it's the closest thing to a coherent justification for the asymmetry I've seen.
You asked for some theory that would allow one and not the other, not just an explanation of nakedly self-serving behavior. I doubt anyone needs to hear "my opponents want me to believe things that help them and to avoid things that don't" from me.
No, I get that.
Its just every epicycle they have to add makes it less credible to me.
It is one thing to point to some guy who inherited wealth built on the backs of actual slaves or exploitation, and say that maybe he doesn't deserve everything he has.
Quite another to point at somebody who just happened to be born into a civilization that was built in part on the back of slaves and through exploitation of weaker neighbors, and claim that just because his ancestors bled, died, and labored to build a nation so nice that everybody wants to move there he doesn't get to be proud of himself... and he also should feel guilt for all the people that were exploited to build the nation (which includes his ancestors, mind!).
I've said it elsewhere, the lesson of politics since about 2010 is "identity politics and racial grievances are a great way to get others to do what you want and give you their stuff."
Of course the end state of this is leftists revolting against nature. It always is. Some nations were bequeathed huge stores of natural bounty, some were not, and this determined their future courses to some huge degree. The only way to correct for this is to move that natural bounty around until every place on earth can obtain some kind of parity.
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When the threat of colonization became apparent, they built themselves up into a modern state.
Which itself is a rather good refutation of the nonsense theories about how the plight of the Third World is all due to the First World, but you'll never get anyone who believes it to change their mind.
Reading the actual history of the Meiji restoration, it seems to have been dependent on the samurai class producing vast numbers of geniuses engaged in pointless bureaucracy they could be pulled off of without anyone noticing. It would be like the Hasidim deciding collectively, overnight, that they need to build an industrial economy and so their best and brightest have to be moved off of torah study to learn chip design or whatever.
Most colonized societies didn't have anywhere near the ability to do this. If we assume the samurai class had the same IQ advantage over the commoners that college graduates do over the hoi polloi in the USA(probably an underestimate) we're looking at a class of people with an average IQ similar to Ashkenazi Jews, who had quite literally nothing to do so they were given sinecures commanding vast resources with enforcing social conservatism as their only responsibility, and a single point of authority to rally around when it was apparent times needed to change, and a pre-existing tradition of employing literal geniuses in copying western technology. Those ingredients were rare in isolation; together they existed only in Japan.
Why do you assume an Iq advantage for samurai? It seems more likely to be reversed in class terms of we assume the class system existed long enough to have a breeding effect.
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