Before the French Revolutionary Red Terror, the Spanish inquisition, which killed a dozen or so people every year, was the standard evil example of repression, and Queen Bloody Mary, who murdered a couple of hundred and caused a thousand or so to flee, the classic tyrant.

That's probably attributed to the parochialism of Bretons of the era -- they couldn't know about the Yangzhou massacre in China where 800,000 people were slaughtered, and the Massacre of the Latins in the 12th century in Constantinople wouldn't stick in their minds.

But I'm sure they remembered St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in the 16th century -- and in Central Europe "Vlad Tepes the Impaler" who killed tens of thousands people was known too.

Today, however, Prince Sihanouk, however, who murdered twelve thousand, many of them in ways colorful, dramatic, and extraordinary, is however sainted for his extraordinary peacefulness and tolerance

Oh, please, sainting monsters has a long tradition, a tradition atleast as old as Theodosius "The Great", proclaimed the Great, and revered by the Orthodox Church, because of how greatly he butchered thousands of pagans back in the 4th century AD.

(facially the claim about the Enlightenment fostering resistance to slavery is particularly bizarre, or at least lazy.)

I'm curious why you think this, looking at the history to strikes me as fairly obvious. The meme that slavery is wrong in principal, as opposed to only being wrong when it happens to you, is definitely a product of the enlightenment.

A large degree of blindness is a better way to phrase things, certainly.

At the risk of tautology, post-colonialism isn't centrally concerned with pre-colonialism, because, well, it's post-colonialism, not pre-colonialism. It's concerned with a very particular world, our modern world, and the interlocking parts within it.

Now, what I think Konqvistador (heh) meant - although I could of course be wrong - is that post-colonialists are always going around denouncing Europe and never the Celestial Empire or Four Regions or Triple Alliance or what have you, which were not so different than Europe in its heyday, after all, and that this reflects an obsession with Europe that belies their claims to draw attention to the colonized and their accusations that Europe sees itself as unique. This would be a mistake, but a very understandable one, because some of the implicit assumptions that postcolonialism sees itself as challenging is the idea that there are more or less independent, coherent nations stretching through history and which are in a process of, albeit at unequal rates conditioned by their internal characteristics and contact with more advanced nations, acquiring progressively greater degrees of modernity. (Like Sid Meier's Civilization, you might say.) If something like this forms your basic model and you don't read post-colonialists carefully (who has time to read everyone carefully?) it looks like they're complaining about Europeans doing what everyone else has been since the dawn of agriculture, just sucking less at it.

But in fact they're operating from a very different set of assumptions. Modernity, in this view, consists of incorporation into a (the) capitalist world-system, something that in some respects is much like the tributary empires of the past and in other respects quite different. It has its own organic logic to it, in need of differentiated parts fulfilling distinct tasks; it moves people, goods, and money around at rapid speed to create them; it fundamentally reconstitutes what goes into it. So what it means to say that the modern world arose from a colonial long event is that we're all colonialism's children, some much more favored than others, not that one of our dads beat the others' up. If you like, you can say that "ironically" postcolonialism says we're all Europeans now, in that a set of relations that first and primarily encompassed Europe now encompasses the globe, but of course this isn't actually ironic, just an example of semantic Dutch Booking.