This is a fascinating article.  The trick about pain is that, once you get to know someone’s story, it’s hard not to at least understand why and how they hurt.  Of course, you think, this person should not have done what they did, should not have been where she was or, got the job he got, or whatever.  But who hasn’t made a bad choice, or, more likely, inherited someone else’s bad choice, a choice that might not even have seemed so wrong at the time?  And once that bad choice is  made, what if all the subsequent good choices are good?  It obviously doesn’t justify something as devastating as colonialism, but, as the child of many non-native Americans, I would be hypocritical if I didn’t say that I’m sympathetic to problem of children of colonizers, even if I’m intellectually and morally much more attached to those who have been colonized.  I don’t think there’s an easy solution to this, and I think living with that ambiguity might be the most painful part of that legacy.  More here:

Even 46 years later, for the French the Algerian legacy is roughly akin to what the Civil War is for Spaniards. Everything to do with France’s colonial reign remains a flashpoint and open wound, above all the long and brutal war that ended it, but not least the legacy of the pieds noirs as occupiers or victims, depending on one’s perspective. Though often reluctantly, France is now confronting a history that it has frequently seemed as anxious to forget as, for many years, it was to forget the Vichy era.