I missed this reply:
duckzilla wrote:Dolan wrote:Well yeah, racism is a topic in the USA and elsewhere precisely because they profited from slavery in the past and now they are perpetually stuck in appologising mode.
You don't seem to understand my point. It is not just the USA which profited from slavery. While France, UK, USA, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium and some other profited directly from slavery, ALL countries today benefit from slavery in present and past. The very industrial revolution would not have been possible without loads of the cheapest laborers which you were able to find to pick the cotton for the British textile industry. It was the spark of everything which unfolded afterwards. The very reason that you are currently sitting in your room reading my comment on an electrical device is a consequence of this early push to capitalism in its most gruesome form.
I think you're over-generalising. No, I don't think the reason why I have electricity has something to do with other countries having had once colonial empires and slaves. It has more to do with scientific progress in the 19th century.
Well if you want to generalise to such an extent, we can get to arguments such as "Mozart could not have composed any of his works without drinking coffee".
Dolan wrote:While Eastern Europe hasn't really had a colonial past, we didn't go around the globe enslaving other peoples. That's why racism is not a topic here, because our history is simply missing this experience, so we aren't beholden to this kind of guilt.
Also here you seem to miss the point. You don't need to have had a colonial past to acknowledge problems of racism. There is not a single country and not a single person on this planet who does not have a history of slavery and oppression. It just depends on how you call it (serfdom anyone?) and how far you look back. You have a 99% chance to have at least one person in your own lineage which has been a slave and another one who owned one. And racism has always been a thing in regions such as Romania which have been constantly conquered and reconquered for the last 2000 years.
The topic is not missing in your history. Your version of history and the people writing your school textbooks just omit it.
I'm afraid you are confusing categories here. Serfdom was not the same as slavery, not at all. Serfs had rights, they were nobody's property. Their main problem was that they did not own any land, so they were forced to pledge allegiance to a local lord or chief to be allowed to work a plot of land, from which they were expected to pay a substantial share of their produce, as well as taxes. But they were free to leave and move elsewhere, although that only meant freedom to enroll yourself in another medieval lord's service. This is a short and simplified description of serfdom, of course, it varied a lot across regions and historical periods (sometimes serfs were tied to their land, for example).
By contrast, slaves were someone's property, who had the right to dispose of them as they saw fit. Completely different historical phenomena.
Dolan wrote:But we do find it weird that Americans or Germans would keep appologising for what their predecessors did.
And again, you miss the point. Germans do not need to apologize and do not do so. They (well, not all) accept the responsibility of what history teaches us all.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49541111Your very thinking in national categories is evidence to the fact that you don't see the general relevance of racism and, more general, of discrimination for humanity. It is this very thinking which is inherently racist. We are one people and we have to learn from the past of all mankind out of pure necessity to find suitable organizational structures for the next hundreds of years without comitting suicide as a species. This is a tremendous task.
I'm actually not thinking (only) in national categories, because nations are a rather recent historical construct. I do think in terms of specificity, since this helps making distinctions, understanding things better. Calling everyone "one and the same" doesn't help understanding anything at all, on the contrary, it creates confusion, because then you can't explain differences in terms of outcomes (like why did the British develop a language that is spoken from the top of the teeth and tongue, using lots of voiceless dental fricatives, compared to Mediterranean people who tend to have a very different phonemic profile).
Mankind is actually a lot weirder than we commonly think. Anthropology is starting to see a much more complicated picture of how this species emerged from multiple regional, local branches that each had their own specific traits. This provides us with much more explanatory value than these stories of "oneness" and similarity.