Do people in France have flags on their cars? Do they sell clothing with the flag for Zimbabwe everywhere? Do people dress as their country’s mascot for every day events?
Do people in France have flags on their cars? Do they sell clothing with the flag for Zimbabwe everywhere? Do people dress as their country’s mascot for every day events?
This is such a comically ignorant view. Most countries in the world have a similar history as the US. It’s like you dingleberries think the US is the only country in history with slavery or conquest. This view shows that you have a myopic view of history.
Every single country in the New World is a product of European colonization, slavery, and erasure of Indigenous people. This is true from Canada all the down to Chile. In fact, this is actually more true in other countries because the US was a small part of the Atlantic slave trade and the Spanish and Portuguese empires made killing natives their favorite past time.
It’s not just the new world, but this also applies to the old world. Countries like Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Australia, New Zealand, and the list goes on and on were had similar histories.
The reality is that this just how nation building is. Nations don’t spring up out nowhere and magically gain land and sovereignty. Nations are built through conquest, hardships, exclusive sense of pride, and cultural homogeneity over time.
It makes you wonder if peaceful societies can ever exist without threat. It’s almost like the most greedy and psychopathic people always endure. That’s why the liberals in the US and Europe will not win against the violent right wingers. The indigenous folks in the US have a word for the white greed sickness. I think they call it watika.
The answer is no. That’s why militaries exist. Peaceful countries cannot exist without them having a strong military or a strong power with a strong military backing them. We live in a reality where people have infinite desires and needs but the world only has a finite amount of resources. There will always be competition for power because of it.
Most countries in South and Central America have a less exclusionary relation with their indigenous people, and having a rebellion against their ruling classes with indigenous participation rather than switching one set of white rich property holders for another.
Part of that due to the Spanish settlers marrying and having kids with indigenous peoples, and the metizos being a large part of the population, rather than US focused pure European ancestry without one drop of black/native blood. Meaning the US has a lack of tie to pre-settler culture and history that these nations don’t to the same degree.
I do agree that Canada has an issue with it too, as does Australia. New Zealand has been working to integrate Maori culture over the last decade or so and made big strides to integration.
The old world cases are also more complicated, you could say South Africa but that history of oppression and apartheid and recognised and have been integrated somewhat to self identity, though obviously a long way to go and the ANC being corrupt and infighty hasn’t help one jot. Maybe the party will collapse and South Africa can finally start to move in the right direction?
Russia has had a long history of culture as well as imperial expansion. Yes, the people of Siberia and Central Asia have suffered a lot, but there’s a Russian identity that goes back over 1000 years anchored to (albiet mostly western Russia places and events).
For Türkiye, Morroco, Azerbaijan, Zimbabwe, Zambia, I’m gonna need your notes to begin to comprehend what your point is with them - probably due to my own ignorance on their history. (Except Türkiye, I just think you’re wrong there, but intrigued to see your logic.)
Turkey traces it’s modern identity to the late Ottoman Empire. The Turks aren’t native to the region, they’re originally from central Asia. Before the formation of the empire in the 15th century by about 400 years, the Turks came into the area uninvited and started colonized Anatolia. They formed little principalities and implemented islam as their law, and the locals, who were mostly Christian at the time, weren’t too happy about it.
You see, islam is a very brutal ideology. It instructs it’s followers to conquer all non muslims, force them to either convert or live as oppressed second class citizens under islam, and if they resist massacre them. In case of the latter, islam instructs that the men be beheaded, the women and girls taken as sex slaves, their property looted and distributed to muslims soldiers as spoils of war, and to destroy their culture entirely. It was so bad that Christians actually organized multiple crusades against them. The point of me telling you this, is that these were the predecessors to the Ottoman Empire, and when the Empire formed to unite the Turks, they used the same methods to rule and conquer.
Everywhere the Ottoman Empire went, they committed atrocities. From the fall of Constantinople to the end of the empire around WWI, they committed massacres, ethnic cleansing, genocides, cultural erasure, wide scale slavery, and oppression. It was so bad that virtually all of the countries surrounding modern day Turkey have their identities formed from how they survived the Ottoman onslaught.
While the Turks slowly expanded over time in Anatolia and they ruled areas far beyond it, they mostly inhabited central Anatolia. The areas around the Black sea and Mediterranean sea were mostly Greek, the areas to west in and around the Armenian highlands were inhabited by Armenians, the areas around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were Assyrian, and the areas to the south east were Kurdish, who were a part of Persia at the time. That means Anatolia was a very diverse places compared to today. So what happened?
Well, before WWI, the Ottoman Empire knew it was on it’s last legs, and all the oppressed minorities in the empire wanted freedom and independence so they started making deals with foreign powers and started separatist movements. The Ottoman Empire’s response was to straight up genocide them all. Between 1910 and 1925, the Ottoman empire started the Armenian genocide, the Greek genocide, and the Assyrian genocide. These were some of the worst atrocities in human history. They are so bad that they literally inspired Hitler. The Armenian genocide in particular was so bad that it was one of the two events that inspired Raphael Lemkin to coin the word “genocide” (the Holocaust was the other).
Notice, how I said the Ottoman empire “started” the genocides instead of just “committed”? This is because while these genocides were happening, the empire collapsed and was replaced a Turkish nationalist movement called The Young Turks. This movement was secular, liberal, democratic, and very genocidal because they continued the genocides with a passion. The reason for this was that the same people who ruled in the Ottoman Empire migrated over to The Young Turks.
The end results? The Greeks were genocided and ethnically cleansed out of Thrace and western Anatolia. The Armenians were genocided and ethnically cleansed out of eastern Anatolia, the Assyrians were genocided and ethnically cleansed out of southern Anatolia, and as a bonus, Turkey started oppressing and genociding the Kurds. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds were killed in things like the Dersim and Zilan massacres. Not only that, but they also tried, and are still trying to culturally erase the Kurds.
Did you know it was illegal for Kurds to speak Kurdish, wear Kurdish clothes, have Kurdish names, or express Kurdish folklore until the 1980s? It was even illegal for them to call themselves Kurds, Turkey forced the name “mountain Turks” upon them. Even to this day, Kurdish is still illegal to be taught in schools and universities, it is still illegal to be spoken or used in the Turkish government, Kurdish celebrations and holidays are still banned, Kurdish political parties are still firmly banned. You think things got better since the 80s? Think again, because Turkey from the 90s to the current day has destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages, displaced millions of Kurds, imposed “food embargoes” (read: engineered famines) on Kurdish areas, and they’re going out of their way to occupy, destabilize, and destroy the Kurds in Iraq, Iran, and Syria to prevent the creation of a Kurdish state.
But we’re not done yet, because there’s another remnant of the Ottoman Empire that’s relevant today. During Ottoman times, the island of Cyprus was occupied, colonized, and ruled by the Turks. When the Ottoman empire fell, the island was occupied by the British. The British decided to grand the island its independence, and along with Greece and Turkey, they signed an agreement saying that all 3 countries will be protectors of Cyprus that will help preserve it’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. The reason why Greece was included was because most of the island’s population was Greek and the island was Greek for most of history.
Regardless, during the 1970s, there was a fascist takeover that sought to get rid of Turkish influence on the island. As a response, Turkey invoked the agreement that they singed before and got rid of the fascists… but they never left. Instead, they illegal created a puppet state, that nobody but Turkey recognizes, that occupies around 40% of the island in clear violation of the treaty. The Turkish speaking Cypriots were against this and wanted reunification, and so Turkey decides to send Turks from Turkey to colonize the island. They’ve been increasing in numbers over the years, and now Turkey has basically annexed a part of another country.
We’re still not done because Turkey isn’t done with the Armenians because they officially deny the genocide, and they’re still actively seeking to destroy Armenia as a country. They’re THE biggest backer of the Azerbaijani dictator and his quest to complete the Armenian genocide. Ilham Aliyev has invaded Armenia multiple times, literally built racist anti-Armenian parks for children in the country, and has very recently ethnically cleansed 100k Armenians out of their lands. Azerbaijan, like Turkey, also denies the Armenian genocide but they are also proud of it.
People nowadays love complaining about Israel or China or whatever, but Turkey is far worse than all of them but nobody seems to care, but I digress. Why am I telling you all of this? It’s because what I just told you IS the Turkish identity. All these atrocities that I told you? That’s the core part of the Turkish identity. Turks are very proud of the conquests that the Ottoman Empire did and a big portion of the population want to see it restored. They are proud of the occupations, they are proud of the oppression, and they are VERY proud of the genocides they committed. If you talk to a Turk about the Armenian genocide or any other genocide they’ll either flip out and either victim blame about those people brought genocide upon themselves or they’ll just straight up say they’re glad it happened.
This is obviously an oversimplification of Turkish history, but this is how Turkey came to be. The bloody and dark history is a part of the Turkish identity, and it is how the country came to be. It’s still on going, and Turks are proud of it. But its not just them, this is how a lot of countries came to be and they all have similar nationalist mentalities. Atrocities just happen to be a big part of nation building.
This highly depends on the country. The Spanish Empire had an entire racial caste system that put races into a hierarchy of superiority. Just because it didn’t work the same way as the American system, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. Latin America has a lot of racism going on and it isn’t talked about enough. But that’s besides the point, we’re not talking about the cultural continuity or racial purity of new world countries, but rather how they came to be. All these countries exist as a result of colonialism, slavery, and genocide. They were all formed by the same 3-4 European empires during the same time.
You misunderstand Russian history. The modern Russian identity doesn’t extend back 1000 years. The Kievan Rus isn’t the start of the modern Russian identity, it’s the start of the Eastern Slavic identity as a whole. Ukraine and Belarus also trace their roots back to the Kievan Rus. The modern Russian identity started with the formation of the Grand Duchy of Moscow in the 13th century, which on to occupy the northern half of what we today consider to be the Russian heartland.
Russia didn’t began it’s expansion until became the Russian Tsardom in the 16th century, which is interestingly around the same time as the age of exploration kicked off in Western Europe. From the 1500s to the 1700s, Russia expanded to it’s borders to more or less match the current borders of the Russian federation. The places it conquered weren’t Russian. Russia enacted campaigns of Russification where they would suppress, ban, and marginalize the native cultures and impose the Russian language, laws, version of Christianity, and customs on the people they conquered. They would then put Russians in charge of administration and have them oversee a settler colonialism campaign to shift the demographics to make it majority Russian. If a group is too big or too resistant they would genocide them through “deportations”. This method was inherited by the next iterations of the Russian state such as the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation.
Russia has done conquered, massacred, genocided, deported, and oppressed the following groups of people since the creation of the Russian Tsardom:
Do you even begin to comprehend how comically long this list is? The absurd thing is that this isn’t even the full list. You don’t even hear about most of these people because Russia has mostly wiped them out or is still trying to. Also these atrocities didn’t take place 1000 years ago, most of them happened within the past 200 years.
Countries like Zambia and Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) had a very similar history to South Africa. They were all colonized by the British and had other European settlers in them who implemented a system of apartheid, displaced the natives, and implemented a certain degree of slavery. These eras ended similarly in all these countries, and they’re even suffering from similar problems today.
Morocco is an interesting example. You see Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia were not originally Arab, they were Berber/Amazigh. These people had their own language, religion, culture, and everything. The Arabs came in, started massacring them, enslaving them, erasing their culture, pushing them off their lands, and forcing islam and Arabic on to them. This process started long ago, but it is still on going to this day. These people are still persecuted. When the French came in to colonize the region, these people ended up being double colonized. The modern Arab states in the Maghreb region are built on the oppression, enslavement, colonization, and genocide of these people.
This deserves it’s own comment, so I’ll write my explanation there.
You’ve seemed to have left out the part about the plagues brought by the Spanish that wiped out entire civilizations in South America before any Europeans had any chance to even come in contact with them.
Let’s not sugar coat the fact that the origins of Latino culture is no better than what happened to the natives of North America. The Spanish are well known to have completely destroyed indigenous cultures and their history in the name of Christianity.
Origins, sure.
Colombus was such a racist dick he was recalled by the King of Spain for poor treatment of indigenous people.
But I also mentioned the integration and how there is less of a divide. Obviously still a divide when you look at racism, discrimination, the likelyhood of indigenous people to have joined a guerilla movement such as FARC or the Zapatista.
But that’s more than the US generally gives, and it was starting to change… But Trump terms 1 and 2 have certainly put up roadblocks.
The way that indigenous identity and partisan politics in South America also doesn’t help and may well be putting their causes back as the right and left continue to coalesce about USAian talking points.
And yes, the destruction and loss of central American cultures due to the Spanish conquest and destruction is terrible, as is the loss of any culture and it’s artefacts and legacy.