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Davin Valkri posted:Speaking of this, does anybody know how racism (as we would understand it) goes from "I'm Prussian, and those Swabians are jerks" to "I'm German, and those Swiss are jerks" to "I'm white, and..."? I know it's happened, but I have no idea how it happened, especially since there are parts of the world in which one of the first two is still the norm. It's a big as hell question. I think part of it is that if you are prejudicial as a society toward any ethnic group, you need to justify it somehow. Any time ethnic groups or races are treated worse than others, that creates a distinction that suddenly people care a poo poo ton about, and for a very good reason: if you have status in the system, you don't want to be mistaken for "one of them" IE the people without it. You can see that in the American south, where the term "blood libel" was a real thing: impugning somebody's "racial purity" was saying that you were contaminated with otherness. While obvious signifies are best when trying to split people into us vs. them, it doesn't have to be this way. The British were experts and dividing societies they colonised with artificial distinctions that sometimes literally made up. The Tutsis and the Hutus are the most tragic example of this
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Mar 3, 2017 17:05
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Nebakenezzer posted:While obvious signifies are best when trying to split people into us vs. them, it doesn't have to be this way. The British were experts and dividing societies they colonised with artificial distinctions that sometimes literally made up. The Tutsis and the Hutus are the most tragic example of this Hey, do you know what the Balkans and the Middle East share? If you've guessed "being ruled for centuries by colonialist empires with a strong interest in dividing local populations to prevent them from gaining any common ground against oppression" you win one me crying silently into an empty bottle! 
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Mar 3, 2017 17:09
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When slavery and European colonialism were big things, you needed to be able to justify abusing the dark-skinned people you were exploiting. The best way to do that was to imply that all the people who didn't look European were subhuman and not truly deserving of rights or life, no more than that of animals. A lot of pseudoscientific justification like phrenology went into convincing people that their actions were okay. Even then, it was a slow process. Immigrants from the less acceptable white countries like the Irish and Slavs (and the ever-present Jews) still had racism applied to them for a while until they became enough of a part of the country's makeup that you couldn't really hate on them any more. Defining a general "white" identity didn't just erase all the existing nationalism. In America, a big part of it is that powerful whites needed to keep poor whites from realizing that the former were the cause of their problems. The South has had a ton of fear mongering against blacks, first against freed slaves and now against blacks in general. It served to maintain the South's existing power structure to keep poor whites' anger directed at black people, convincing them that they would rape the women and eat the children if they were allowed to roam free.
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Mar 3, 2017 17:23
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spectralent posted:I finally played an Assassin's Creed game and now I want a 30YW AC where the actual assassin dies and the assassin guild has to pay a landsknecht to finish the job who just goes running into target's houses and chucking them out of windows with zero grace or skill. I kinda want an Assassin's Creed set during the Venezuelan War of Independence.
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Mar 3, 2017 17:38
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chitoryu12 posted:When slavery and European colonialism were big things, you needed to be able to justify abusing the dark-skinned people you were exploiting. The best way to do that was to imply that all the people who didn't look European were subhuman and not truly deserving of rights or life, no more than that of animals. When Ottoman colonialism was a big thing, how did they justify slavery? Solely on religious grounds?
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Mar 3, 2017 17:42
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Raenir Salazar posted:Children of the Arbat had a look that was kinda interesting. We only saw him and his perspective once or twice, mostly we saw him through others that interacted with him. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to think. Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward is incredibly depressing but it does have some very interesting looks inside Stalin's head. It also has an good perspective on doing scientific and engineering work in prison.
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Mar 3, 2017 17:53
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4Chan starts out as all fun and games and then having fun being politically incorrect, and then when the outside world is critical of them they get into a reactionary fury at these outsiders coming to take their jokes. Their terrible, terrible jokes. Then all of a sudden they're sending death threats and such, and they're honestly unaware of at what point they became so invested in these dumb things that they're going to fight to the last for them. It's an interesting microcosm. Cyrano4747 posted:edit: if you want to see something really funny compare FDR's 1931 campaigning rhetoric about government and the economy to Trump's. You'll piss off both dems and republicans! Well, I do get so angry at Trump and at the fact that he feeds off of attention that I feel like I can only refer to him as "that man."
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Mar 3, 2017 18:01
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The early period of exploration, i.e. Spain in Mexico or Portugal in Africa is pretty interesting to me precisely because racism hadn't fully developed. Like we'll still kill you and take your gold, but it's because we want your gold and are okay with killing humans to get it, not that we think you aren't human.
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Mar 3, 2017 18:26
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SlothfulCobra posted:4Chan starts out as all fun and games and then having fun being politically incorrect, and then when the outside world is critical of them they get into a reactionary fury at these outsiders coming to take their jokes. Their terrible, terrible jokes. I'm glad I'm not the only one who's always been suspicious of these aimless edgy jokes/memes/whatever slowly contributing to all this nonsense. But yeah somebody should do an effort post on how the Ottoman and HRE/Austria-Hungary did their own thing then got eaten from the inside by national movements!
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Mar 3, 2017 18:46
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Kopijeger posted:When Ottoman colonialism was a big thing, how did they justify slavery? Solely on religious grounds? 'Everyone else does it and has done for millennia' I imagine.
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Mar 3, 2017 18:50
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P-Mack posted:The early period of exploration, i.e. Spain in Mexico or Portugal in Africa is pretty interesting to me precisely because racism hadn't fully developed. Like we'll still kill you and take your gold, but it's because we want your gold and are okay with killing humans to get it, not that we think you aren't human. I have this interest too, when it comes to, say, the Romans, I can't decide if their world concepts were just chill with slavery or that they had justifications too, it's just they were impossibly weird justifications like "True Romans are here, these Roman-esque people are here, and these weirdos of the Judean people's liberation front are down here" [Breaks out a chart with the six classifications of Romans to see if a crime was actually committed] I mean, you read the old testament and God is "just" all the time, but it's this weird totally alien concept of just that in no way maps onto our modern concept of just. It's way closer to "uncritical obedience"* *Except Moses, he argues with God and God changes his mind **But sometimes being just means genociding the gently caress out of other Jews who are not of the people and happen to be living on the promised land ***Also sometimes you are punished for unthinking obedience, like when King David does a census of Jerusalem like God commanded and God sends a plague to kill half the city as punishment, thus invalidating the census Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Mar 3, 2017 |
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Mar 3, 2017 18:55
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Humanity really just likes breaking out artificial barriers and excuses to hate on people sadly.
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Mar 3, 2017 18:56
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For Romans their world concepts were basically just OK with slavery. They didn't try to justify it with racial theory.
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Mar 3, 2017 18:57
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Yeah, the justifications for slavery get progressively goofier as it gets less and less congruent with the rest of a society's mores until now it's 1850 and we're diagnosing slaves with drapetomania.
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Mar 3, 2017 19:03
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Kopijeger posted:When Ottoman colonialism was a big thing, how did they justify slavery? Solely on religious grounds? They had been doing it before becoming an Empire and the Devshirme system had religious overtones as well as state necessity (keep too many Christians from outnumbering Muslims)
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Mar 3, 2017 19:22
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Mr Enderby posted:Well you can probably dig up parallels to modern racism across a lot of ancient and non-western cultures, but I'd say it arises in the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century. Portugal and Spain had a pre-existing racial caste system, which marked those with Moorish or Jewish ancestry, and barred them certain positions. I would argue that the system you described was not racial in nature but entirely based on religion. It only turned into modern racism when people who converted from one faith to another (usually from Judaism or Islam to Christianity) were still treated like members of their old faith. This was actually a source of conflict between the Church, which held that all Christians were equal, and the local elites, who were quite insistent that some Christians were more equal than others.
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Mar 3, 2017 19:45
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Nebakenezzer posted:I have this interest too, when it comes to, say, the Romans, I can't decide if their world concepts were just chill with slavery or that they had justifications too, it's just they were impossibly weird justifications like "True Romans are here, these Roman-esque people are here, and these weirdos of the Judean people's liberation front are down here" Romanitas was fundamentally a behavioral thing. So they certainly looked down on foreigners for their strange practices and dubious religions, but it was pretty accepted that you could become Roman by doing as the Romans do. Which won't stop your political opponents from trying to paint you as an outsider of course, but that's politics. Goes the other way too, you could cease to be a True Roman by going native, which was famously the line Augustus used to attack Mark Antony. Their religion was very syncretic as well, going as far as straight up importing foreign gods who seemed powerful. The justification for slavery was basically just 'slavery is fine'. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Mar 3, 2017 |
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Mar 3, 2017 20:02
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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From a long historical perspective the question really isn't "why do people justify slavery" but "why do people start to think slavery is wrong?" Slavery was a totally normal and accepted thing from the earliest cultures that we have any kind of information about through to the early modern period. At that point SOME people started getting the idea that maybe it was kind of BS, but the pendulum didn't fully swing over to most ruling elites thinking it was an awful thing until maybe the early 19th century.
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Mar 3, 2017 20:24
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Plutonis posted:They had been doing it before becoming an Empire and the Devshirme system had religious overtones as well as state necessity (keep too many Christians from outnumbering Muslims) The Devshirme in particular was kind of weird as slave systems go, because you were basically a conscripted civil servant or soldier who wasn't allowed to quit until retirement. Especially if you rose to the very top of the system, whereupon you were a slave who was owned by the institution you were in charge of. Edit: ArchangeI posted:I would argue that the system you described was not racial in nature but entirely based on religion. It only turned into modern racism when people who converted from one faith to another (usually from Judaism or Islam to Christianity) were still treated like members of their old faith. This was actually a source of conflict between the Church, which held that all Christians were equal, and the local elites, who were quite insistent that some Christians were more equal than others. Which in turn was in part an outgrowth of the fight between the conversion imperative and the profit imperative. The early Spanish Empire had a good few rich people get very, very angry that the dang Church was converting their chattel and therefore turning them into real actual people. 
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Mar 3, 2017 20:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:From a long historical perspective the question really isn't "why do people justify slavery" but "why do people start to think slavery is wrong?" The economic justification faded away.
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Mar 3, 2017 21:39
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The fall of slavery in Europe was practically an accident, rather than principle, wasn't it? At some point serfdom was less complicated, and western Europe wasn't as wealthy as the other markets for slaves, so they weren't sold to as much. Then when eventually they came into a windfall of cash, they needed their slaves more in the colonies than back on the mainland. I'm not so sure on why western Europe stopped directly enslaving during its wars. I guess most of them were friendly enough with their neighbors that it didn't seem right to enslave them while fighting them? Or maybe when they were trying to conquer an area it was more viable to not uproot the populace and keep them working where they were. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Mar 3, 2017 |
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Mar 3, 2017 21:50
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Mr Enderby posted:Do they still have a poetry sub-forum? I'm not going to look for it on a work computer, but I used to find that pretty hilarious back in the day, back when neo-nazis were some weird dying subculture, not the terrifying future.
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Mar 3, 2017 22:28
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The Roman value system was quite alien to our own, and compassion wasn't a virtue in the way it is for us. Slaves deserve to be slaves because might makes right, and if they really didn't want to be slaves, why, they could just do the honorable thing and kill themselves.
Grevling fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Mar 3, 2017 |
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Mar 3, 2017 23:12
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Slavery has always been profitable, but usually softer forms of it are more efficient especially when labour force is scarce like in post-black death Europe: serfdom, tenant farming, cottaging etc. Also in the olden days switching a job wasn't quite so easy for a 'free man', you'd have to have a solid reputation and both a permission and a recommendation from your former employer, which gives the employer tremendous power over the life of the employee. Or how does a factory worker joining a strike and getting fired, then getting blacklisted among EVERY factory in the region making employment in your profession impossible, sound? It's not exactly slavery but the result was that you'd starve looking for a new job matching your skills. Racism as a justification is an interesting phenomenon in itself because later on it has fuelled some weird behaviour in the USA such as the use of chain gangs in southern states, an obvious relic of slavery still in use in Maricopa county.
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Mar 3, 2017 23:34
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Grevling posted:The Roman value system was quite alien to our own, and compassion wasn't a virtue in the way it is for us. Slaves deserve to be slaves because might makes right, and if they really didn't want to be slaves, why, they could just do the honorable thing and kill themselves. On the other hand, the Romans just saw Slavery as being a natural part of a wide spectrum of civil rights that you could (within reason) move up and down and that's just a thing that could happen. The Romans didn't see any inconsistency with a slave having no freedoms with respect to their master, yet wielding immense practical power over others by virtue of being chief clerk to a Consul. Fast forward to the enlightenment and you have a problem because now people are claiming that everyone has some innate rights that cannot be lost. So either slavery is immoral, or the people you have enslaved aren't really people. And that is the road down which the institution of Southern slavery becomes far more brutal and hateful than any other.
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Mar 4, 2017 00:02
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It should also be noted that Roman slavery, with some exceptions such as the mines, was slightly better than the chattel slavery of the Americas. It was more of lowest lot in life versus literally subhuman and property.
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Mar 4, 2017 00:07
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Pontius Pilate posted:It should also be noted that Roman slavery, with some exceptions such as the mines, was slightly better than the chattel slavery of the Americas. It was more of lowest lot in life versus literally subhuman and property. This exactly. Mine slavery was effectively a death sentence, but particularly during the early Imperial period, Roman slaves acquired a number of legal rights.
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Mar 4, 2017 00:13
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Stairmaster posted:The economic justification faded away. I don't think I agree with that, slave-grown cash crops were still very profitable. You couldn't work your slaves to death quite as casually as you could in the 1600s, but that was because the British shut off the Trans Atlantic slave trade.
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Mar 4, 2017 00:38
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Pontius Pilate posted:It should also be noted that Roman slavery, with some exceptions such as the mines, was slightly better than the chattel slavery of the Americas. It was more of lowest lot in life versus literally subhuman and property. Also, not being race based, literally anyone could become a slave if they had a bad turn in life. I don't recall the exact quote but there's a Roman writer who said something like 'treat your slaves well because it could be you next'. Not so much for white dudes in the South.
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Mar 4, 2017 00:42
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Pontius Pilate posted:It should also be noted that Roman slavery, with some exceptions such as the mines, was slightly better than the chattel slavery of the Americas. It was more of lowest lot in life versus literally subhuman and property. I thought it sucked just as bad for the most part, because most slaves were on the latifundia and were treated like chattel. We just have a rosy picture of it because most of the slaves we hear about are Cicero's secretary or some other cushy job. The ones outside of rich peoples' houses didn't get written about as much but were far more numerous.
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Mar 4, 2017 00:45
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OctaviusBeaver posted:I thought it sucked just as bad for the most part, because most slaves were on the latifundia and were treated like chattel. We just have a rosy picture of it because most of the slaves we hear about are Cicero's secretary or some other cushy job. The ones outside of rich peoples' houses didn't get written about as much but were far more numerous. And there were three major slave rebellions, the Servile Wars. Those helped slavery reforms along because they were afraid of slaves rebelling again and again.
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Mar 4, 2017 01:13
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Antti posted:And there were three major slave rebellions, the Servile Wars. Those helped slavery reforms along because they were afraid of slaves rebelling again and again. Yeah was going to mention that Slavery was really loving bad in the Roman Republic if Spartacus managed to rally over a hundred thousand people with him during the third revolt.
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Mar 4, 2017 01:17
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Oh it was still Slavery and still pretty terrible for the vast majority. The distinction that I'm getting at is that a Roman slave could be manumitted and become a freedman and apart from the social stigma of having been a slave, the Romans wouldn't bat an eyelid at it. His or her children could become full free citizens. In contrast, the US South violently rejected the notion that a black person could have any legal status other than as a slave. To even think otherwise was to threaten their entire social fabric.
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Mar 4, 2017 01:29
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Alchenar posted:On the other hand, the Romans just saw Slavery as being a natural part of a wide spectrum of civil rights that you could (within reason) move up and down and that's just a thing that could happen. The Romans didn't see any inconsistency with a slave having no freedoms with respect to their master, yet wielding immense practical power over others by virtue of being chief clerk to a Consul. I think this is typical of a lot of pre-modern slave systems. For example in old Siam 'slavery' was common, but it can be hard to distinguish slaves from other forms of serfdom. For example Nobles and Princes could buy and sell serfs from one another, and in certain periods would even tattoo their names onto the serfs to prevent them from running away. Serfs under the de jure direct control of the King would not infrequently sell themselves into slavery, in order to escape their obligation of corvee labor. Slaves could take any profession, including soldiery, and possessed many rights and privileges that varied with how they become property. Meanwhile all technically free people were embedded in patron-client system which came with numerous obligations. Living without a patron, perhaps the most free social category, essentially meant living as an outcast or outlaw with no rights or recourse to the legal system.
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Mar 4, 2017 02:17
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I have been wondering for a while about how exactly slavery priced out versus paying workers who would naturally be more productive since their lives were less horrible and miserable. The day-to-day labor of the slaves obviously was free, but there's still the cost of food, board, and hiring men to supervise them and catch them when they run off, in addition to the cost up front of purchasing the slaves in the first place. It feels like it wouldn't necessarily be as clear of a cost benefit as people normally make it out to be. I kind of have a gut feeling that individuals being free to make their own choices about their lives would be overall more efficient and profitable for all parties involved. Of course, slaves wouldn't necessarily bought or sold all that often at the point of the civil war. The cost of the slaves would already have been sunk, and a lot of slaveowners would just be inheriting their slaves rather than purchasing them new. And that sunk cost was one of the big reasons they fought against abolitionism; it would mean the destruction of their wealth in the form of human livestock. Not that it was really a matter of an individual's right to their own property. Slaveowners who wanted to free their own slaves legally had to jump through all sorts of hoops to actually do it. The south respected their property rights as much as they respected the free states' rights to ban slavery within their borders.
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Mar 4, 2017 02:22
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SlothfulCobra posted:I have been wondering for a while about how exactly slavery priced out versus paying workers who would naturally be more productive since their lives were less horrible and miserable. The day-to-day labor of the slaves obviously was free, but there's still the cost of food, board, and hiring men to supervise them and catch them when they run off, in addition to the cost up front of purchasing the slaves in the first place. It feels like it wouldn't necessarily be as clear of a cost benefit as people normally make it out to be. I kind of have a gut feeling that individuals being free to make their own choices about their lives would be overall more efficient and profitable for all parties involved. For jobs that had high mortality rates, like draining malarial swamps, it was preferable to use cheap immigrant labor since there was no sunk cost there. Southern slavery wasn't terrible simply because people worked without pay, it was terrible because your masters could and would rape you, impregnate you, then tear the child from your arms and sell them off to where you could never see them again. It required people who could deny their own children humanity because of the color of their skin. Economics doesn't begin to tell the story.
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Mar 4, 2017 02:38
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Davin Valkri posted:Why would they call their own stuff "propaganda" and not "agit-prop" or whatever? I thought you want to use "propaganda" to describe what "the other guys" are putting out, and your media is "the suppressed truth" or something similar. Agitprop is too communist for nazis. Mr Enderby posted:Do they still have a poetry sub-forum? I'm not going to look for it on a work computer, but I used to find that pretty hilarious back in the day, back when neo-nazis were some weird dying subculture, not the terrifying future. "Roses are red, violets are blue. My job sucks because of, the International Jew."? I can't imagine nazis being very good at poetry. Or anything creative. Though I suppose I do like their architecture but maybe that says more about me than anything. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Mar 4, 2017 |
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Mar 4, 2017 02:54
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Alchenar posted:In contrast, the US South violently rejected the notion that a black person could have any legal status other than as a slave. To even think otherwise was to threaten their entire social fabric. There were a lot of free blacks in the south. Granted their situation was somewhat less than sunny, but there were still a lot of them. SlothfulCobra posted:I have been wondering for a while about how exactly slavery priced out versus paying workers who would naturally be more productive since their lives were less horrible and miserable. The day-to-day labor of the slaves obviously was free, but there's still the cost of food, board, and hiring men to supervise them and catch them when they run off, in addition to the cost up front of purchasing the slaves in the first place. It feels like it wouldn't necessarily be as clear of a cost benefit as people normally make it out to be. I kind of have a gut feeling that individuals being free to make their own choices about their lives would be overall more efficient and profitable for all parties involved. The general consensus among economic historian types is that the chattel system was extremely inefficient and unnecessarily impoverished a whole lot of non-slaves in addition to the obvious human rights issues, but the thing that it did do extremely well was to consolidate wealth and power in the hands of the big planters. For example, look at the average craftsman or factory owner in the south: they'd be far better off serving large numbers of yeoman families cultivating free soil, but since the prosperous yeoman farmer was practically unknown in the south (he couldn't ever compete on price with the big slavers), they had to do all or most of their business with the big planters. As such, their perspective was that they were as dependent on slavery as anyone, despite the fact that elsewhere in the US, factories and craftsmen were getting far wealthier in freesoil economies. So, they, along with farmers, drivers, etc etc, all ended up supporting the planters even though they almost certainly would have been better off in a free society.
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Mar 4, 2017 02:56
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Cyrano4747 posted:At that point SOME people started getting the idea that maybe it was kind of BS, but the pendulum didn't fully swing over to most ruling elites thinking it was an awful thing until maybe the early 19th century. Before this totally gets veered away from, I got interested in the British anti-slavery campaign based on an history enthusiast who sketched the origins of the decision but was mainly interested in the ships and the gallant captains who did clever things with them. Later accounts show that the whole campaign to stop slavers was for decades a stop-start thing since the Navy wasn't going to pay for it and making money from fighting slavery was tough to beat actually doing it. It attracted a few characters, and led to the interesting institution of flags of convenience for American ships (particularly Liberia). It was also really difficult to police the whole west coast of Africa, funnily enough. It's a good illustration of how you can legislate something and then for decades it's just um err no one wants to actually be the bad guys and actually do it properly.
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Mar 4, 2017 03:54
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bewbies posted:There were a lot of free blacks in the south. Granted their situation was somewhat less than sunny, but there were still a lot of them. Most of the free black population was concentrated in the border states or the area around Washington, they were comparatively rare in the future confederacy of the deep south. With the exception of Louisiana, where things got weird.
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Mar 4, 2017 04:03
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