Please remove if this doesn’t fit the rules. I love learning. :)

So it is generally accepted in the mainstream that the US believed in racial supremacy and conducted genocidal conquest against the Amerindian populations / took land from Mexico. This campaign was called “Manifest Destiny” and is generally looked on critically in the US. A lot of mainstream might frame it in a “regrettable light,” and there is a lot of nuanced discussion over if it was a legal genocide, if the disease factor was just an unfortunate tragedy, etc.

Butter at the end of the day, Americans putting a figure like Polk/Roosevelt as the face of the American space program wouldn’t turn our stomachs as much as when Americans put Paperclip-nazi Werner von Brauhn there, for example. (well his dedicated NASA page describes him as a “champion of space exploration” so maybe I’m wrong about that, too)

So now when we compare it with the rhetoric on Lebensraum, we get stark contrast. The mainstream goes gloves off, calling it a major crime, subjecting any dissenters to academic isolation (rightfully), etc. Anything beyond total condemnation is (rightly) unacceptable within the academic community. Of course any celebration of Nazi leaders in other contexts are also swiftly (and correctly) condemned out of fear that pushing such ideas makes the Nazi leaders more palatable to the general public.

So my question is, what is the reason for the change in temperature? Why is Lebensraum appropriately and totally condemned, while Manifest Destiny is “brutal,” but “highly consequential”? Figures like Polk and Roosevelt are not considered universally negative figures like high Nazi officials are.