Yeah, but you can do that with just about any country's history.
The past is an ugly place. What makes the US special is how much it did to make itself better, then make the world better. Compare the US to any major power ever--its history is far less hideous (yes, even with all the atrocities).
I think this is true outside of the US, but what was done to Native Americans and black people in the US is equivalent to some of the worst behaviour anywhere (with a couple of pretty obvious exceptions)
The Native American population of the US fell over 50% during the 19th century, much worse than, for example, Ireland, and much more directly the result of deliberate policy
Nah, you should see what basically every European country did to the 'wrong' sort of Christians during the Wars of Religion.
And the brutal repressions that took place even after the Wars of Religion were over (Louis XIV, for example, sent gangs of dragoons to steal from and rape Huguenots).
A third of Central Europe died in the Wars of Religion, and most countries in Europe almost completely ethnically cleansed themselves of non-coreligionists.
Also, until a wave of liberalism sparked (in this regard, ironically) by the American Revolution, every European country that could get its hands on tropical or subtropical colonies with nonzero arable land was fully committed to massive use of slave labor for cash crops.
You do realize that use of forced labor in European colonies, both as corvee and as punishment, was still rampant even after the formal abolition of slavery, right? Especially in Africa.
Britain was employing child soldiers in colonial Uganda as late as the 1910s.
Every colonizing European power engaged in horrific mass violence against the ppl it was colonizing, including the use of mass slaughter as a form of collective punishment.
Russia, the Ottomans, and Belgium stand out as especially bad in the 19th Century. The others did worse than the US, too, tho.
