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If you compare what happened in Hawaii vs. a variety of e.g. African colonies, the crucial difference is the absence of blood in the final fall of native Hawaiian rule.

Its kind of irrelevant that the Marine intervention was illegitimate, since the US government still accepted the new regime as legitimate. A lot like the US's eventual intervention in the Black Hills, after settlers ("colonists" if the parallel is too opaque) illegally entered the area and then required protection from the natives they were displacing. If my kid steals a toy from another kid, and all I do is say "gee, sweetie, that was mean", but I don't force my kid to return the toy, its still theft.

Its also irrelevant that the coup was led largely by Hawaiian subjects (6 subjects, 7 foreigners, according to wikipedia), since the committee of safety was, to a man, non-native, whose explicit intent was to disenfranchise native Hawaiians.

I also want to highlight this: > A lot of the issues with Hawaii and Native Hawaiians can be traced back to the Kingdom times (but not all).

As in, the Kingdom times that started less than a century prior with the unification of the Hawaiian islands? The same era that coincided with the first century of European contact with Hawaiians? Even if the modern problems are directly related to the policies of the Kingdom, saying that its just the Kingdom is like saying that Titanic sank because of low quality metal in the hull, while completely omitting the iceberg.



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