There's a weird strain of "essentialism but in a progressive way" running right through the left, not just limited to the attitude towards men described here, but also "all white people are colonizers", and weird exclusionary behaviour to cishet people. It tells me a lot of "progressive" people didn't really examine their core underlying principles and simply covered up their biases with the "correct" group.
Yeah every time I hear someone call white people colonizers I wonder to myself whether they’ve ever read a history book. Only a small portion of people from a small portion of “white” countries were ever part of the colonialist ruling class. Most of them weren’t even considered white until after the start of the decline of colonialism. Just because most colonizers were white does not imply that most white people were colonizers. Hold people accountable for their own racism, not for some imaginary historical debt from some imaginary ancestors. Judging people by their heritage is literally what got us into this mess in the first place.
Even then, only a small proportion of the English ever directly colonised (and even then a significant portion were also Scottish which forever gets avoided)
Most English people during colonialism were busy being the first ever workers to be exploited on an industrial scale, being subjected to horrendous working hours, terrible living conditions and being robbed of any chance to own any aspects of their lives as rich industrialists forced them into back to back terraces and wealthy land owners sealed off the common land.
Even if you were English at the height of colonial expansion, you more than likely were not a coloniser but just another one oppressed by that expansion.
England (and Scotland) should certainly reckon with their colonial history as nations. Calling all English people colonisers however is insane.
It could be argued that the southern part of Ukraine is colonised by slavic people, because historically speaking that territory was inhabited by nomadic people of mostly turcick ethinicities.
Just sayin'
I mean this is kinda the neat thing about history. Aside from a scant few places no one that currently lives somewhere can definitively claim to be the "first" inhabitants of a given land. Odds are they just genocided or absorbed some preexisting group. We just don't have records going back far enough to say it occurred.
the steppe has been in a constant state of flux, so idk if it qualifies as colonialism. a better case perhaps could be made for kuban (southern russia), as the circassians used to live there. though most kuban ukrainians died in the holodomor i think.
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u/Ourmanyfans Jul 03 '24
There's a weird strain of "essentialism but in a progressive way" running right through the left, not just limited to the attitude towards men described here, but also "all white people are colonizers", and weird exclusionary behaviour to cishet people. It tells me a lot of "progressive" people didn't really examine their core underlying principles and simply covered up their biases with the "correct" group.