Cultural relativism aside, I’m sure we can agree on “terrible” if we talk it out. I’m not asking for a “well X country is worse than Y country, so, Y country isn’t THAT bad”. I’d say for this discussion we can go as far back as 1800 for “past” as I’m currently convinced there isn’t a country with a perfect track record going back even that short a time.
I agree there probably isn’t one, but so what? If a country did terrible things, but if you were the decider so would you, or if you were a product of that age and so would you, then how judgmental can we be.
For example there are a lot of evils around colonialism and it’s unacceptable today , but it seemed widely accepted a couple hundred years ago. Obviously there are degrees and some things can never be excused, but was basic colonialism really a terrible thing, say to an average Englishman 200 years ago? Terrible but realistic
At the risk of getting blasted here, I’ll do it: consider the us attack on Iran as an example. It’s clearly a terrible action. Maybe there are reasons they think justify it, but not available in public, but even if it were in any way justifiable it’s clearly a terrible action. Yet I can see there being reasons any country might decide it needs to do similar. I can see there being circumstances where the average lemming would make a similar choice. Terrible but realistic