#and they can seem *really appealing* to people who’ve been subjugated without understanding that the solution is not becoming
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I wonder how much of the practice of banning other faiths, especially Judaism, had to do with the newly Christianized Roman Empire not wanting to own up to crucifying Jesus? It’s all about finding convenient scapegoats to distract the populace from the government’s hypocrisy and various screwups, and modern ethnonationalist governments with ambitions of Empire keep up this “proud” tradition of Blaming Somebody Else.
Fun fact about the early Catholic church is that, despite spending generations being persecuted by the Roman empire, it took less than 15 years under Theodosius I to go from “the empire is Catholic now” to “and also every other religion is banned.” You can literally read St. Augustine move from “state religious persecution is unacceptable” to “state religious persecution is cool actually” over his lifetime as Catholicism came to power. I’m sure there’s no broader lessons to be learned there
#antisemitism mention tw#palestine#genocide mention tw#like…it’s really important to understand the nuances of antisemitism when it comes to talking about palestine & israel’s government#particularly how the ethnonationalist blame game is SUCH an easy trap to fall into for people desparate for ‘safety’ and ‘tradition’#no one group can resist its siren call without conscious dedicated effort#because nationalism and authoritarianism are *easy*#and they can seem *really appealing* to people who’ve been subjugated without understanding that the solution is not becoming#the boot planted on the neck of the first available ‘acceptable target’ that isn’ them#it being easy is also why the christian european powers were like#‘how do we solve the horrors german ethnonationalism wrought upon Europe’s jewish population?’#‘i know! EVEN MORE ETHNONATIONALISM! and we get to build a puppet colony that can extract resources from the region AND control jerusalem!’#‘as opposed to having to share it with arabic jews and muslims!’#‘now we don’t have to self-reflect or protect our jewish citizens because when things get bad we can just ship ‘em off to israel! yaaaay!’
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