Race- Privilege, Relations, Racism, etc.

It's funny to me when thinly veiled white nationalists get super defensive if you say America is not an great country due to various issues that we still struggle to solve and then pull arguments like that out to try to justify their position that America is great.

Yeah I get it, no other country on Earth is free of atrocities and shitty buisness. That doesn't automatically excuse our country though.

Honestly. Only American white supremacists say that, all the European ones considerate it a horrible race-mixed mess.

Truth is, native societies weren't neither superior or inferior, they were roughly in the same level as European ones, or as much as you can be given their context.

Imperialism is a constant of human history overall. It just happens that the European were the strongest due to geographical factors.

Implications? It's open literal White Mans Burder.

And they often fanboy the side(s) that lost decisively and never had much of a prayer to begin with (the CSA, 3rd Reich, etc).

B-but winners wrote history!!.

The CSA is a fairy tale of aristocratic white men standing on dark-skinned folks. Nothing white supremacist doesn't love.

Similarly, the argument "my ancestors didn't do X" often ignores much of what we've learned about human social psychology, chiefly how ideology influences and is influenced by peer pressure. It also relates to our willingness to defend systems from which we aren't likely to benefit on the off-chance that we'll get our reward - that we'll get to live in the land of milk and honey or something to that effect.

"My ancestors didn't own slaves" or "the Irish were slaves, too, you know" in the context of chattel slavery in the American South are two arguments that get tossed around a lot. The point about the Irish being slaves has been debunked numerous times, as has equivocating indentured servitude with chattel slavery. I suggest reading Liam Hogan's research on this topic.

On the issue of one's ancestors not owning slaves, that was statistically the case, but your ancestors more than likely wanted to own slaves, at least enough to support the institution based on economic, moral and religious rationalizations popular at the time. Wanting to own a slave or supporting the institution of slavery was not that ideologically far removed from tacitly or passively supporting xenophobic, revanchist or irredentist policies today because you might (a snowball's chance in hell) get your two-story house, two cars, a golden retriever and a white picket fence. I won't speak for non-US tropers here, but in the US, that still means you've made it, so to speak. Read Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era for a healthy insight into this topic, as well.

This also goes back to the "job creator" myth that still crops up from time to time as an explanation for why regulatory mechanisms are bad for a given economy, and in turn why meritocracy myths often - but not always - have racist undertones. I.e. "they were conquered/subjugated/had their economy ransacked because they didn't work hard enough to defend it". White supremacy tends to be morally tautological. You can see how going down this rabbit hole leads to some really pernicious apologia such as eugenics, historical romanticization/oversimplification and Malthusian economics.

I suppose what I'm arguing is that when we argue against racist policies and other atrocities, there is a temptation to either claim that it's not a big deal because everyone did it or to argue that it's not a big deal because so few people did it. I'm aware that slave ownership as a population percentage averaged in the single digits in the buildup to the Civil War, but it was a fairly resilient system that remained in place for so long because it was granted vast moral and economic legitimacy. And mentions of internecine conflicts/slavery among indigenous peoples does nothing to address the continuing fallout from systems of oppression that were never properly remedied in the first place.

For example, the Sengoku period in Japan has nothing to do with Japanese interment camps in the US that were explicitly based on a racist ideology that had no discernibly positive effect on Imperial Japanese espionage, real or imagined.

I could go on, but my post is getting a bit bloated.

Edited by Aprilla on Jul 20th 2018 at 11:33:22 AM

Mind you, I remember the Murder on the Orient Express novel's depiction of America.

Poroit picks up everyone is American fairly early on because it is a mixture of various races working together and who know each other intimately. It was a melting pot in his view and a place where the world was becoming one.

I miss that American dream.

I had an argument over a the Mexicans are lazy vs Mexicans are stealing American jobs with a dipshit who was bashing immigrants for taking the jobs Americans didn't want or didn't stay for long in.

I said for him to pick his mind, over the subject how Mexicans are stealing jobs from Americans and what does that say about American workers. How can one be lazy and at the same time do the work no one else is willing to do.

His argument is because Mexicans are so cheap the employers can hire 4 Mexicans to do the same job one American would even if they are lazy.

I tried to explain how workplace management doesn't work like that due to the increase of people doing the same tasks harms the productivity (economic theory 101 right there); how if the pay was so low they might as well have stayed in Mexico due to those payments having to be at least a fourth of a minimum wage; how most of them while still working for scraps still contribute due to VAT but can't collect the social benefits; and how the biggest beneficiary of illegal immigration are larger companies who can exploit those workers and profit of their unregulated work, something the Republicans are still working to keep going.

From there on, you can guess the cussing that was directed at me. It is either circular logic or tautologies being used to justify those viewpoints.

And apparently George Soros owes me money.

Edited by AngelusNox on Jul 20th 2018 at 3:49:02 PM

That is not hard at all. I am lazy, can confirm

Also, if Inmigrants take the job that no one wants. Then what is the issue, how you can steal something that nobody wants?

Edited by KazuyaProta on Jul 20th 2018 at 1:58:24 PM

Whoever said that has never bothered to read a Japanese text book.

Any history book to be exact. Unless they count literal propaganda, which they certainly would read.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Jul 20th 2018 at 4:53:23 AM

The fetishization of Nazi Germany is something that still annoys me.

It still the Wehrboo wet dream to see Germany win because of Imagine how science would have advanced if Germany won II and Look at those wunderwaffe the Germans were making.

Specially when Germany wasn't exactly ahead of the Allies, specially the US and UK when it came to science and technological development, and it a lot of ways they were fairly behind a few things.

Secondly, the wunderwaffe of Nazi Germany did more harm to themselves than it did to the enemy. Either because they didn't work properly or because they were so dangerous to use and expensive, there was no way to get them in enough numbers to make any difference.

And lastly the fucking myth of Nazi Germany efficiency, this one is the dumbest fucking myth that keeps being perpetrated. Nazi Germany never achieved either the large scale manufacturing capabilities the US and USSR did, but they also couldn't even get the logistics right, or have weapons procurement that weren't clusterfucks or even think things through like should we build a logistically 50 ton tank prone towards catching fire and breaking down when our industry is suffering from parts shortages and we can't get enough fuel for the tanks we already have, let alone bigger tanks?.

Not to mention how Nazi propaganda was taken at face value by historians when exploring the feats of German crews.

Wasn't some of their tech dangerous or impractical to use? Like the rocket-powered fighter-glider, two or three Heinkels fused together, the Tiger line, an batch of defective torpedos, that giant "mobile" artillery piece, and the motherfucking Maus?

Like 80% of their stuff was just crap and that's arguably a generous number.

Not sure whether this belongs here, but does anyone else find the embrace of the "France's African World Cup team" meme by otherwise-progressive folks a bit troubling? I just ran into this Vox article covering the soft debate between Trevor Noah and French ambassador to the US Gerard Araud on the issue, and while it brings up some very valid points regarding France's need to come to terms with its violent colonial past and the ethical implications of assimilationist policies, I think that it's also terribly biased against the idea of the players adopting a singular French identity.

I mean... there are very real problems with France's "aggressive vision of assimilationism" (exemplified in recent years by strict laicite laws), but the article also glosses over the fact that immigrants of non-European descents have been coming to France for generations and chosen to adopt its national identity of their own volition. Thomas Alexandre Dumas, a black man from Saint-Domingue (Haiti), became a general in the Revolutionary Army in 1793. Severiano de Heredia, a biracial Cuban, became the first non-white mayor of Paris in 1879. Many African-Americans immigrated to France in the interwar years and took up a wholly French identity, including one of my favourite historical figures, cabaret performer Josephine Baker. If the country is not colourblind, then at least it's certainly no stranger to the idea of colourblind civic nationalism. And that's what the French team has displayed in this past tournament. They declared their French identity in pretty much the loudest way possible - by wearing its colours, singing its anthem and representing it in the world's most widely-broadcast television event.

This is the 21st century, and national identities have become infinitely fluid things. I believe that it should be possible for anyone to be fully French and fully African. In an ideal world, calling them an "African" team shouldn't take anything away from their French identity. And as far as I know, the members haven't been exactly shy or discreet about the other facets of their personal identities - Pogba documented his 2017 Hajj trip on Instagram, for instance. But I can't help but wonder if the well-meaning "African team" jokes came from the same buried sentiment that leads to angry yells of "go back to Africa", the one that says that being African does indeed make them less French. I really don't know; how would Americans feel if European media started calling NBA an "African league"? Or if they labelled Asian-American-majority colleges and science olympiad teams "Chinese"? What I know so far is that the players have chosen to identify as French, and it's frankly uncomfortable to see people pushing national identities that they never chose onto them. If someone were to ask me to identify them by a different gender and pronoun from the one they had at birth, I wouldn't deny them that dignity just to be a contrarian - and I don't see how this case is any different.

Thoughts? If there's any important fact that I missed, I'd be happy to be corrected.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Jul 20th 2018 at 6:12:19 AM

The first were actually pretty good tanks.... when they worked, but had so many maintenance problems that "When they worked" was uncertain, they weren't wunderwaffen, but they weren't bad tanks by any measure either.... For bad tanks you want the Tiger(Porchse) which is a VERY different tank made by a diffrent manufacture with diffrent engines, bodywork, and everything... and its offshoot the Ferdinand, which may have been some of the worst vehicles ever made... there was a hilarious interveiw with one of there crew members on the eastern front talking about how they were taking a formation of them up a hill and one exploded, so they all started panicing about Russian artilary....

Until another exploded, and then another.... at which point they calmed down because "It was just the engines blowing up from overheating due to going up a foothill"

Second point, on Torpedos? The germans had some bad ones, but no one had working torpedo in WWII... the worst batch went to the Americans though, who in just 1943 alone fired off over 1,442 MK14 torpedos and sunk less then 43,000 tones of ship with them, and of 40 torpedo boats lost in combat, lost 32 of them to there own torpedoes...

Is an actual quote from a US submarine captian explaining how he managed to unload all torpedo without getting a single kill.... And then there was our Oxytorps which exploded when shot... exploded when droped.... exploded if you didn't clean them right, and sometimes just exploded because they felt like it.... Long story short...

No one really had working torpedos in WWII.

Finally for the giant Artillery peice, it depends on which one.... Schwerer Gustav? Huge waste of money and resources, did nothing, became target practice for bombers. Strumtiger and Karl-Gerat fucking terrifying.

The Germans have a lot of bad equipment in WWII, from tanks that explode when you take them up a hill, to some how managing to make Battleships that consumed 50% more fuel then the fucking Yamato, it just helps to get the list right so they cant refute it.

This is what happens when every one is competing for internal favor, rather then actually bothering to consider if they need it, if it works, or any thing of the sort.

That and they had a nasty tendency to try and force designs that just weren't going to work to work, to.... hilariously ineffective results (see:Ferdinand)

Edit: Girls Und Panzer has the Tiger(P) down perfectly.

Edited by Imca on Jul 20th 2018 at 6:13:56 AM

I'd include the Panthers in the list of wunderwaffes that are hyped as fuck but failed to deliver, by the time Germany worked out the flaws the war was almost over and they barely fixed all of them (mostly the Panther D tendency of catching fire), like the engine having a life time of 1500Km but the final drives having a 180Km life expectancy. The Panther didn't even had better Kill Ratios against Shermans, it ended the War with 1.1:1 in favor of the Shermans.

To have an idea, when the M4 was being trialed the Aberdeen Testing Grounds did a 3000 miles run with the M4 without a major malfunction, meaning it didn't break anything that prevented the use of the tank.

When it comes to Nazi Germany, you have the Whitewashing of the SS and Wehrmacht war crimes and the whole lest clean the Eastern Europe out of people so the Germanic Arians can move in with either claiming that Stalin was worse and they were liberating Eastern Europe from the Soviets, the whole Holocaust thing was to get rid of the Bolsheviks (as if it should be acceptable to begin with) and most of them happened to be Jewish and Slavic and groups like SS Einsatzgruppen and SS Wiking being merely hunting for Partisans, who also happened to be mostly Jewish or Slavic.

Also other things like Nazi Germany recruited African blacks to their auxiliary armies! There were Slavs fighting for Nazi Germany! Hitler considered Arabs to be Arians and so the Japanese so they can't be really racist!

Edited by AngelusNox on Jul 20th 2018 at 11:26:44 AM

Fascism is kinda a deconstruction of Rated M for Manly and Rule of Cool. They based themselves on it and well...it was messy for themselves.

In other side that I don't know if call it rascism, there a group of Peruvian Nationalist that said that Imperial Japan is better than modern Japan just because they dislike Moe.

I wonder if that idea can be called racist? The whole "this country was better when they were a literal dictatorship!"

Edited by KazuyaProta on Jul 20th 2018 at 9:31:19 AM

OTOH, that is why the bullshit narratives persist. To a lot of people, Nazi stuff looks cool. So they continue to believe and spread falsehoods to make their fascination with Nazi stuff seem less shallow and rooted in bigotry than it actually is.

I notice Call Of Duty had a hand in Wehraboos existing. Specifically with the character of Richtofen.

@eagleoftheninth: I do have a problem with it. As good hearted as Trevor's comments were, they were also functionally indistinguishable from those coming from the many, many racists in Europe, like for example the entire nation of Italy.

I have to second that, while not intrinsically bigoted the idea that everyone must have a second set of identities beyond the strictly national in my view is something that has mostly helped the bigots both historically and contemporarily. The best way to fight bigotry is to completely decouple nationality from blood and focus on it as a civic concept involving ideals and culture, which can't happen if we have a dozen ethnic and racial identities.

What Trevor was saying in his follow up video is how minorities have to say that ther are only this or only that. In said follow up video, he acknowledged how some racists use that argument, but his problem is how eager some people are quick to say "this person is French/American/German" after they have achieved some sort of accomplishment, as it those things were marks of morality. He used the example with the African migrant as an example. In any case, I disagree thoroughly with decoupling my various identities just because racists may say I'm not American. That is erasure, and I will always leave that on the table.

Here is the response video for anyone who wants to watch.

Edited by Kakuzan on Jul 21st 2018 at 9:32:29 AM

Similar bullshit came from my parents last World Cup. "See how all of the Dutch team is singing their anthem? Look, even the black ones are singing!"

What, are black citizens of the Netherlands not allowed to be Dutch or some shit?

"Even the black ones"...wow, that actually made me cringe upon reading it.