That sounds like damning with faint praise. After all, America ostensibly was doing something different; it originated in a war with some ten thousand deaths in battle alone, and people today still claim this as a great revolution in the name of equality.
Meanwhile the British Empire, which I think on its own counts as a pretty large portion of the world, banned the slave trade in 1803 and slavery itself in 1833. America wouldn’t abolish slavery until 1865, and then it was still prevalent enough that this involved a war killing hundreds of thousands of people.
If America needed so much bloodshed just so it would not be much different than anyone else, why would anyone look at that as greatness of any kind? I’m with Brainspore; at least today it isn’t so far behind countries like England, Canada, and Australia.
