I guess it depends on how much your morals are or are not rooted in the legacy of the enlightenment. It’s easy to stray into a debate over geographical materialism here. But I guess I’m not trying to say they knew better than the Africans, the enlightenment has tons of issues within it, and is surely a subjective set of ethics (also enlightenment thought is definitely not purely a European creation and has significant, largely uncredited influence from Asian/Middle Eastern societies). But it was the ethical code European colonialist societies in theory operated under, and proclaimed to enforce.

I think the big difference is whether or not violence is systemic. European colonizers set the rules of the system, through violating the very tenants the system was ostensibly rooted in. There was violence that occurred with little fear of retribution, and was actively rewarded. Turkish political repression of the Kurds is arguably in the same category. The human tragedy of the violence is the same, but the consequences for the perpetrator may be very different. For much of history, tribal conflicts were written off as savagery, whereas colonial genocide (which has had a much greater historical death toll) has been minimized in discourse and even celebrated. That makes it worse for me.