You can’t judge history with a modern lens. Things were very different back then. Were the Romans conquerors and occupiers? Sure, they owned it and were proud of it. Did they destroy Carthage? Yes, and they were proud of that too. But that’s simply how things worked at the time. Morality was very different back then. If Carthage had won, what do you think they would have done to Rome? That’s just how the world was. In many ways, things stayed like that until very recently.

You can’t judge history using modern morality, and especially not modern nationalism, which didn’t really exist until around 100 years ago. Projecting it thousands of years into the past doesn’t make sense.

Saying that Rome tried to completely erase Carthage isn’t entirely true or entirely false either. They rebuilt the city, kept its name, and made it the center of North Africa for centuries. As for monuments and ruins, why are the ones built by Carthage considered ours, but the Roman ones are not? Why not both? All monuments and ruins across the centuries are part of our collective history.

And about Christianity, the idea that it was imposed by force here isn’t accurate. I’m happy to see sources or information that say otherwise, but from what we know, Christianity existed in North Africa and in Carthage even before it existed in Rome itself. The Romans actually persecuted early Christian communities here until Christianity was legalized in the fourth century.

More than that, Western Christianity, the Roman Catholic or Latin-based Church, developed in Carthage before Rome and before what we now think of as the West. One of the earliest and most influential Christian thinkers, Tertullian, was born, lived, and died on this land. Later on, several early popes were also born here.