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 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.
I’ll get to Türkiye soon, that’s a lot to respond to. But I’ll start here:
I think this is the biggest issue, we’ve been talking at cross purposes. The point this dingbat has been trying to make the whole time has been the cultural continuity. The US doesn’t have it because it put the break with Britain and monarchy, and the denigration of American Indian culture at its core.
I kept talking about Central and South American nations to highlight the difference. Maybe I could’ve been cleared, but go back and reread my posts with that in mind.
That I mean cultural continuity and heritage is also why I’d trace Russia back to Kievan Rus and the shared Slavic origins. Yes, all the genocide and imperialism against all the other people are bad, and also a part of Russian national heritage at this point. It’s also very grim and beyond the scope of this conversation, so I’ll acknowledge it, agree it is and continues to be an atrocity.
And In fact, that the disagreement comes from my failing to clearly articulate that I meant cultural continuity and heritage. Not modern carving out of the land that makes up modern borders.