What disguises this fact for the 'heritage Americans' thumbless grasp of history is those new composite states last so long that they create new identities which white nationalists then and now mistake for original, pristine identities.
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'thumbless grasp of history' gets a chef's kiss. I'll be having that.
aug 4, 2025, 4:13 pm • 12 1 • view
Today’s ethnic-nationalists are repeating the arguments of the “little Englanders” of the 18th century—whose views (not coincidentally) influenced the American colonists
aug 4, 2025, 6:52 pm • 0 0 • view
How much do you think Hollywood’s propensity to cast white people for just about everything contributes to and/or reinforces this?
aug 4, 2025, 7:16 pm • 1 0 • view
Everything except the hordes of bloodthirsty invaders, of course, which definitely doesn't help.
aug 4, 2025, 11:04 pm • 0 0 • view
E.g. the state of France does not exist on its current boundaries because all those places were already filled with 'the French.' Rather the French state already existed and made everyone in its borders *learn French.* The state created the nation, not the other way around.
aug 4, 2025, 4:05 pm • 379 46 • view
L’etat, c’est moi, not l’etat c’est nous
aug 4, 2025, 4:26 pm • 4 0 • view
In short, most modern 'nation states' began as small empires which lasted long enough to homogenize - the late unifiers (Germany, Italy) that did so in the age of nationalism are the strange exception - a product of nation-envy, as it were - not the rule.
aug 4, 2025, 4:05 pm • 251 13 • view
Were even they really that uniform? In addition to some variety even among the Germans I believe there were quite some slavs involved too? Witness the multitude of German surnames that have obvious slavic roots.
aug 4, 2025, 7:14 pm • 0 0 • view
As i understand it, Slavic surnames mostly come from linguistically polish Prussian subjects. While the quip "a Pole could easily be a Prussian, but unfortunately never a German" was largely true during the 19th century, quite a lot assimilated or intermarried in some way. Source: live in Berlin...
aug 5, 2025, 9:51 pm • 1 0 • view
...and basically all my locally born friends have a bit of polish ancestry.
aug 5, 2025, 9:53 pm • 1 0 • view
There was no German or Italian language but a bunch of dialects and regional languages
aug 4, 2025, 4:07 pm • 4 0 • view
My wife has family from opposite ends of Germany who have to use Hochdeutch to communicate with each other.
aug 4, 2025, 5:41 pm • 2 0 • view
I've lived in Northern Germany for 10 years and still struggle to understand certain dialects from South/East.
aug 4, 2025, 7:36 pm • 1 0 • view
like, ask Firenze how it historically feels about, say, Siena
aug 4, 2025, 4:58 pm • 2 0 • view
Better ask Garibaldi about it 😉
aug 4, 2025, 7:37 pm • 1 0 • view
it always strikes me as pretty funny that people expect, say, Ohio, to get over border grievances with Michigan when there's stuff that is 700 years old that people in Italy are still mad about
aug 4, 2025, 9:41 pm • 1 0 • view
All of which is to say, ethno-nationalist enclaves were the exception, not the rule, for most historical polities and when they existed, they tended to be small, weak and vulnerable precisely because of their exclusionary nature. The big tribe is the safe tribe.
aug 4, 2025, 4:05 pm • 287 19 • view
Definitely remember seeing some observations that the collapse of the Dual Monarchy didn’t exactly lead to a positive outcome with regards to the collective security of Central Europe against its neighbors.
aug 4, 2025, 6:01 pm • 0 0 • view
Yeah, wouldn't we all want to live in ... 18th-century Montenegro?
aug 4, 2025, 5:37 pm • 1 0 • view
Meanwhile, your extremely successful expansionist polities - Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Mongols etc. - became successful because they incorporate outsiders. The biggest winners (Rome, Mongols) do so the most intensely. Diversity *is* strength, it turns out.
aug 4, 2025, 4:05 pm • 401 49 • view
I find it very significant that one of the first things Livy has the Romans do is build an asylum/sanctuary for all the rabble, exiles and unwanted from the neighbourhood and then after a few kings he turns to the reader and says “that’s right, almost all Roman kings weren’t born here btw!“
aug 4, 2025, 5:30 pm • 6 1 • view
Turns out if you put significant restrictions on who gets to be part of your group you won't have the numbers to really be strong. The best way to increase population is immigration/taking in outsiders, and population is kind of important.
aug 4, 2025, 6:17 pm • 5 0 • view
So did the Inca.
aug 5, 2025, 8:08 pm • 0 0 • view
A theory I heard for why Rome ultimately failed was a turn toward more exclusive conceptions of "Roman" in later antiquity. The "barbarians" wanted to BE Roman, not conquer it.
aug 4, 2025, 6:32 pm • 6 0 • view
Yes exactly, they started excluding people born in Germania or Gaul from promotion, which caused them to switch sides.
aug 4, 2025, 6:44 pm • 6 0 • view
Would be curious to see a comparison between Rome and the Mongol empire (and their component parts) in general.
aug 4, 2025, 4:09 pm • 3 0 • view
The main difference that comes to mind is how quickly the Mongol Empire decentralised into separate, very distinct entities, creating whole new 'ethnicities' (for lack of a better word) in the process
aug 4, 2025, 4:43 pm • 1 0 • view
Hm...pastoral nomadic steppe empires are...really different. Different subsistence systems results in different systems in a lot of places. But both were genius at the incorporation of foreign peoples and technologies.
aug 4, 2025, 4:19 pm • 22 0 • view
Mongol sources are obviously varied across time and place but if you could use any from Chinese sources, would be happy to oblige.
aug 4, 2025, 4:35 pm • 2 0 • view
That might be difficult since Ming era onwards had lots of anti Yuan rheoteric and Yuan wasn't in place long enough for its own propaganda to take root in classical history. There's a focus on the destruction and lives lost by classical historians, helped by Ming literati so....
aug 6, 2025, 12:32 pm • 2 0 • view
Sorry - the Mongols? The empire that was built on massacre and lasted barely longer than the blink of an historical eye once they tried governing? By what metric were they extremely successful? Their politics in China and Korea, at least, could hardly have been called inclusive.
aug 5, 2025, 2:10 pm • 0 0 • view
Largest land empire in history.
aug 5, 2025, 2:59 pm • 5 0 • view
…which lasted - what -two and a half human lifetimes the minute they stopped killing and tried to govern. Not sure we see success, or inclusivity? Enforcement of Mongolian language policy in China, which failed. Forced marriage of KR aristocracy to Mongols engendered resentment
aug 5, 2025, 6:18 pm • 0 0 • view
"…which lasted - what -two and a half human lifetimes" Hey, that's 2 and a half times longer than Alexander's Macedonian empire. ^_^
aug 18, 2025, 3:11 am • 0 0 • view
Where did you think the Chinese infantry to take on Southern Song, or the artillerists to take on Xiangyang came from ? The Empire inability to scale up rulership, and the resulting instability combined with Imperial rule led to its fall yes but well, military wise, Mongols did very well by recruiti
aug 6, 2025, 12:21 pm • 0 0 • view
Finally, going lasted 2 lifetimes ignores en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norther... And the Ming inability to conquer the 16 commanderies and subsequent creation of the Great Wall....
aug 6, 2025, 12:28 pm • 0 0 • view
Subjects revolt, citizens don't.
aug 5, 2025, 2:41 pm • 0 0 • view
On Know Your Enemy, Mike Duncan said this exact, same thing about Rome. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h...
aug 4, 2025, 4:08 pm • 46 0 • view
I mean, from a moderately-educated layperson's perspective, the Romans were definitely bigots, and absolutely dicks, but not along the silly phenotypical lines that we have drawn since the early modern period.
aug 4, 2025, 5:11 pm • 49 0 • view
They were absolutely cultural chauvinists, but were pretty accommodating of non-Romans who assimilated, especially if they had money/power
aug 4, 2025, 9:00 pm • 0 0 • view
Yeah, the point isn't that the named examples were what we'd call progressive (because obviously not), but that even as bad as they could be, they weren't overcome by this particular ideological malfunction
aug 4, 2025, 5:24 pm • 32 0 • view
One of the fun things I extrapolated from some of the EU games (I think 2?) was that France was not just simply "France" back in the day!
aug 4, 2025, 4:10 pm • 6 0 • view
Ernest Gellner from the grave: HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO EXPLAIN THIS TO THEM?
aug 4, 2025, 5:12 pm • 1 0 • view
And speakers of Occitan are still mad about it
aug 4, 2025, 4:07 pm • 27 0 • view
amb rason ☝️
aug 4, 2025, 4:10 pm • 3 0 • view
Right!? I'd joke that I am begging these idiots to go to Europe and, like, talk to people, but half of them live in Europe and I guess don't talk to people? 'We're ethnically homogeneous' says the racist in a state (the UK) which is explicitly four different nations!
aug 4, 2025, 4:20 pm • 30 0 • view
Cornish and Manx might argue it's more than four, even.
aug 4, 2025, 9:01 pm • 6 0 • view
habitual refusal to talk to people seems to be the leading risk factor in falling into these ideologies
aug 4, 2025, 8:51 pm • 4 0 • view
Not to mention Breton, Walloon, Picard, Francoprovençal, Basque…
aug 4, 2025, 4:26 pm • 12 0 • view
And the Catalans! They're here too.
aug 4, 2025, 9:09 pm • 1 0 • view
Indeed!
aug 4, 2025, 4:27 pm • 1 0 • view
This always confuses me about race-essentialists. Like, where did those races originate from? If you were a pre-Darwin biologist who believed humans sprung up fully formed in their local regions, then okay. But anything else you have to face that ethic groups were created by a mixing of people.
aug 4, 2025, 4:21 pm • 20 0 • view
I mean, the real answer is they don't know or care, they just hate Black people with a moronic fury. I put basically the same thread on Twitter and it's doing numbers but also drawing out the racists whose arguments basically sum up with 'but they weren't Africans!' which is, of course, also wrong.
aug 4, 2025, 4:24 pm • 33 0 • view
My hot take is that while Ramses II or whoever may not have been ‘black’ by modern standards North Africa is historically more African than Near Eastern. Or at least equally so. The division of the continent by the Sahara is in no small part racism.
aug 4, 2025, 5:14 pm • 4 0 • view
St Augustine was African! So was Septimus Severus. Your statue PfP is African. Gah!
aug 4, 2025, 5:15 pm • 4 0 • view
Fundamentally, we're all Africans, the question is just 'at what level of remove.' People are people, no matter where you go or when you are. Unalienable rights, inherent dignity, all the rest. Everywhere, all the time.
aug 4, 2025, 4:25 pm • 28 0 • view
I think their idea is that while humans were at one point on even footing, the "harsh climate" of Europe induced futher evolutionary development, while the "abundant food" in tropical climes did not. And they would dispute that any significant ethnic mixing took place before the last few centuries.
aug 4, 2025, 4:51 pm • 2 0 • view
Boy, they would not like to know that Neanderthal genes are more prominent in Europeans than any other “race”!
aug 4, 2025, 11:29 pm • 0 0 • view
there's a whole branch of biblical "literalist" creationism that does this brucegerencser.net/2017/08/is-s...
aug 4, 2025, 8:53 pm • 0 0 • view
“Thumbless grasp of history” is a beautiful turn of phrase
aug 4, 2025, 6:27 pm • 1 0 • view