#ignorance of eastern european history in the west

[tomorrowusa]

« Realism about Russia grows in proportion to the shrinking physical distance. If you are Portuguese, or Spanish, or Italian, then you have never had Russian soldiers in your country against your will, and you never will. Whereas we have had them looting and raping and imposing an alien political system on us, repeatedly, over 500 years.

[ … ]

We have been very lucky in this emergency: a) that Ukraine fought, b) that Joe Biden was in the White House, and c) that the United States was not otherwise engaged. If any of these conditions did not apply, we would be in real trouble. »

— Radek Sikorski, former foreign minister and defense minister of Poland and current MEP, on the danger from Russia to its neighbors and the invasion of Ukraine. Quoted at The New Statesman. (archived)

People in the West who know little about Eastern European history are usually clueless about how Russia has never abandoned its imperialistic nature. Communism (which has always been crap) just dressed up Russian expansionism in ideological terms.

There needs to be much more teaching of Eastern European history in US and other Western countries' schools. All we typically get about pre-WWI Eastern Europe is exotica like Ivan the Terrible and Vlad the Impaler and (maybe) a couple of better things WAY too big to ignore like the astronomy breakthroughs of Copernicus and Jan III Sobieski's breaking of the Ottoman siege of Vienna (because the latter allegedly gave Western Europe coffee and croissants). This broad lack of knowledge makes it unsurprising there are so many mindless tankies and blatant twits like Elon Musk.

Pan Sikorski mentions the set of conditions which has helped Ukraine avoid total conquest by Russia. Indirectly these also represent a massive failure by intelligence agencies in Russia which simply just told Putin what he wanted to hear.

Few people in Ukraine wanted to join Russia – including Russian-speaking Ukrainians; the willingness of Ukraine to fight against Russia's proxy insurgency in Donbas since 2014 should have been a warning to Putin. And Russia's catastrophic misjudgement of Joe Biden's response is a result of Putin's delusional thinking that liberal democracy is a sign of weakness.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine was a de facto declaration of war on the West and it should be seen as such.

[storywestistrash]

i am actually so tired of the way westerners treat eastern europeans

[iamthetruenhaz]

Russia's prep work

I originally wrote this as a reply to a reddit comment about the prep work Putin's Russia has done to reconquer Eastern Europe (and Central Asia) and soften up the West in order to "reclaim" the "lost" global power status the USSR had.

Putin* has been prepping his "reconquering" of Eastern Europe and Central Asia since he stepped into office. He took on an openly anti-western course since the Munich speech in 2007. He probably saw American global dominance weakening following Afghanistan and Iraq and because Russia had stabilised after the 90s, he thought it was time to act.

First he paved the way with the Chechen war where he "won" and got to jump on the War on terror bandwagon and use Islamic terrorism as a boogeyman for his own imperialistic purpose to rile up Russians against external threats.

Then he invaded Georgia to probe the soil and see how the west would react. They mostly ignored him so he went on to meddle in Eastern European politics, coerce Ukraine for gas and fund right-wing parties all across Europe (at the time mostly to drive a wedge between Eastern and Western Europe and suck EE countries back into Russian orbit) while pumping anti-western sentiment and Soviet nostalgia at home.

He saw that the west was disunited because of the US-UK-EU split following the wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria. He capitalized on that in several ways using both the wars and the refugee crisis that followed. One, to increase racist and nationalist propaganda and stir up hatred against "the liberal gay western cabal" and the resulting Euroscepticism. Two, to prop up the "proper" traditionalist Russia as an alternative. Three, to paint Eastern European countries as a puppet of the US liberals who were "ackschually" nazis in disguise, which was easy when the West was divided between trying to coax them into the EU and leaving them as a buffer-zone backwater. The brightest example of the latter was in late 2021 when Lukashenko started dumping Middle Eastern migrants on the Polish border so the Poles could be painted as a racist, white supremacist state. Unlike, you know, Belarus (really Russia) which weaponized the migrants.

Then he failed in Ukraine when his puppet's sharp turn away from a planned EU accession path caused the Euromaidan revolts. Pro-Russian protesters soon spawned, staging provications (my own country had a wave of protests and pro-russian counter-protests back then and I remember neonazis and other paid protesters being at the forefronts). Russian media started hurling accusations of nazism against pro-western protesters.

All of a sudden, it's like a switch was flipped in Russian society. Decommunization was out the window. In 2015, Stalin was chosen as the most influential figure in *world* history by Russians. All the anti-Western, Russian irredentist, traditionalist, racist and homophobic sentiments coalesced into one, directed against the "evil nazi gay jewish West". Putin started openly provoking the West with displays of military force, close flybys in territorial waters, playing Cuban missile crisis in Kaliningrad. All to rack up the atmosphere of an imminent Cold War II and maybe even WWIII where a "wronged", "humiliated" Russia would finally make the West pay. The WWII victory celebrations also took on the appearance of a war cult, with jingoistic slogans like "we can do it again", "to Berlin" and "we're coming for the German women" displayed on every 9th May parade. Eastern European countries, especially the Baltics and Poland, noticed and tried to raise alarm, but were mostly told to keep their paranoia down and ignored.

In the last decade, he used his military and propaganda machine (what we call "hybrid warfare") to create the impression of the following: (1) The West is imperialist (and is being hypocritical about it), waging pointless bloody wars in the Middle East; (2) The West is weak in those wars, causing Russia to step in like in Syria and deal with the issue "properly"; (3) Western democracies are weak in dealing with "barbaric" refugees because they're too greedy not to let them in but too soft to throw the bad apples out (this was used to boost nationalism and Euroscepticism).

By those means, Russian propaganda managed to manipulate both anti-imperialist and nationalist groups within the West as well as in Russia and Eastern Europe and pave the way for its "just war" of "reconquering" Eastern Europe. In the West, the image of Eastern Europe was molded as either "poor backwards savages we're better off without" (for nationalists), "paranoid silly yokels crying wolf about Russia who is now playing nice" (for moderates), "ingrates not worth defending so we'll pull out" (for Trump-like US conservatives) or "backwards homophobic barbarians we don't want here because they'll ruin our utopia" (for progressivists). In Russia, they were portrayed as "lost property", accused them of being "taken over by nazis" anytime they tried to acknowledge any of the repressions suffered from USSR, and "unconscious puppets of the West" and routinely threatened with "annexation in 3 days" whenever they "misbehaved" by taking a stance against Russia's politics, whether past or current. Finally, in Eastern European countries themselves, Russia tried to ruin the image of the liberal West by portraying them as "the real fascists", "liberalism gone so far it circled back to fascism" and to prop up its own image as the "savior from debauchery upholding the good ols ways".

Also worth noting that Putin was all too eager to intervene in any country that tried to reject Russian dominance or even its own pro-Russian dictatorship. He was ready to support Belarus in 2020 and intervened in Kazakhstan in 2022 just a month before the invasion of Ukraine.

So yeah, it was quite the prep work. All to ensure that when he went on his imperialistic crusade in EE, people at home and in the West and even in Eastern Europe itself would applaud him, failing that be indifferent, failing THAT remain unheard.

* by "Putin" I don't necessarily mean just him, but the lobby behind him as well.

[olderthannetfic]

I'm in a hobby that has the biggest following in East Asia, like really fucking huge, second place is literally Eastern Europe before the Anglosphere slinks in on third place, and one drama topic that pops up every few years through newbies on the Western front is their incredibly narrow and Western centric understanding of the world, and their static assumption about things. This seems to be a widespread issue with anyone tbh, even East Asian diaspora who's only connection to the hobby is Western. Basically any Western Westerner raised in the West might end up having that problem regardless of ethnicity.

I'll try to keep this a lot shorter than it should be but... The occasional English or insert-Western language speaking East Asian likes to join look what's going on in the West, and the topic of "East Asian as obsessed with Eurocentric features" has been a huge part of annoyance and rants for years. Especially when the infantilising and colonialism card gets pulled, aka only reason beauty standards seem to exist is because white people, and even after all this time they assume East Asians haven't developed their own beauty standards based on their own culture, or pre-colonialization culture. That every East Asian wants to be white, and when that accusation doesn't stick it's something else just as ridiculous and Western centric.

One thing I've read more rants about than is healthy, is that Western people only read beauty standards through a Western lens aimed at European features, but seems to be completely unable to accept that these standards might be set without European features. Even in creations in the hobby that do feature European themes the design of the character is often very much following East Asian beauty standards and features.

So here are the biggest features that Westerners constantly accuse of being Eurocentric, and completely ignore that these are features that are completely normal and also very much present naturally in East Asians: Pale skin. Double lidded eyes. High cheekbones. Narrow noses. There are more but I don't exactly keep a list.

When this gets brought up by newbies it's also often very cherry picked, they will not point out that these beauty standards often are mentioned in tandem with more obvious East Asian features. They'll take what can be misconstrued because those features are actually pretty universal, slap a Western lens on it, and call it Eurocentric.

Pale skin especially has gotten a few laughs and some "Do these people know how to google fashion history?" Because it's not exactly hard to mentions of pale skin being the height of beauty throughout the eras.

You could also look at those features through an Asian lens, and see how these features would naturally translate into someone who's Asian. But people just don't do that, even when it's explained to them.

--

[hacked-wtsdz]

When it was Russia vs Ukraine it was hundreds of sanctions against Russia, months of protests on the street, half of western companies closing in the country, Russia eventually being disconnected from SWIFT, planes no longer being allowed to fly into Europe/USA out of Russia, no more visa privileges, people fired from work and expelled from universities simply for being Russian, Ukrainians getting help with getting into universities, being accepted as refugees in many European countries, millions in financial and military aid sent to Ukraine, Zelenskyy making speeches on every political and non-political worldwide event, Russia being banned from the Olympics, Facebook and Instagram officially allowing hate speech against Russian soldiers, Ukraine being talked about by the western press non-stop.

When it is Israel killing Palestinian civilians, it is the banning of protests for Palestine, social media (aka regular people) being the biggest source of awareness, millions sent to Israel from the USA, misinformation spread by the biggest western journals, major western companies supporting Israel, “it’s not all Jews, antisemitism is still awful” and “if you talk badly about Israel now, you’re an antisemite”, Instagram and TikTok allowing videos of Israelis mocking the dying Palestinians to stay up, USA sending billions in military aid to Israel. BILLIONS IN MILITARY AID. Dehumanising articles about Palestinians. No place for the Palestinians to speak. And more and more and more.

It takes a glance at a history textbook to understand why, of course. It benefits the USA if Ukraine wins and if Palestine gets destroyed. As simple as that.

But to say that you are against the war in Ukraine and support Israel or ignore Palestine is hypocritical. You are either against violence or simply repeating the trendy slogans. Your support of peace might be genuine but if it doesn’t extend to Palestine then it is hollow.

But in general this situation shows how little western people care when tragedies happen “somewhere in the east”. As long as it’s not white people, European people, people who look like you and believe in what you believe and are not poor, not uneducated, not somewhere far away, you do not care.

But also this situation shows how eager people are to follow trends without researching the situation. Some research into the history of Russia and Ukraine will reveal the fact that this conflict is complex and is wider than just Ukraine and Russia. It will also reveal some pretty disheartening facts about the Ukrainian government. Some research into the history of Israel and Palestine will reveal the lies of the western media.

When it’s Palestinian HAMAS “starting the violence” (not true if you look at the big picture), then they are terrible terrorists all — even the children — and the Israeli bombing is justified.

When it’s the Ukrainian government bombing Donbass villages (on the border with Russia, inhabited by many Russians) for seven years, with enough children dead from it that they built an “alley of angels” for them, literally nothing is said about it.

This isn’t a justification for the war but another example of how differently people treat westerners and middle easterners.

The west, its media, its governments, its companies, care only for gain. They say that they care for people but only for certain people, only for regions in which it brings gain. And people buying into their propaganda is enraging to see. People supporting only European lives is enraging to see. People clearly not caring about Palestine because it is largely Muslim and Middle Eastern and poor is enraging to see.

Free Palestine.

[honourablejester]

Random Thoughts around D&D Westerns

Okay. So this started out as me thinking about character concepts for a D&D western-type campaign, and then moved to me thinking about setting elements for a western campaign, and then devolved into me thinking about both westerns and D&D style fantasy as genres, so like … bear with me? I’m trying to figure out how to pull this back and put it in order.

But. Okay. Let’s do it the way I did it. Let’s start from the characters.

So I’ve been noodling around the odd western type character concept for D&D the last little while, things like a druid/light cleric using guiding bolt for high noon style duels (and thorn whip as a lasso), and probably stemming originally from Kossi, my knowledge cleric/fey ranger frontier postwoman character that I’m playing in a solo campaign. So I was thinking about western characters in D&D, and thinking about the archetypes of westerns and how they’d fit.

You have things like the lone wanderer seeking justice or vengeance. The sly gambler with the heart of gold. The fire and brimstone preacher. The fiery homesteader fighting to drive bandits or railway barons off their land. The taciturn bounty hunter more at home in the wilderness than the town. The bewildered easterner about to get a sharp lesson in the way of things out west. The civil war veteran (of either side) trying to make a new life out here where people don’t care who you were, and where the rough and tumble lessons of war won’t look too out of place. The foolish miner lured to his death by greed for gold. The desperado determined to die free, go out in a blaze of glory.

The western, as a genre, is evocative. And, well, of course it is. The western is basically an attempt to valorise and mythologise a particular period of history, to gild over or ignore or straight up heroicise the, uh, less than laudable elements of that era. It’s a mythology, so of course it has some very evocative imagery.

But it is, also, a product/reimagining of a very specific historical and cultural context. And there’s elements of that particular setting that maybe you don’t want to carry over. And others that you do, but they need some set up to build in.

So I started thinking about how to get a western setting, how to make a campaign that would feel like a western. And there are …

See, the thing is, D&D kind is a lot of the way there already? When you think about the kind of stories that show up in westerns, the band of heroes defending a town, or the hunters sent out into the wilderness to track down a dangerous foe. Westerns definitely are one of the progenitor genres for D&D’s whole brand of fantasy to begin with. So what would make a setting feel more deliberately western than just standard D&D?

And, I mean. You have your basic biome shift. Put the story somewhere more arid, like the stereotypical western desert, instead of in a European forest analogue, and already it feels a bit more western. There’s also technology. Firearms, a telegraph analogue, trains. Bring some Eberron elements in, that’ll shift things a bit. But are those just cosmetic changes? Well. Yes but no. Put a pin in that for later. For now, ignoring what a western setting looks like, what does a western setting feel like?

And I think, to a large extent, it comes down to theme. Westerns had a particular set of themes that ran through them, and that’s where the backbone of your setting will come from.

So. Some of the themes I think you see a lot in westerns:

Land Ownership/Land Custodianship/Territory. Westerns are about land, on an extremely intrinsic level. It’s where the colonial underpinnings of the entire genre really show up. Think of all the western books and movies and series you’ve seen that are about claiming land and then defending that claim. So many stories are about being driven off your land. The homesteader under threat from robber barons and cattle barons and railway barons. Towns under threat from ‘Indians’. Miners getting driven off their claims. Who owns what territory. Who has the right to hold what territory. Who can defend their right to that territory. And there is … there’s a cyclical kind of terror in there. A cyclical colonisation. Because the first settlers went out there and took land from the first nations, set up their own towns and ways of life, and then the great civilising forces of the east, the railways and the telegraph wires and the big ranches, rolled in and stole it from them in turn. There’s a kind of a ‘what you do unto others will be done unto you’ sort of terror underpinning a lot of the ethos of the genre. The central theme of a lot of westerns is, basically, the territorial dispute. The land, who owns the land.

Resources/The Lure of Gold. Linked to that, there’s the resources of the land, and who gets to use them, and how far do they get to use them, and who gets murdered in the process. Gold rush. Oil. Lumber. Water. Again, very much linked back to the territorial dispute, but often in a more directly destructive way. Who can not just own the land but destroy the land. How much does owning the land give you the right to use it. And, linked from that, if you own one bit of land, and you destroy it, how does that affect, say, everything downstream of your land? (Mines and mining has a lot of knock on effects).

Civilisation vs Wilderness/Urban vs Rural. Again, linked back, but a lot of the underlying mythology of the Wild West was about being that halfway place, between the full untamed wilderness (or the full ‘savagery’ of the native peoples) and the full civilisation of the big eastern cities. A lot of (particularly later) westerns are about valorising that lost freedom and independence and rough and tumble ‘honesty’, before the railways came through and the cities built up. Which leads to a smaller scale:

Personal Freedom vs Rule of Law. Outlaws. Sheriffs. Bounty Hunters. Gunslingers. The fundamental conflict between a person’s right to do what they think best, exacerbated by so many people feeling like they had to do things for themselves because they were on their own out in the ‘wilderness’, and the need for the civilising, but also potentially tyrannical, forces of law and order. Bringing law and civilisation to the wild frontier. Personal vengeance vs impersonal justice. Corruption. Freedom. Basically, a lot of the conflict in a western will primarily run along the law vs chaos alignment axis. Good and evil depend on your interpretations of the players involved, but the fundament of the conflict will be order vs chaos. And also:

‘Progress’ vs Preservation. The thing about westerns, particularly the ‘golden age’ between the end of the civil war and around about the 1890s, was that they were right in the middle of that 19th century theme of industrialisation. As well as the colonial theme of ‘progressive civilisation vs backwards barbarism’ (hence the inverted commas on ‘progress’). This is a whole bundling together of the above themes, but westerns had a definite theme of encroaching progress. The old way of life being bulldozed for the new. The railroads are coming. Law and order are coming. The old rough and tumble frontier life is dying. The last great gunslinger is about to have his final duel. The famous desperadoes are going out in a blaze of glory. Progress is coming. And it will destroy everything in its path. But will it be a better future? And again, that kind of ties back to the colonial thing. Westerns are weirdly poised where the white settlers are experiencing what they did to those before them.

So. With all of that said. How much of that do we want to emulate? How much of that do we need to emulate? Maybe I don’t want to get into colonialism and land ownership right now, maybe all I want is a setting where a lonesome spellslinger can wander up to a desert town seeking justice, or a rough and tumble party can get together to defend a town from some desperadoes.

But. On a macro geographic level. I do think there’s some elements you want about your setting to set up those kinds of stories.

On a basic level, you want a large region of contested, non-urbanised and non-agriculturalised land (at least in the European sense of ‘endless fields of tillage’), that is divided up into a lot of small territories, where the largest urban areas tend to be towns at best, and large sections of it are claimed by various different groups or even individual owners. This region needs to be bordered by one or several very urbanised and centrally controlled powers. Probably several, not necessarily because you want to directly mirror North vs South or America vs Mexico, but because this region has been the recipient of the leftovers of a lot of outside conflicts. It’s where people come to hide, or reinvent themselves.

And it’s also where people, powers, come to build themselves. So you want to give it resources. Things people want to come and take. The constant theme in westerns is, someone wants your land. Someone wants your gold. Someone wants your town. And why? What do you have that someone wants?

Maybe, since we’re in fantasy western territory, you want to give it a rare, mystical resource. Maybe you can link that up to the theme of progress, too. A particular mineral that allows the manufacture of more powerful, durable spellstones, that would enable someone to set up a network of sending stone stations that would allow news (and information for outside powers) to flow more easily. You know. A telegraph network. Anyway.

So. A large, divided, contested region, not directly occupied by but of interest to several nearby urbanised, civilised powers. An area where there has been a lot of successive waves of people coming in, often from conflicts in or between those surrounding civilised powers. An area with a distinctly fractured and individualistic ethos as a result. An area that maybe always did, because it was never natively inhabited by empire-building societies. Everyone is this land has always claimed their own piece, just big enough for themselves, and been content with that. Yeah, bigger groups wanted more, and wars were had, because people are people, but this idea of ever-expanding ‘progress’ is new and weird and kind of terrifying.

Is this sounding a lot like a typical D&D setting again? Well, I did say D&D has a lot of western in its bones.

So. How do you make it distinct, then? Is it just cosmetic elements, biome shifts and different technology? Give it a more directly desert, 19th century vibe? And, well, that is part of it. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be technology. You don’t have to give everyone a gun. There just has to be a theme of progress. Maybe it is that sending stone network. Maybe you do want to invent a fantasy railway. But you don’t necessarily need gunslingers directly.

As an option for the gun thing, you could give every character, regardless of class, a free ranged attack cantrip. Make it part of the local culture. Defense of home. Every kid in these parts gets taught enough magic to manage that. Shit, hon, everyone teaches their five year olds how to throw a firebolt around here. What if they meet critters out there? Or worse, people?

Mostly, you want to theme your adventures around small, independent towns and groups. You want a lot of the conflict to be over land, over who has the right to be where, over who has the right to take what. You want external regional threats that are attempting to push into the area, often under the guise of for its own good. You want a theme of freedom vs law. You want wilderness vs civilisation. Or ‘wilderness’ vs ‘civilisation’, given how loaded those terms are from a standing start. You want progress as both a promise and a threat. You want natural resources, you want greed, you want boom towns and magical mining and the communities downstream that are paying for it. You want bands of outlaws running from foreign wars and making it everyone else’s problem. You want folk heroes of dubious morality. You want big powers talking about big projects, like driving a new trade route straight through someone else’s territory, like stealing rivers to bring water to cities two hundred miles away, like carving out a whole mountain that doesn’t belong to them to fuel a magical revolution in another city just as far.

And, yeah. Looping back to character concepts and plot elements. Some specific elements and ideas that I might personally include:

An apprentice wizard who’s working as a sending stone operator for the newly established United Sending Corporation station in the local town. It’s the big new thing! You can send messages instantly to any town that has one! Think of how easy it’ll be to get news! It only costs a bit per message. And yeah, the USC high ups are all big city folk from down on the coast, but hey! All the operators are local, and it is a good idea! So why not, huh?

A local druid who’s been seeing strange new afflictions in the plants and animals in their area, and who has come to town to see if anyone else has been having similar issues. And a few people have, mostly along waterways leading back to a particular area of the mountains. Incidentally, there’s also a lot of wagon traffic and provisioners moving through town. Miners and supplies moving out to a big new claim in the mountains …

A wandering itinerant preacher-slash-teacher of a gentle god who, this last little while, has been found themselves moving through towns where another, clearly much more militant preacher has been there ahead of them, and who has been riling up local tensions in ways that they’re beginning to suspect are deliberate. Setting towns on towns, tribes on tribes. Misplaced zeal, or perhaps a more long-reaching attempt to clear a path through the area for something else?

A genteel gambler who’s maintained a careful circuit around some of the local settlements for some time now, taking care not to over-harvest their flock at any one place, has started hearing whispers of a new group of bandits in the area, and some of the whispered names are worryingly familiar, echoes of the good old bad old days, when they were a different person in a different place, and under a different name …

A lean, hard, soft-spoken ranger, who ain’t got no home, who hasn’t had a home in forty years, who gets paid good money to track people down and bring ‘em in, and who has been wondering, after these last couple jobs, just who exactly has been setting the bounties in this area. Because there’s starting to be a pattern in their targets, and they’re starting not to like it.

A tired fighter, not even forty years old and already grizzled, with an albatross around their neck in the form of a legend. A bright young child who watched everything they loved be destroyed, home burned, family killed, and land stolen, and who became the fastest, meanest, most dangerous spellsword in the land in response. But that was thirty fucking years ago, and vengeance can only sustain you for so long, and now they’re broke down and broke up, and so fucking tired of all these young idiots trying to make a name for themselves out of their hide.

A charming, vicious sorcerer with a very visible scar who tends to respond dramatically to threats, and who takes a certain amount of perverse pride in being the ‘bad element’ in any town they wind up in, but who maybe, if it was offered, wouldn’t say no to chance to be better regarded than that. At least in one place. At least by one person.

Because, you know, as tangled and thorny as the genre is, westerns do have some really fucking iconic archetypes, and they are fun. Throw magic on top of it, and it is a vibe. I do enjoy it. Just, you know. You’ve got to set it up a bit carefully around the implications. Heh.

[alatismeni-theitsa]

okay, i've heard you're one of the 'greek gods are white' people. how do you explain 'zeus athiops', considering linguistic research proved that's a word for what we now call Black. how do you explain drastically different depictions of the same deities in Syria and Lybia and more. how do you explain that a third of the pantheon have eastern roots. like girl... please get out of that mindset.

i think you need to legit drop that whole whiteness thing. it'd reductive as fuck, to us Europeans too. leave it to the people who made it, adhering to whiteness is just erasing heritages.

If that's what you got out of the discourse, you have a really USAmerican thinking pal, albeit not a USian. Or perhaps someone simplified this to you in this way and you took it word-by-word. Let me tell you what the discourse is actually about, and why there's a problem even when the Greek gods are depicted (for example) blue-eyed and blond, like N. Europeans.

It is about the treatment of pantheons by Western nations, a treatment with colonizing and imperialistic attitudes which separate the gods from their culture. A treatment that ignores depictions of a culture with an extremely large history and reduces it to distinctly Western and Anglophone pop-culture and Fandom.

Just because this happens to a nation which is considered generally light-skinned it doesn't mean it shouldn't alarm you. And the complaints of Greeks only alarm you when they address changes from lighter to significantly darker appearance, and not the opposite.

I bet you didn't send Greeks any hatemail when they were complaining about actors being too pasty and saying "This person doesn't even look like a Greek. More Irish. They even have an Irish accent…" We had this problem for centuries. N. Europeans had this super pale depiction of our gods which they considered "noble" and they saw actual Greeks are dark barbarians who are "not like the original Greeks". Now this type of projection is happening again, in order to make the West feel better, and we are actually told how we look and don't look.

Now we constantly hear "You are too light to be Greek"/"You don't look Greek" because another stereotype has settled among the powerful nations that control our image. Needless to say, this is negative too, just by the nature of being untrue, and harmful to Greek people. But this doesn't seem to worry you. You only worry when the West tells you to worry because now the cause is "noble" according to them. They never stopped seeing themselves as the righteous and noble ones. Fuck other cultures and their specific issues and histories, right?

Treating popular pantheons as a blank canvas will happen to more "races" and ethnicities when they start being considered "white" specifically in the US, our "beloved" planetarch nation. (There's already some discourse about Mexicans and Asians being the "new white"). In 50 years perhaps your grandchild will shout at a Mexican for not understanding why "it is okay" for the deity Tezcatlipoca to be depicted half-Chinese half-Nigerian.

The same thing happened to the Greeks. In many parts of the world, Greeks are still "non-white" and in the US we only recently became "white". The Middle Easterners and N.Africans are also "White" on paper. The Greek Whiteness is also only on paper, since the Westerners get the hickeys every time they hear our names, or see a part of our culture which so resembles the Middle Eastern ones. Or they clock us as Mexicans, Arabs, Turks etc. But I digress.

My point so far is that this Western approach, in its effort to be progressive, has used pantheons of foreign cultures in a way that it negates these cultures and their depictions, or their beliefs. (Something that I wouldn't call progressive)

Onto the depictions themselves. As you understand, me - and the overwhelming majority of Greeks - wants to maintain them. To this day, within the Greek culture I haven't seen depictions of native gods as - we would say today - Black. If we had some that would be okay. But we don't. I reckon, even other lands who got Hellenized didn't change the "race" of these gods. Sometimes they were alterations, yes, but to the point we are talking about a new deity, and certainly not a deity the Greeks would recognize or worship. Then we are not talking about Greek mythology, but mythology of other nations which, at some point, came in contact with the Greek culture.

But, again, it doesn't look like the Greek gods had different races in the depictions of other nations. Even today the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern nations don't racebend the gods. They see them as they are in the ancient depictions. Perhaps they indeed saw these gods looking a bit more like them but if you think Greek people and their neighbors (N. Africans, M. Easterners) belong to different races… you might want to check some racist notions you might hold.

"Aithiops" can mean "glowing" and "of burnt face". (αἴθω < πρωτοϊνδοευρωπαϊκή ρίζα *aidʰ- (φλέγω) = burn/on fire + όψη = face/look) It's an Epithet (an adjective) of Zeus on the island of Chios (Lycophron, Cass. 537, with the note of Tzetzes.). You can see where this island is and you may easily understand that it had more or less the same population as the rest of Greek areas, in which "Black" individuals were very rare.

But the most important thing is, we also haven't found a depiction of Zeus as a "Black" individual. If we had found a statue with the features of a "Black" man and the name Zeus underneath, I'd be happy to say "Some Greeks indeed saw Zeus as Black". I don't mind the "race", I mind how everyone gets in mental gymnastics to try and defend a lie just because it sounds progressive.

Perhaps in their minds this aspect of Zeus had the appearance of a Middle Eastern but... this is not what you call another race. Even today Greeks don't consider Middle Easterners and South Arabs a different "race". Also, as I said in the beginning, it could just mean "Glowing Zeus", like his face is glowing so much as if it is on fire. One word can have more than one use. The "αιθ-" root is also used about the sky, because it's glowing. The word Aether/Aitheras which we still use in Greece (αιθέρας/αιθέρες) refers to the skies. Maybe he had a "appearance/face like the sky"

Also, very important: Back then the region where the country of Ethiopia is today was called Abyssinia. The Greeks, in the period you're thinking about, probably had no contact with the land which today is Ethiopia. Aethiopia was a whole region, possibly the Middle East. (See the post here where many sources are gathered)

The first depiction of Andromeda, an Aethiopian princess as "Black" came from Ovid, who came much later and who is not part of the Greek narrative. He's also very unreliable because with his stories he wanted to oppose the status quo and therefore the mythological figures of his time. The Greek depictions have Andromeda and her family look more or less like Greeks. (Otherwise, they would have noted the difference in appearance)

Plus, Andromeda and Perseus birthed the nation of Persians. As you know, while there are "Black" Persians the population, in general, is not "Black". Plus, I am not even sure the Greeks had contact with the "Black" Persians because they are mostly extremely far south. Such a small population so down south it's not something to base the whole Look of a Nation on, at least.

It's the Northwesterners that always use the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern nations as an excuse to disrespect these depictions. (Meanwhile the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern nations don't agree with this. They never get ACTUALLY asked)

Not to mention, the changes the western nations make are not part of a cultural exchange and they don't happen naturally through cultural osmosis. It's plain theft and ownership over the gods of a foreign culture, which they have been doing for some centuries now. The Western cultures are dominant over the Greek one. We are towards the bottom of the ladder socioeconomically in Europe. The US is literally a puppet-master of the Greek nation (and many other nations). Our government can't even fart without checking with the US. Oh, and the US also helped the 70's Junta rise to power.

Lastly, the Greek gods don't have "Anatolian origin". This rhetoric (which again implies that ancient people of a region were all the same stock) has been refuted. Nobody "stole" gods from anyone. There are so many posts on these blogs about it. Greeks were also in Anatolia for 3.000 years before the genocide, so we are not even talking about separate regions. (But I know that you saw them as separate so I approached the argument the way you meant it)

There are common roots, common beginnings, perhaps but the difference grew so much that neighboring nations had distinct gods. They also believed that their gods were distinct. You have to respect that, and also you can't lump them all together because they "all look the same to you" or some sort of a similar mindset. The Greek gods are not interchangeable with the Assyrian gods etc.

One or two, like Dionysus, indeed were brought from outside. But most are considered native to the land. (Aphrodite, too, is native to the island of Cyprus) And the Greek gods are considered ethnically Greek. The Greeks considered themselves born by these gods. Each line had a god that gave birth to it or claimed to descend from a god. See more at the end of this great video: (Video with Timestamp) Again, the Greek gods are not ethnically Japanese, or ethnically Argentinian, or ethnically Norwegian. They come from a specific culture, with specific stories and appearances. You cannot imply otherwise without making all cultures a disservice.

You can see more discussions about this, including why the argument "But a minority must be represented!" kind of argument.

Some are a bit old but the general point is the same.

*In my language "Black" for a person is not exactly a positive term so it's in quotations. The term "race" is also extremely bad in Europe. I leave this disclaimer cause I know no one gives a shit if non-Anglophones must say slurs to convey a point, as long as we all speak the USAmerican way :) We also know that the individuals I am talking about weren't identifying as "Black".

[mariacallous]

When Richard Nixon defied expectations and went to China in 1972, Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, packed the president’s briefcase. Among Nixon’s reading materials was The Chinese Looking Glass, a book by British journalist Dennis Bloodworth about understanding China on its own terms. In his opening pages, Bloodworth sets the stage by going back to the beginning: “The gaudy catalogue of China’s disasters and dynastic glories, whose monumental scale has given the Chinese much of their character … brings us to our true beginning.”

Kissinger, one of America’s most consequential foreign-policy leaders in recent memory, clearly internalized the centrality of China’s “true beginning.” In his 2011 tome On China, Kissinger marveled at China’s “singularity” and staying power. Indeed, even the hardest of hearts cannot help but be moved by the continuity of a civilization that predates the birth of Christ by hundreds, even thousands, of years.

Awe, however, is no substitute for knowledge. In the opening pages of On China, Kissinger writes of China’s “splendid isolation” that cultivated “a satisfied empire with limited territorial ambition.” The historical record, however, contradicts him. From the Qin dynasty’s founding in 221 B.C. to the Qing’s collapse in 1912 A.D., China’s sovereign territory expanded by a factor of four. What began as a small nation bound in the fertile crescent of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers morphed into an imperial wrecking ball. In the words of Bloodworth, the very author Kissinger recommended to Nixon in 1972, “It would be absurd to pretend that the Chinese had never been greedy for ground—they started life in the valley of the Yellow River and ended by possessing a gigantic empire.”

To be sure, China was not the aggressor in every war it fought. In antiquity, nomadic tribes regularly raided China’s proto-dynasties. During the infamous Opium Wars of the 19th century, Western imperialist powers victimized and preyed upon China at gunpoint. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regularly refers to China’s “Century of Humiliation,” when European empires brutalized China and killed or wounded tens of thousands of Chinese men, women, and children. Indeed, the party has memorialized these grievances in a permanent exhibit of the National Museum of China, just steps away from Tiananmen Square.

For all of Beijing’s legitimate and long-standing security concerns, however, the sheer scope of China’s expansion is undeniable. Western leaders often deny or ignore it, usually at the behest and prodding of Chinese leaders. When Nixon finally gained an audience with Mao Zedong, he reassured the chairman, “We know China doesn’t threaten the territory of the United States.” Mao quickly corrected him: “Neither do we threaten Japan or South Korea.” To which Nixon added, “Nor any country.” Within the decade, Beijing invaded Vietnam.

At the time, Nixon’s gambit was to split the Soviet bloc and drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Nixon and Kissinger saw the Sino-Soviet split and took stock of the PRC’s trajectory: a growing population that, once harnessed, was poised to dominate the global economy. It was textbook realpolitik: cold, dispassionate tactics divorced from moralism. If Washington could turn the Soviet Union’s junior partner, the West could significantly hamper Moscow’s ability to project power into Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

During the final years of Nixon’s life, his presidential speechwriter William Safire asked him about that fateful trip to Beijing in 1972. Had opening up to the PRC made Americans safer and China freer? According to Safire, “That old realist, who had played the China card to exploit the split in the Communist world, replied with some sadness that he was not as hopeful as he had once been: ‘We may have created a Frankenstein.’” Over time, many in the United States have come to realize this predicament. Unfortunately, articulating that problem well has proved difficult.

During her brief stint as director of policy planning at the State Department in 2019, Kiron Skinner previewed the shop’s keystone intellectual project: a strategy to counter China, in the spirit of George Kennan’s “containment” strategy. At a public event in April 2019, Skinner tipped her hand and revealed her philosophy of U.S.-China competition: “This is a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that before.” She went on to add, incorrectly: “It’s the first time that we will have a great-power competitor that is not Caucasian.” Skinner received widespread criticism for these remarks and was soon after dismissed for unrelated issues.

Skinner’s mistake was twofold. First, she simply got the history wrong and ignored imperial Japan in World War II. Of deeper consequence was her failure to explain what strategic culture actually is, why it matters, and how China’s past shapes the CCP’s behavior today. In fairness, these errors aren’t unique to Skinner. Understanding Chinese history can be difficult for most Westerners. In some ways, it’s difficult to think of two more different nations. The United States is less than three hundred years old.

China was unified more than two hundred years before Christ was born. Immigrants founded America. Denizens established China. The United States was born out of revolution against a colonial power. China came into being from a regional conflict of gigantic proportions. Favorable geography allowed America to grow economically and territorially on its own terms and at its own pace. China came into being surrounded by rival kingdoms and tribes on every side.

Americans turn to one source more than any other to make sense of these differences: The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. One of his more recognizable dictums, “All warfare is based on deception,” has captured the imagination of many Western thinkers. Instead of investigating the history that informed Sun Tzu’s counsel, however, many policymakers take the easier path of Orientalizing China. “China thinks in centuries, and America thinks in decades” is a well-worn trope. Another well-meaning but vapid cliché is, “America plays chess, but China plays Go.”

These statements are often left untethered from history and offered as self-evident axioms. What’s left are useless clichés that offer no actual understanding of why Chinese strategists advised cunning and deception, or how China’s unique historical experiences informed military tactics. In the absence of curiosity, an impression easily forms of China as “the other,” a mysterious, inscrutable competitor. A shallow understanding of Beijing’s past leads to incomplete conclusions about its present behavior.

More often than not, policymakers find it easier to avoid China’s history entirely. In late 2020, the policy planning office finished the 72-page report. It was a commendable attempt to reprise Kennan’s strategic clarity, but China’s dynastic strategic culture received a single page of attention.

Reducing strategic culture to vague racial differences helps no one except Chinese President Xi Jinping and his party henchmen. The CCP works to enmesh itself with the Chinese people and regularly uses them as a rhetorical human shield. To criticize the CCP, according to the well-worn rhetorical trope of Beijing’s diplomats, is to “hurt the feelings of 1.4 billion people.” As a matter of course, Beijing uses this specious logic to construe anti-CCP policies as evidence of racism. Years before former U.S. President Donald Trump fell headlong into this trap with his careless rhetoric about the “Chinese virus” and “kung-flu,” a young generation of China hawks had vowed to evade this pitfall.

Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote about this resolve in his 2021 bestseller, Chaos Under Heaven, which documented the collective decision of Washington, D.C.-based China hands to blunt Beijing’s attempts “to divide Americans by party or ethnicity, to divert attention from its actions.” I was a regular member of those meetings and still believe America’s leaders must differentiate the party from the Chinese people—not only out of respect for those who daily live under the CCP’s jackboot, but also for the safety of Chinese Americans, who faced a rise of race-based crime in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, in doing so, America must avoid a separate trap: equating the party with China.

China’s history did not begin in 1949 when Mao and the CCP established the PRC. Nor did it start with China’s “Century of Humiliation,” when European imperialist powers forcibly opened China in the mid-19th century. Chinese civilization predates America and the West by orders of millennia. That context gives meaning to the party’s contemporary behavior. The themes of greatness, fall, and restoration hidden in Xi’s remarks in 2013 constitute the essence of Chinese history.

They are the four-act play of China’s story, or “strategic culture”—without which it is impossible to understand the CCP’s strategy today. Strategic culture explains how a country’s unique experiences shape distinct national identities that translate into foreign policy. These three elements—story, identity, and policy—reinforce and shape one another. To be sure, the CCP has its own story, identity, and policies, but the party is one tributary in a long river. American leaders cannot prevail against the CCP without understanding the story and identity that belong to China.

From the start, China has been a civilizational juggernaut striving for political hegemony. China has often attempted to conceal this ambition with conciliatory diplomacy, but its neighbors know from experience the struggle to live—and survive—in the dragon’s shadow. CCP diplomats often bully China’s neighbors by claiming sovereignty over part or all of their territory “from time immemorial”—an inadvertent admission that the party is the latest crusader in a long line of imperialists. This struggle that was once relegated to the nations of East Asia is now a challenge for every country in the world.

Beijing is approaching the world not to embrace it, but to rule it. The Western world has no excuse for missing this reality, and American politicians have badly misjudged Beijing for decades. Washington’s China policy will continue to be a “two steps forward, one step back” affair until it reckons with the Middle Kingdom’s penchant for imperialism.

This reality calls into question the unspoken objective of American policymakers: seeking a democratic China. For all their differences, both hawks and doves in the United States have framed the “China problem” as an ideological challenge. Proponents of engagement believed that economic contacts would necessarily lead to political reform, a belief rooted in liberal internationalism. Advocates of confrontation couch the CCP regime as the problem, which implies an ideological solution.

The one unchanging constant in America’s China policy since Nixon’s meeting with Mao in 1972 is the steady commitment to regime change, either by commerce or competition. The underlying belief in the universal power of democracy has proved intoxicating. “If we can just make them like us,” the thinking goes, “we can turn an enemy into a friend.”

Perhaps this self-delusion is inevitable. America’s national identity is steeped in beliefs about liberty, equality, and opportunity. But the CCP’s heritage raises an uncomfortable question for the United States: Even if modern China were to become a democracy, would it cease to be the Middle Kingdom?

If the CCP collapsed and China followed Taiwan’s path of economic and political liberalization, would it suddenly lose its appetite for hegemony? Maybe. Then again, perhaps simplifying Beijing’s behavior to its current Communist Party overlords ignores thousands of years of China’s own history, as well as the strategic culture that informs those decisions.

[the-girl-who-didnt-smile]

BARON SAMEDI vs. PAPA GUEDE

Why and how the two are confused for each other

Companion piece to: https://the-girl-who-didnt-smile.tumblr.com/post/761164319058739200/the-whitewashing-of-maman-brigitte 

In the original version of this post, I accused Maya Deren of being the source of the claim that Baron Samedi and Papa Guede are one in the same. Upon researching this further, I do not think this was a fair accusation. Similar comments can be made towards Zora Neale Hurston. I revisited this essay to address this issue, as it is possible that Deren and Hurston’s comments reflect a real regional difference that exist(ed) in Haitian Vodou.

This should also be obvious, but I have no Haitian heritage, nor am I an expert on this topic. In the past, I was really ignorant about the differences between Baron Samedi and Papa Guede. This essay represents my attempt to research this subject. I apologize in advance for any mistakes that may be present.

Many Westerners like myself believe that Baron Samedi and Papa Guede are the same, or two aspects of a single lwa. Where does this notion come from?

One of the most important foreign authors in changing the public perception of Haitian Vodou is Maya Deren. Although other Westerners published books about Vodou before her, she was able to balance factual accuracy with a degree of eloquence that reached a mass audience. It comes as little surprise to me that an author of Eastern European heritage could resonate so easily with the remarkably brutal history of Haitian Vodou.

That being said, she has been criticized from an anthropological standpoint regarding some of the assertions she makes in Divine Horsemen. It is in this book that Deren states the following:

“As Death, he is the keeper of the cemetery, guardian of the past, of the history and heritage of the race. The cross of Baron Samedi (as Ghede is sometimes called) is in every cemetery; and the graves that are under the special protection of his female counterpart, Maman Brigitte, are marked by a mound of stones.”

SOURCE: Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. United Kingdom, McPherson, 1983. p. 103. https://archive.org/details/divinehorsemenli00dere/page/102/mode/2up  

Because Divine Horsemen was taken as authoritative in the West, this quote has been reproduced in several other foreign works.

Deren herself cites the American novelist Harold Courlander, who traveled to Haiti many times and produced an early trove of songs from Haitian Vodou.

Below are quotes from Courlander’s (1944) “Gods of the Haitian Mountains”:

“…Some Haitians feel that BARON SAMEDI and GEDE NIMBO are the same…” (p. 356)

“...In some parts of Haiti GEDE NIMBO is thought to be identical with BARON SAMEDI…” (pp. 361-362)

SOURCE: Courlander, Harold. “Gods of the Haitian Mountains.” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 29, no. 3, 1944, pp. 339–72. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2714821. Accessed 22 Dec. 2024.

Similar comments are made in Courlander’s (1960) The Drum and the Hoe:

“...Gede Nimbo, also known as Baron Samedi…” (p. 56)

“...In some parts of Haiti, Gede is thought to be identical with Baron Samedi…” (p. 323)

“...They are so closely identified that some Haitians feel that Baron Samedi is merely another name for Gede Nimbo…” (p. 323)

SOURCE: Courlander, Harold. The Drum and the Hoe: Life and Lore of the Haitian People. United States, University of California Press, 1960. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/drumhoe0000unse/mode/2up 

Further context is provided in Courlander’s (1973) Haiti Singing: 

“Gede Nimbo , also known as Baron Samedi. (Rada loa.) Athough Gede is inferior to Baron la Croix, he is still one of the most important of all the family. In fact, he is one of the most powerful deities of the whole Haitian pantheon. He guards the cemetery and protects the graves, especially those of children. But Gede Nimbo is not simply another loa, he is sometimes a personification of death itself. He is always spoken of as “dressed all in black.” While people may give “pitit lament” or small money to the other loa, they pay heavily to Gede Nimbo. He is not pleasant when aroused. (In Mirebalais, Dr. Herskovits received the impression that Gede Nimbo and Baron Samedi are different loa. In the south they are considered the same.) Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, who visited the south coast of Haiti on a folk tale collecting trip some years ago, recorded the following impressions of Gede: “He is like Ogun [Ogoun], but ‘worse,’ he is a grande diable. He makes all kinds of motions to make you laugh, but you must not laugh at him, for if you do, he makes you ‘stop laughing,’ which means inversely that he makes you go on laughing forever against your will. Anything you touch, he takes and never returns, and you have to give him more and more. He smokes cigarettes, not cigars. He wears a coat and a hat, and carries a stick. He can make himself short or tall, ‘as tall as a mast.’ ” (p. 34)

SOURCE: Courlander, Harold. Haiti Singing. United States, Cooper Square Publishers, 1973. Originally published in 1939. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/isbn_0815404611/page/34/mode/1up 

Although Courlander claims that Gede Nimbo and Baron Samedi are considered the same in Southern Haiti, this is contradicted by the source he provides.

Where George Simpson studied Vodou in Northern Haiti, Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons reported his observations from “a recent folk-tale collecting trip to the south coast of Hayti”. He clearly differentiates between Baron Samedi and Gede Nibo, like so:

"On this higglety pigglety pantheon my notes read: Loi Gede or Gede-nibo talks through his nose (i.e. when he takes possession of any one). He eats only casaba and peppers and herring. He "ties his jaw" just like the dead, with cotton in the nostrils, for he is «master of the cemetery» mait' e cimetière). He is the "head loi". At the capital, Port-au-Prince, "most people have the loi Gede..." His papa loi (devotee) wears habitually (?) a white handkerchief around the head…." (p. 158)

“Loi Ba-un-Samedi (? gives or for Saturday). He is like Ogun, but "worse", he is a grande diable. He makes all kinds of motions to make you laugh, but you must not laugh at him, for if you do, he makes you "stop laughing", which means inversely that he makes you go on laughing forever against your will. Anything you touch, he takes and never returns, and you have to give him more and more. He smokes cigarettes, not cigars. He wears a coat and hat, and carries a stick. He can make himself short or tall, "as tall as a mast…."” (p. 162)

SOURCE: PARSONS, Elsie Clews. “SPIRIT CULT IN HAYTI.” Journal de La Société Des Américanistes, vol. 20, 1928, pp. 157–79. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24720068. Accessed 22 Dec. 2024.

Still, it is possible that Courlander correctly observed a regional difference in Haiti – that some Haitians consider(ed) Baron Samedi and Gede Nibo to be the same. If this is a true regional difference, this would explain why many foreign authors either equate the two, or describe them as being very similar to each other.

Another important Western author on Haitian Vodou is the anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. One of the most insidious aspects of American history is the manner in which African Americans were turned against their own heritage by racist misconceptions. Where Deren reached a large white audience, Hurston was instrumental in changing the perception of Hoodoo and Vodou within the African American community. Although she has several critics, it is important not to diminish what she was able to accomplish as an African American woman anthropologist from the early 20th century. 

Hurston’s Tell My Horse is generally considered a less reliable source than Divine Horsemen, criticized for descriptions like the following:

“Guedé has another distinction. It is the one loa which is entirely Haitian. There is neither European nor African background for it…” (p. 219)

SOURCE: Hurston, Zora Neale. Tell my horse . United Kingdom, HarperCollins, 2008. Originally published in 1938.

The above is false for two reasons: (1) Guede is derived from a Dahomean vodun, with a clear African background (2) There are many other lwa that originate in Haiti. 

Consider now her description of Baron Samedi: 

“Papa Guedé is almost identical with Baron Cimeterre, Baron Samedi and Baron Croix, who is one god with three epithets, and all of them mean the Lord of the dead…” (p. 223)

SOURCE: Hurston, Zora Neale. Tell my horse. United Kingdom, HarperCollins, 2008. Originally published in 1938.

Her description echoes Courlander’s claim that Gede Nibo (Gede Nimbo) and Baron Samedi are “so closely identified that some Haitians feel that Baron Samedi is merely another name for Gede Nimbo”.

One of two things could be true: 

All of these American authors spoke in error, mistaking Baron Samedi for Papa Gede due to their shared association with the cemetery. 

These Americans correctly identified a true regional difference that exist(ed) in Haiti.

Without a time machine, it is not possible to determine whether this is correct. With this in mind, I previously erred in accusing Deren and Hurston of spreading a misconception. 

Equally important is to recognize that Baron Samedi and Papa Gede are not considered the same lwa by many Haitians. Every person of Haitian descent that I have corresponded with echoed Paul C. Mocombe’s description, where Baron is clearly differentiated from Gede. According to Mocombe, Baron symbolizes the concept of ‘Death’, while Gede symbolizes the ‘Spirits of the ancestors.’

SOURCE: Mocombe, Paul C. “Practical Reason in Haitian Idealism: Anti-Dialectics, Reciprocal Justice, and Afeminism Epistemology.” Race, Gender & Class 25, no. 1–2 (2018): 31–47. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26649532.

In Haitian Vodou, many of the lwa typically have something akin to a "first name" and a "last name". The "first name" is the family name (fanmi), while the "last name" indicates the spirit in that family (nom). 

There are multiple Legba: “Legba Atibon”, “Legba Gran Chemin”...

There are multiple Ogou: “Ogou Feray”, “Ogou Balendjo”...

There are multiple Erzulie: “Erzulie Dantor”, “Erzulie Freda”...

And so on.

Sometimes, the “last name” is dropped, and an additional title (e.g., "Papa" as in “Papa Legba”, “Papa Guede”, "Papa Ogou"...) is added in front of the “first name”.

In the Gede rite, the Barons (Bawons) and Guede (Gede) belong to two different fanmi. Of the Guede, Guede Nibo is the most well-known. Of the Barons, Baron Samedi is the most well-known. 

SEE: Beauvoir, Max. Lapriyè Ginen. Haiti, Edisyon Près Nasyonal d'Ayiti, 2008. pp. 187-196. https://archive.org/details/beauvoir-max-g.-lapriye-ginen-2008/page/n97/mode/2up

Because he rules over the Guede, who refer to him as “papa”*, Baron Samedi is often confused with Papa Guede. 

*see: Marcelin (1950) Mythologie Vodou, Vol. II

Here is Papa Guede: 

You can tell him apart from Baron Samedi by his purple, informal clothes. Even when he dresses in black, he can be recognized by his style and demeanor, which is mischievous, playful, and very sexual.

Papa Guede’s personality is described in a section of Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. There are vivid descriptions of his behavior and manner of speech. He is often lewd, in a way that makes people laugh. He can be likened to a clown, in the truest sense, where he indulges in taboos to mock social norms.

Here are some excerpts: 

“When asked to describe Gede, Vodou spirit of death, Alourdes said, “Papa Gede is a cemetery man. He live in the cemetery, but that not mean he’s bad. He very good man. He love children a lot. He love women a lot. He a very sexy man. Sometime he say a bad word, but…he love everybody. He love to help people. When people sick – all kind’a sickness – that’s his job to help.”

“Papa Gede, as Alourdes usually calls him, is a trickster spirit. Through his randy, playful, childish, and childlike personality Gede raises life energy and redefines the most painful situation – even death itself – as one worth a good laugh.” 

“No spirit, not even Ogou, Alourdes's met tet, rides her more frequently than Papa Gede.”

SOURCE: Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola: A vodou priestess in Brooklyn. Vol. 4. Univ of California Press, 2010.

Often, “Papa Gede” actually refers to Gede Nibo, who is sometimes called “Papa Gede Nibo”. There is a famous song that goes: “Papa Guédé bel gason! Guédé Nibo bel gason!...”

SOURCE: Marcelin, Milo. Mythologie vodou (rite arada). Vol. 2. Éditions Canapé-Vert, Pétionville, Haiti, 1950. p. 145. Retrieved from: https://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00005044/00002/images/144 

 That being said, there are many Gede lwa; in isolation, the phrase “Papa Gede” doesn’t actually indicate which lwa he is.  

It is important to keep this quote from Melville Herskovits in mind:

"Some of the inconsistencies and individual variations in the naming of the gods as demonstrated in these lists may be specified. Outstanding are the differences found in the manner of naming a single god, as when General Ogun is called Ogun Gallone or Papa Ogun, or when Aizan Damballa is listed as two loa, Mait' Damballa and Mait' Aizan..."

SOURCE: Herskovits, Melville Jean. Life in a Haitian Valley. New York, Octagon Books Inc., 1964. pp. 309-319. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/lifeinhaitianval0000hers/page/308/mode/2up 

Contrast with Baron Samedi:

Baron Samedi dresses as the undertaker, wearing a formal black suit. Sometimes it has purple accents, but his suit is either entirely or predominantly black. He is not playful, but an intimidating hot spirit. A fearsome and powerful lwa, he is Lord over the Dead and the Supreme Judge of the Earth.

As described by Andre Pierre:

“It’s Baron Samedi who punishes and pardons on earth. Neither the living nor the dead can escape Baron Samedi. They must be judged by him.”

A lengthy section of Milo Marcelin’s Mythologie Vodou, Vol. II describes Baron Samedi’s personality. In this section, Marcelin describes how an angered Baron Samedi interrupts a service. He is foul-mouthed as he takes the offerings from the altar and throws them violently into the courtyard. He threatens everyone before he leaves. Nobody smiles or laughs at this; the faithful are afraid of him:

“Han-Han! fit Baron, vous ne pouvez pas nous recevoir aujourd'hui! Eh bien, foutre, je gâte le service!

Il se dirigea vers le pè ou autel du temple, prit toutes les offrandes et les jeta violemment dans la cour. Puis il prononça de sinistres menaces et se retira.

Les fidèles, craignant qu'il n'y ait de conflit entre Baron et les autres loas ou dieux, lui consacrent, ainsi qu'à son escorte, un hounfô-r ou temple à l'écart.”

SOURCE: Marcelin, Milo. "Mythologie vodou (Rite Arada), Volume II." Pétionville: Éditions Canapé Vert (1950). p. 156

Here is how he is described by Brown in Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn:

“As Baron Samdi (Baron Saturday), head of all the Gede, he arrives as a corpse; his body falls to the ground, stiff. In a mood of solemnity and sadness, the people surround him, bind his jaw with a white cloth, stuff his nostrils and ears with cotton, and powder his face to reproduce the pallor of a cadaver. When Baron Samdi possesses Alourdes, which he does infrequently, the tense psychodrama of death ends only when time doubles back on itself, when Ti Malis displaces Baron and a childish giggle escapes from the mouth of the corpse. Then, and only then, does the tension snap and the fun begin.”

SOURCE: Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola: A vodou priestess in Brooklyn. Vol. 4. Univ of California Press, 2010.

Donald Cosentino contrasts the Barons (Bawons) against the Guede (Gede), like so:

“Descended from these fearsome elders are a limitless band of capricious children, known collectively as the Gede spirits, who are as beloved as the Bawons are feared. The Gede are tricksters who cavort in opposition to the senior Bawons. The Gede always laugh, but Bawon never does. Bawon kills, but the Gede heal. Bawon is a skeleton, but the Gede are rotting flesh. Bawon is boss, but the Gede are bums. Bawon imposes harsh order, but the Gede blow it off. Bawon has secrets, the Gede always tell the truth. Bawon tends to dress conservatively, often in a top hat and dress coat, the attire of an undertaker. His face is powdered white and he needs sunglasses because his eyes can’t take the light after his underground work. Typically one lens is missing. His colors are purple and black. In art and action the Gede lwa morph into louts, rock stars, black-gowned college graduates, hipsters—whatever’s new on the social horizon.”

SOURCE: https://fowler.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/InExtremis_CRU.pdf 

While Baron Samedi can be frightening, he is not evil. He is actually described as a paternal figure.

“Gede is the secretary of the Bawon, who is the judge. Bawon is the father of the family. Andre Pierre.”

SOURCE: Cosentino, Donald. Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. United States, UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995. p. 406 https://archive.org/details/sacredartsofhait0000unse/page/406/mode/2up 

“Bawon Samdi is Adam. Guardian of the cemetery. Guardian of all the dead. Everyone's father. And Gran Brijit is Eve. Andre Pierre“

SOURCE: Cosentino, Donald. Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. United States, UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995. p. 407 https://archive.org/details/sacredartsofhait0000unse/page/406/mode/2up 

This is probably my favorite modern rendition of Baron Samedi and Maman Brigitte, which is why I plagiarized the shit out of it.

Before I had this context, I just liked this one because I think they look really cool here. But as it turns out, this is also one of the most accurate depictions!

Baron Samedi’s personality and style of dress are both accurately portrayed. In fact, I wonder if this artist referred to the following painting of Andre Pierre’s: 

Could be a coincidence, but his glasses and cigar are noteworthy details.

This is also a rare instance where Maman Brigitte’s ethnicity is accurately depicted, although she is younger than traditionally portrayed… Then again, this might be an Angela Bassett situation, where she looks better than college students, but is actually 66 years old.

…Unfortunately, many other renditions are a lot worse than this. What is often passed off as “Baron Samedi” is actually a weird, evil version of Papa Guede, with random African looking shit on him. It’s pretty wack! 

This strange, bastardized version of Baron Samedi really is one of the most iconic things about New Orleans Voodoo…or am I wrong to describe him as such?

Is it possible that there is a different version of Baron Samedi worshiped in New Orleans, that is more similar to Papa Guede?

Previously, I had speculated whether Baron Samedi was worshiped in New Orleans prior to the revitalization movement: https://the-girl-who-didnt-smile.tumblr.com/post/760848084922155008/crackpot-theory-baron-samedi-was-worshiped-in-new 

If he was, we would expect him to appear similarly to the early descriptions found in the Haitian historical record. “Genealogies of Gede” (2012), Smith & Cosentino comment on these early descriptions like so: “None of the performative or ritual markers we associate today with Gede—the obscene and comic behavior—are present in the text.”

SOURCE: Smith, Katherine, and Donald Cosentino. "Genealogies of Gede." In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st-Century Haitian Art (2012): 84-99.

His physical appearance should also be something like this:

“...Most of the time, however, when going about on the earth, the Negro devil has the appearance of a gentleman, wearing a high silk hat, and a frock coat, and having an "ambrosial curl" in the center of his forehead to hide the single horn which is located there. Mrs. Viriginia Frazer Boyle tells me that when she was first taken to church by her father and mother she used to scan the congregation eagerly for a man with that "ambrosial curl" and one with the "evil eye", which her old Negro nurse had told her were to be found in every crowd, even in church. In most cases this Negro devil has cloven feet, a characteristic also credited to him in European circles. Possibly the black cat is the animal most chosen by the Negro devil for impersonation...Nevertheless the devil is not limited to this particular form but may appear as a rabbit, terrapin, serpent, housefly, grasshopper, toad, bat, or yellow dog at will. To the Mississippi Negroes he often appears as a black billy-goat; a view strictly in keeping with his custom at the English witches' Sabbath. In New Orleans it is thought by some that snakes and black cats are incarnations of the devil…” 

Source: Puckett, Newbell Niles. Folk beliefs of the southern Negro. University of North Carolina Press, 1926. https://archive.org/details/folkbeliefsofsou00puck/page/552/mode/2up?q=devil 

The physical description does not match how Baron Samedi is portrayed in popular media. As far as I know, it is doubtful that he was a feature of Louisiana Voudou prior to the revitalization movement.

The other possible introduction point would be the revitalization of the late 20th century. Louisiana Voudou of the 19th century either died out or went underground by the early to mid 20th century; it was later ‘revitalized’ in the late 20th century, where one of the major influences was Haitian Vodou. This is why iconography from Haitian Vodou is so heavily associated with the tourist industry of New Orleans, even when there is little evidence these were features of historical Louisiana Voudou.

Recall Courlander’s claim that Baron Samedi is equated with Gede Nibo in some regions of Haiti. If he was correct, it is possible that Haitian(s) from said region(s) introduced this version of Baron Samedi to Americans, who then introduced this to New Orleans.  

 When reporting his observations in Haiti, Melville Herskovits corresponded with three different sources. He wound up with three different lists of lwa that contradict each other, as previously quoted.

The point is, there are legitimate regional differences in Haiti. Are they called lwa (loa) or jany (zange)? What is the name of the child on Erzulie Dantor’s wrist? Does Erzulie Dantor make people homosexual? Two different credible sources can give you different answers to such questions, including the manner in which certain lwa are classified. This might explain the portrayal of Baron Samedi in New Orleans.

Still, there is a factor of uncertainty here, and concrete evidence is lacking. With this in mind, it is best to adhere to the descriptions provided by Haitians, where Baron Samedi is easily delineated from Papa Guede.

There is another misconception that associates Baron Samedi and (Papa) Gede Nibo with the LGBTI community. This is quite the offensive misrepresentation, which warrants its own essay: https://the-girl-who-didnt-smile.tumblr.com/post/770627900843098112/the-gede-rite-is-not-associated-with-the-lgbti

[mightyflamethrower]

What are the mobs in Washington defiling iconic federal statues with impunity and pelting police men really protesting?

What are the students at Stanford University vandalizing the president’s office really demonstrating against?

What are the throngs in London brazenly swarming parks and rampaging in the streets really angry about?

Occupations?

They could care less that the Islamist Turkish government still stations 40,000 troops in occupied Cyprus. No one is protesting against the Chinese takeover of a once-independent Tibet or the threatened absorption of an autonomous Taiwan.

Refugees?

None of these mobs are agitating on behalf of the nearly 1 million Jews ethnically cleansed since 1947 from the major capitals of the Middle East. Some 200,000 Cypriots displaced by Turks earn not a murmur. Nor does the ethnic cleansing of 99% of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ancient Armenian population just last year.

Civilian casualties?

The global protestors are not furious over the 1 million Uighurs brutalized by the communist Chinese government. Neither are they concerned about the Turkish government’s indiscriminate war against the Kurds or its serial threats to attack Armenians and Greeks.

The new woke jihadi movement is instead focused only on Israel and “Palestine.” It is oblivious to the modern gruesome Muslim-on-Muslim exterminations of Bashar el-Assad and Saddam Hussein, the Black September massacres of Palestinians by Jordanian forces, and the 1982 erasure of thousands in Hama, Syria.

So woke jihadism is not an ecumenical concern for the oppressed, the occupied, the collateral damage of war, or the fate of refugees. Instead, it is a romanticized and repackaged anti-Western, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic jihadism that supports the murder of civilians, mass rape, torture, and hostage-taking.

But what makes it now so insidious is its new tripartite constituency?

First, the old romantic pro-Palestine cause was rebooted in the West by millions of Arab and Muslim immigrants who have flocked to Europe and the U.S. in the last half-century.

Billions of dollars in oil sheikdom “grant” monies swarmed Western universities to found “Middle Eastern Studies” departments. These are not so much centers for historical or linguistic scholarship as political megaphones focused on “Zionism” and “the Jews.”

Moreover, there may be well over a half-million affluent Middle Eastern students in Western universities. Given that they pay full tuition, imbibe ideology from endowed Middle Eastern studies faculty, and are growing in number, they logically feel that they can do anything with impunity on Western streets and campuses.

Second, the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion movement empowers the new woke jihadis. Claiming to be non-white victims of white Jewish colonialism, they pose as natural kindred victims to blacks, Latinos, and any Westerner now claiming oppressed status.

Black radicalism, from Al Sharpton to Louis Farrakhan to Black Lives Matter, has had a long, documented history of anti-Semitism. It is no wonder that its elite eagerly embraced the anti-Israeli Palestine movement as fellow travelers.

The third leg of woke jihadism is mostly affluent white leftist students at Western universities.

Sensing that their faculties are anti-Israel, their administrations are anti-Israel (although more covertly) and the most politically active among the student body are anti-Israel, European and American students find authenticity in virtue-signaling their solidarity with Hamas, Hezbollah, and radical Islamists in general.

Given the recent abandonment of standardized tests for admission to universities, the watering-down of curricula, and rampant grade inflation, thousands of students at elite campuses feel that they have successfully redefined their universities to suit their own politics, constituencies and demographics.

Insecure about their preparation for college and mostly ignorant of the politics of the Middle East, usefully idiotic students find resonance by screaming anti-Semitic chants and wearing keffiyehs.

Nurtured in grade school on the Marxist binary of bad, oppressive whites versus good, oppressed nonwhites, they can cheaply shed their boutique guilt by joining the mobs.

The result is a bizarre new anti-Semitism and overt support for the gruesome terrorists of Hamas by those who usually preach to the middle class about their own exalted morality.

Still, woke jihadism would never have found resonance had Western leaders—vote-conscious heads of state, timid university presidents, and radicalized big-city mayors and police chiefs—not ignored blatant violations of laws against illegal immigration, vandalism, assault, illegal occupation, and rioting.

Finally, woke jihadism is fueling a radical Western turn to the right, partly due to open borders and the huge influx into the West from non-Western illiberal regimes.

Partly the reaction is due to the ingratitude shown their hosts by indulged Middle-Eastern guest students and green card holders.

Partly, the public is sick of the sense of entitlement shown by pampered, sanctimonious protestors.

And partly the revulsion arises against left-wing governments and universities that will not enforce basic criminal and immigration statutes in fear of offending this strange new blend of wokism and jihadism.

Yet the more violent campuses and streets become, the more clueless the mobs seem about the cascading public antipathy to what they do and what they represent.

[eretzyisrael]

The scholar who helped restore Sephardi Jewry to history

By bataween on 7 June 2023

Moshe David Gaon was a Sephardi, Ladino-speaking scholar born in Bosnia. He realized that the contributions of Sephardic Jews had been overlooked by 19th century historians and  dedicated his professional life to correcting the record. His personal archive is preserved today at the National Library of Israel, writes Yoel Finkleman in The Librarians:(with thanks: Michelle)

Moshe David Gaon: gathered information on Sephardim in Eretz Israel

His contribution is more impressive given the context and history of academic Jewish studies, which began in the 19th-century in German-speaking lands. This tradition – known as Wissenschaft des Judentums – worked to present Judaism as on par with the greatest aspects of European culture, and it tended to emphasize the contributions of Judaism to the West and to Europe. Modern Sephardic Jewry was often ignored or looked down upon as unsophisticated. The Zionist historians, mostly from Eastern Europe, who began working in the first half of the twentieth century, emphasized the contributions of European Jews to the nascent Zionist movement, but tended to downplay the continuous history of Sephardic Jewish settlement in the Land, as well as Sephardic contributions to the modern renewal of Jewish life in Palestine.

Gaon, among others, insisted on a correction. But that correction was hard to implement. After a century of work, Wissenschaft had already created a basic infrastructure for the study of the past, including bibliography, networks of scholars, and journals. But Sephardic Jewish studies were way behind the curve.

Central, then, to Gaon’s project was gathering and creating new sources of knowledge, and this meant reaching out to sources of information far and wide. His extensive archive reflects the work he did in creating a bibliography, particularly of important Ladino newspapers. It documents his groundbreaking work on the influential Ladino Biblical commentary, Me’am Loez. Gaon published works of Sephardic Hebrew poetry, and he gathered biographies of influential Sephardic Rabbis. His most important work is Yehudei HaMizrah BeEretz Yisrael (1928), a compendium of information on Sephardic Jewry in the Land of Israel. It remains an important reference work today, and it has been reprinted several times. In that work, he emphasized the importance of Sephardic Jewry in the establishment of an economically productive but religiously observant Yishuv in the land of Israel.

He could not have done any of this alone, and part of what he set out to accomplish was creating a network of scholars, knowledgeable laypeople, and community members who would all contribute to an ongoing conversation that would give Sephardic Jewry the pride of place it deserved. His archive is full of his ongoing correspondence, some of which was haphazard, but some was a more systematically designed effort to gather information and share ideas.

Read article in full

Sephardi forerunners of Zionism

[pricklypear1997]

Second post about AUs:

Is it just me or did the author of Shadow and Bone, just pick a completely random real world location to adapt her story from? It’s supposed to take place in some alternate version of Russia, but there’s hardly anything Russian about it other than the ethnic descriptions for the characters, but only in the books… there’s some vague political and cultural parallels but it’s so bad that the author didn’t even bother to research something so simple such as Slavic naming conventions… it should be Alina Starkova NOT Starkov. Barely any of the show characters are even Eastern European. I know there’s a Bulgarian actor, but literally everyone else is British, American, and just incredibly racially diverse for no reason at all. I don’t even remember if this school or military training program that Alina and co are in is an international school/organization or whatever, but it literally makes no sense that there’s barely any real Russian or Slavic representation at all, and that it looks more like an urban American population than that of any Eastern European nation. I get the six of crow aren’t tied to any one specific country, so I’m not talking about that. Just the fact that it’s really sad and makes me angry that east euros get really bad and inaccurate representation or we’re just seen as criminals and mafia, nothing more. We should do more to represent ourselves in media and not rely on some ignorant American media company to “represent” us, but regardless, it still pisses me off. Like why even pick countries like ours if the majority of westerners do not even give a rat’s ass about us or deliberately hate us and spread anti Slavic nonsense.

People like what they like, but it just makes me sad that Hollywood has all this money and shit, but they don’t even bother to do proper research about a culture, and on top of that make pointless diversity hires and call it representation while also completely misrepresenting the people that this series is supposed to show in the first place. Hollywood isn’t the only thing at fault here too. Ignorant people like the author who just don’t do any research. I’m so so tired of it. We’re not asking you to try to represent us, literally not a soul is asking the west to represent us but if you do it, have the decency to do it in a respectful manner…

At least with ASOIAF, Martin stayed grounded to what he understands of history. Yes, I genuinely believe the north could be seen as Eastern European, combined with some Celtic ( Scottish) inspirations, but Martin leaves it generally open for the viewer to understand that Westeros is based off of Europe in a more generic but still incredibly relatable way without offending any ethnic group from Europe. Dorne could be seen as Spanish specifically during the Arab invasions, but it’s honestly its own thing, the characters don’t even have Spanish or Arab names. Their clothes aren’t really even described as typical to Spanish or North African cultures. They just have vague surface level similarities, unlike the world of shadow and bone which seems to rely too much on the REAL Russia as a inspiration while at the same time just being incredibly inaccurate which sounds ridiculous and ironic but it’s true. Shadow and bone is nothing but a failed attempt of an alternate reality.

[djuvlipen]

How do you feel about people calling Roma/Rroma (sorry I still don’t know which one is the correct spelling) ‘basically Indian’ or just straight up calling them Indian? I’m someone with actual Indian and South Asian ancestry, from West Bengal and Bangladesh and Nepal, and it even annoys me when people say this. Maybe it’s bc I can empathize, since many Indians even do/say this about Nepalis and how we’re also ‘basically just Indian’ despite us having a separate culture, that has been influenced by India but is also unique due to our own developments and influence from other cultures. But when many Indians see us we’re just ‘off brand’ Indians to them. But it’s always seemed much weirder to do it to Roma bc their connection to India is even much more distant than Bengali or Nepali connection to India, which still exists today. Roma haven’t had a connection to India since pretty much forever but since their ancestors long, and have long ago developed their own culture and ethnic identity, but bc of those very distant origins are still being branded an identity that isn’t there’s. Idk it just seems weird to me but I’m not Roma and have no Roma friends currently so I wanted to see what a Roma person actually thinks instead of projecting my own opinion

Hi, anon! Both spellings (Roma / Rroma) work 😊

So, whenever I read or hear "Roma are basically Indian" it's always in one of these two contexts:

People (Romani or not, but mostly not) talking about Romani culture, DNA, etc

Romani people talking about intra-community issues

In the first context, it does rub me the wrong way, for the reasons you mentioned. Roma have forged our own racial, ethnic, cultural, etc, identity. We identify ourselves as Romani first and foremost, and we are identified by Europeans as Romani. When a European sees a Romani person, they will think "this is a Romani person", not "this is an Indian person". And I can tell you that when Romani people think about ourselves, we think 'we are Romani', not 'we are (South) Asian', you would actually get laughed at if you said the latter instead of the former. So even if Roma come from India, our cultures and languages have similarities with Indian ones, etc, our identity has evolved a lot over the past millennium, was shaped by our staying in the Middle East and, later, in Europe.

Also, the whole thing is a bit weird to me because, as you said, Roma haven't had a strong connection with India for a long while now. There are some connections (for example, it's not uncommon for Roma to go and visit India if they have the means to, some big Romani activists have met up with Indian officials, etc), but nothing important or big enough to totally change the face of Romani - Indian politics you know?

For the same reason, I also disagree whenever people ask if Roma can be considered desi... I think people from the Indian subcontinent have issues that we, as Roma, cannot relate at all (I'm talking about colonisation by the UK, wars during the 20th century, religious tensions, racism they face for being South Asian), and on the other hand, Roma face issues that people from the Indian subcontinent cannot relate to (the Holocaust, institutionalized segregation in Eastern Europe, slavery in Romania, racism we face for being Romani, etc). I think there is/can be solidarity between Romani and South Asian people but that saying "Roma are basically Indian" is a big stretch that ignores all the differences (historical, social, cultural, etc) between us.

However, I'm a bit more lenient when Romani people say that in the context of intra-community issues. With the spreading of the Christian Evangelical faith, a lot, a lot, a loooot of Roma have started to deny having any Indian ancestry (and they are usually being racist against South Asian people while doing so...). A lot of Roma also don't know we actually came from India because some of us aren't aware of our history. In this context, I've seen some Roma going hard on the "we are actually Indian !!!" bit, which is once again a stretch, but I understand why they feel that they need to. I am myself annoyed at Evangelical Christians lol.

[mask131]

With all that is going on and happening since last year, there is something I have grown very angry at. How people use the term "Western" or "West" left and right without even understanding what it means - or worse, using it knowing what it means but hoping others do not.

Take every time people start saying on this accursed website "Do not trust Western media" or "Do not listen to the media of the West". What do they actually mean? That's something you should ask them.

Because the terms such as "West", "Western", "Western culture", "Western media" are now frankly outdated and meaningless terms. They were here for the colonial era and for the Cold War - but somehow, whereas nobody uses "East" anymore, everybody keeps using "West".

I remember how someone online kept referring to the West, and since I'm from France, excluded it from the conversation. I was a bit baffled so I asked them what they meant by "West" - and in their mind, the "West" was a term for North America exclusively. I had to explain to them that, technically speaking, Europe was also part of the "West" - because when for example Muslim etxtremists from the Middle-East or Putin's propagandists said "The West is the enemy", they definitively included Europe in it, and because of all sorts of reasons and past events and the way things are taught worldwide, the "West" usually designates America and Europe.

And yet things are not so easy - because in Europe itself, there are still leftovers of the old Cold War divide between Western Europe and Eastern Europe. In fact, it is a point of contention - some considering we should keep this old Cold War divide to highlight the cultural and political differences, others preferring to treat Europe as a whole. And take Southern America - not many people today who speak of the "West" think of referring to Southern America, and yet... It is located in the "West" and its countries are part of the "Western" countries.

So you already have this whole mess where for some people the "West" only means the United-States, for others it means all of North America but nothing else, for some it means the whole American continent and that's it, for others it means United-States+Western Europe, for another group it means North America and Europe... Everybody has different limits and considerations for what is the "West".

And even beyond that - while one can agree that in terms of history, politics and culture there is a sort of common ground or common link between all those countries (thanks again to events such as colonization and the Cold War, which strongly divided the world), in truth, in the actual matters, in reality... To treat the "West" as a sort of single-minded one block sharing one same culture and one same goal is completely stupid and very ignorant. Everybody knows that North America and Europe do not share the same culture or the same laws. North America is not just the United-States but also Canada, which is definitively NOT the USA. Europe is comprised of dozens and dozens of countries with their own national specificities, and if all European countries were alike, there would never have been all those wars that kept dividing the continent between East and West, North and South, Center and the rest, Latinized and Germanic, Catholic and Protestant... And Australia is also technically the West! Try to tell me that Australia and Italy or that Canada and Spain are both acting the same way, out of the same goals, with the same views of the world and the same culture, and you become a laughingstock.

It is identical to if someone starting re-using the term "the East" or "Eastern media". Are you ready to mix together and mash into one Arabian countries, Russia, India, China, Japan, and more? Are you going to tell them the media of all these countries are saying the same things, spreading the same lies, sharing the same truths? Are you going to tell me that they all are similarly aligned in a political way, or that they have one shared culture? I mean come on! Think, people, before using stuff like that.

I can accept people using terms such as "East" and "West" when it comes to describing historical events or the development of cultures in the past - again, these words are needed to describe for example how the Cold War unfolded. But they are definitively not working in any way to describe the actual realities we are living in, and the events we are going through - and only self-centered ignorants (like those Americans who claim that if the USA fell the West would stop existing - hello, Europe is still there, and we're still considered the "West") or those paranoid fanatical extremists of religion or politics (like Putin's crusade against the entire "West", aka everything that is not Russia, and his desire to restore the "East", aka invade and control all neighbor countries) keep using these terms as if they still had an actual reality.

[eye-in-hand]

its almost like the people who are marginalized here in the states isnt the same as the people who are marginalized in other countries. Arabs and Muslims are treated like shit here, but they are the colonizers of the MENA region. Han Chinese are treated like shit here, but they are colonizers in East Asia. And there are more examples.

This infantilaztion of non white people is a part of white supremacy, stating that only white people can be oppressors (white power), and erases (and sometimes glorifies) the violence done to ethnic minorities by non white people.

Putting American ideas of race onto conflicts around the world leads to a disingenuous conversation. The Russians' attack on Ukraine is not about whites versus whites to Russians or Ukrainians, it's about Russian supremacy (which isn't white supremacy, it is specifically ethnically Russian supremacy, the idea of whiteness isn't the same in Eastern Europe but especially in Russia). The conflicts in the Middle East are not whites versus non whites. It's typically radical islamists and non-muslim ethnic groups, or arab supremacy. Chinese genocide of uyghur muslims is not a "white versus non-white" conflict. Japanese imperialism was horrible, imperialism happened before whites showed up in NA, etc.

It is white supremacy to take away non-white people's abilities to be evil. That is to say that they can't do good out of their own free will but because they just can't be anything other than that. Just because it sounds "nice" doesn't mean it isn't absolutely insidious to imply.

The western moved goal post definition of racism as something only an oppressor could do (which already had a phrase: systematic racism, and has made it so only whites could be oppressors - which has lead to problems like suddenly Jews are white despite having millions killed in recent history for not being white. Or the western disinterest in helping Ukraine because Ukrainians are too white for them to be genocided apparently. Or ignoring Imperial Japan, suddenly everyone being okay with Tibet "has always been a part of China, and Inner Mongolia was definitely not taken from the Mongolians), has never been a good definition of racism, and has only lead to intellectually dishonest conversations about racism. What definition can be used on all instances around the world? Hating someone for their race/culture/ethnicity. And it's important to keep defining the word that way if we actually want to fight against racism in all its forms.

It's important to talk about racism between non-white people (here in the west and outside of it), the racism between whites and non-whites, the racism between whites and other whites, the racism between colonizers/imperialists and indigenous populations (which does not always fit white European and indigenous brown person), etc. The idea of whiteness and how it isn't real, but still affects people in a very real way.

It's important to talk about racism and how it rears its ugly head in all the ways it does so if we actually want to disengage from it.

Everyone is human. To say only some are capable of evil not only dehumanizes those, but dehumanizes those that are "only capable of good".

I think everyone knows intellectually that marginalized people can be racists, sexists, fascists, or all-around assholes and that non-white, non-Christian societies can be just as brutal, fucked-up, or oppressive as the countries in which we live, but I don't think, until recently, that a lot of people on Tumblr actually really *believed* this.

[alatismeni-theitsa]

Will all good intentions, you and other blogs like yours should stop wasting your time writing whole ass essays to racist strangers online as if they care. I can assure you people of color and ethnic minorities have countless of stories to tell when it comes to entitled racist people who always try to justify their shitty behaviour by blaming minorities for not wasting their lives "teaching" them like elementary schoolers, why racial nasty jokes are not "ok" and coddling their ego.

These people don't lack any knowledge of Greek myth, in fact, it literally requires zero knowledge of Greek mythology to know basic stuff like how stupid fantasy books with Greek elements will never make you learn anything about Greece or that being vile to a non-abrahamic religion is one of the worst types of blatant religious racism. They are terrible towards ancient Greek elements because no one sees Greece as a real country nor Greek people as real people with actual emotions who can actually see them and hear what they say, so they know can get away with racist reactionary content that gives them tons of notes and clout.

Thank you for the support, really. At the same time, the condescending tone about minorities and poc feels out of place when speaking to a Greek. "I can assure you, people of color and ethnic minorities-" Yes, we know. We are in these categories.

Greeks have been historically considered non-white, "barbaric" and "ethnic" in many countries (still are, in a lot of places). In the US we started being seen as white after the 1950s and it's been a slow progress since WASP USians saw us as the same "race" as them. Before that, Greeks faced segregation and extreme violence by White communities and police. (Lots of WASPs still see us as "primitive" when they actually learn how our customs and Christianity look, btw). But we also exist in other places and the othering about how we look hasn't stopped.

Greeks have been considered "poc", "ethnic" and "wog" for a looong time in the west. We know bigotry not only because of how we look but also because of our ethnicity (hence the progroms and genocide and cultural erasure, you can Google all about anti-Greek sentiments and Greek caricature figures on posters). And of course, we have ethnic minorities everywhere and have faced forced cultural erasure like state punishment when speaking Greek (Turkey), changing the names of Greek towns in other countries to erase the Greek history there (Russia), and more. Recent research shows Greek names in the US are discriminated against as much as Chinese names.

Let me remind you that although Middle Easterners and N. Africans are categorized as White in the US legislation, it doesn't mean that they are exempt from racism and bigotry. The case of Greeks is similar. In northern and Anglo countries our appearance is commented on and looked at with suspicion, our customs and our food receive negative comments, there is hiring discrimination, etc. There is a reason we say "the only Greeks foreigners like are the dead ones". When you don't show them syrtaki and feta, they can turn to bigotry really fast.

So, we've been in the dance for a looong time. Try the "barbaric" from Charlemagne's time. Try NW Europeans basing their national identities around a superficial image of idealized ancient Greek culture, the NW Europeans stealing our antiquities because we weren't "worthy heirs" of our own culture in their eyes, the "disappointed" Nazis with how "non-white" we looked, etc etc.

What makes you think Greeks had aaaany say in this? What makes you think we don't know how it is to be ignored while other nations make bank and base their whole new-age spirituality and our stomped-on heritage?

It's clear you are on our side here and I don't mean to interpret your message in bad faith. Most of your statements ring true, anyways. But I feel that, while you correctly identified people who don't take Greeks' accounts seriously, you kiiiinda did the same? I mean I wouldn't need to write another essay if you had dignified us with the thought we know how it is to be in marginalized spaces, that we know how it's to not be heard, or that we know the reasons people online don't respect us. Example: I and most Greeks have verified with our own experience that the following statement is actually false.

"These people don't lack any knowledge of Greek myth, in fact, it literally requires zero knowledge of Greek mythology to know basic stuff like how stupid fantasy books with Greek elements will never make you learn anything about Greece or that being vile to a non-abrahamic religion is one of the worst types of blatant religious racism."

We've been in this discourse for at least a decade and you'll be surprised by the great number of adults who are absolutely confident that PJO taught them everything and that gods hold no value for worshippers or Greeks whatsoever. I invite you to have that discourse on our behalf and see for yourself.

Bottom line: Please let us handle the situation however we see fit. We take nothing from other people and nations when we express annoyance about how our culture has been treated.