72 réponses à ce sujet

[In Exile]

True, but in terms expansion, military power, technological and medical advancement, Europe kind of dominated in the end. Not to downplay the efforts of the Mongols or the Persians, but most of what we have to day is due to European advancement.

They were kind of mighty in the past 600 years.

I think 600 years is pushing it for the cultural hegemony of the Europe. In my view, it's only with the spread of colonial European powers east - through the Middle East, India and China - that you can really speak about a complete cultural hegemony and "domination", as opposed to a kind of relative equality. Europe lagged for a long time. By the Enlightenment that gap started to close. It's really only in the mid-to-late 1700s that you start to see Europe (and by which I mean England) eclipse the old guards. It's closer to 200-300 years that we've had what amounts cultural hegemony by Europe, and maybe 500 years (when we started to have mass colonization of, among other places, the North and South American continents) for actual global preeminence. 

 

In any event, that's a really different picture from the bizarre racist idea that "the majority" of Empires came out of Europe. If we're being really, really generous, modern Europe had 4: the English, the Portuguese, the Spanish and the French. Russia was, at best, a continental power. 

 

Before that, we're comparing Germantic and Celtic tribes to the Assyrians and Egyptians, which is just comical. 

 

A backwater plague-stricken society that went from having its entire population almost wiped out by a disease to controlling almost all of the world's landmass collectively a few centuries later.

 

But nah, that's just racism. Everyone knows whites are a patriarchal myth.

 

Europe's cultural hegemony is a historical fact, though you missed the actual start date by about 200 years (since the plague hit in the mid 1300s, and colonial powers only got kicking in the 1500s). The idea that "the majority of the world's strongest empires and kingdoms were majority-white" is just historically ignorant racism. 

 

Edit: 

 

I mean I suppose you could throw the US in there as a colonial power, but now we're talking about what amounts to the 19-20th century only. 

[Handsome Jack]

In any event, that's a really different picture from the bizarre racist idea that "the majority" of Empires came out of Europe. If we're being really, really generous, modern Europe had 4: the English, the Portuguese, the Spanish and the French. Russia was, at best, a continental power.

 

Bizarre racist idea? The SJW shows his true colors.

 

Lest we forget the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, and German Empires collectively ruled a little over 75% of the world's surface and people. More if you toss in the Russian Empire, but I'll throw you a bone.

 

Whitey really is mighty, no matter how self-hating your SJW masters tell you to be.

[In Exile]

Bizarre racist idea? The SJW shows his true colors.

 

Lest we forget the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, and German Empires collectively ruled a little over 75% of the world's surface and people. More if you toss in the Russian Empire, but I'll throw you a bone.

 

Whitey really is mighty, no matter how self-hating your SJW masters tell you to be.

 

The Belgians and Germans can't possibly count as major colonial powers. That's a radical misapprehension of history by any stretch. Belgium had three minor colonies in Africa, and their colonial star only rose to prominence in the late 19th century. The German colonial empire is less of a joke, but only if the comparison is Belgium. To begin with, there wasn't a modern Germany until the late, late 19th century. Secondly, again, you had only small holdings in Africa with them as well. Hell, one of the major factors behind WW1 (or rather the powderkeg situation pre-WW1) was Germany's being utterly shut out of the colony game. 

 

The British Empire was a massive machine, and - for a limited time and at its height - stretched for a substantial portion of the known world. Outside of Britain, Spain and Portugal were of note but their colonial empires had or were already fragmenting by the British Empire truly dominated the globe. 

 

So, yes, it's weird racism, emphasis on the weird. It's weird because it's so historically wrong it's almost comical. And it's racist because it's based on some idea that there's some great white race out there that's somehow dominating all of history, which is, again, what you said. 

 

Things like the size of colonial powers is a matter of fact, regardless of whatever other strange ideas are floating in your head. 

[AresKeith]

Bizarre racist idea? The SJW shows his true colors.

 

Lest we forget the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, and German Empires collectively ruled a little over 75% of the world's surface and people. More if you toss in the Russian Empire, but I'll throw you a bone.

 

Whitey really is mighty, no matter how self-hating your SJW masters tell you to be.

 

Brah, you have issues

[Handsome Jack]

So, yes, it's weird racism, emphasis on the weird. It's weird because it's so historically wrong it's almost comical. And it's racist because it's based on some idea that there's some great white race out there that's somehow dominating all of history, which is, again, what you said. 

 

Things like the size of colonial powers is a matter of fact, regardless of whatever other strange ideas are floating in your head. 

 

Almost every technological advance and cultural luxury we have to this day, and almost every major world power in the past few centuries, has been a European or European-descended nation where the majority of the population is Caucasian. The States, the British, the French, the Russians, and ****, even go all the way back to the European Greeks and Romans, and you'll see our entire modern society was founded by great men who happened to be (mostly) White.

 

That isn't racist, it's fact. Considering you think Belgium was a "minor colonial power", I don't think you know your 19th century colonial history very well at all. No amount of SJW bias can reverse or censor history.

 

Brah, you have issues

 

Hardly.

[Aimi]

Russia was, at best, a continental power.

I dunno. You look at Russian policy in Siberia from the sixteenth century onward and it's basically as exploitative and imperialistic as anything the British did in India, except without the Snidely Whiplash British famine policies and massacres. And the Russians got their chance to do some of the latter when they rolled over Central Asia and the [Chinese] Northeast in the nineteenth century, to say nothing of the Greater Wrath in Finland and the Caucasus 'pacifications'. Also like British rule, Russian control in Siberia was resource-extractive, but focused on fur and gold rather than tea and textiles.

Sure, the Russians weren't separated from their empire by an ocean, but that didn't make it any less an empire.

[Sartoz]

Back in the Solas thread, someone pointed out this tumblr post, which rather irked me.

 

Except that BioWare wrote the Dalish the same way they wrote Dorian.

 

They could have written it so that at least some elven character/s, through some special circumstances, were able to learn the things that Morrigan learns. But they didn't. They chose to portray modern elves (particularly the Dalish) as being somehow so woefully incapable (through culture, circumstance, and even personal gumption) of discovering anything significant about their past, while human characters like Morrigan are somehow able to search for and learn more about elven lore and technology better than any elves can.

________

________

________

________

Big Snip

 

The Dalish are like the North American Indians..... connected to the land. That culture type is, IMO, inherently anti-tech..... but definitely pro keep those ancient traditions.

 

That philosophy prevents them from learning and accepting anything new. Cultures that grow must first invent farming,  to be able to support a large population which leads to villages, towns and then cities.... which means the culture must become anti-migratory.... put down roots and stay in one place. The Dalish... keep moving around. Following the buffalo herd is not the way, if you wish to have mathematics, reading, writing and architectural (requires geometry) skills to flourish (also needs natural resources like iron copper, etc). Knowledge based on memory retention passed down from one generation to the next leads nowhere new.

 

An experiment was made with 10 people in a room sitting in chairs. The professor whispered a 30-40 word story to the person in chair1. The instructions were simple.. pass on what you heard to the next person, also in a whisper. The last person was to tell what he/she heard out loud. Guess what? the story told was nowhere near the original.

 

So, I disagree with the notion that the Dalish were somehow short changed. It's a self-imposed cultural limitation.

[Aimi]

The Dalish are like the North American Indians..... connected to the land. That culture type is, IMO, inherently anti-tech..... but definitely pro keep those ancient traditions.

that is not what actual aboriginal Americans are like at all, it's a make-believe image of them you have in your head

[In Exile]

Well, this got derailed fast. So now I'm not going to address whatever... that racist tirade is because, Jesus, there's nothing I'm going to be able to say to that in response. So instead I'll touch on a really interest side point of history:

 

I dunno. You look at Russian policy in Siberia from the sixteenth century onward and it's basically as exploitative and imperialistic as anything the British did in India, except without the Snidely Whiplash British famine policies and massacres. And the Russians got their chance to do some of the latter when they rolled over Central Asia and the [Chinese] Northeast in the nineteenth century, to say nothing of the Greater Wrath in Finland and the Caucasus 'pacifications'. Also like British rule, Russian control in Siberia was resource-extractive, but focused on fur and gold rather than tea and textiles.

Sure, the Russians weren't separated from their empire by an ocean, but that didn't make it any less an empire.

 

You're entirely right that Russian wasn't different in kind at all from the other colonial powers. When I say continental, I didn't mean to distinguish the conduct so much as the scope. Russia was confined to the continent and I couldn't find a better phrase for it than "continental" (which I know has connotations of what power simply happened to dominate the local landmass, cf. France during the Napoelonic period). 

 

I think - in the context of post 16th century European politics - we need some kind of demarcating term for those powers that looked to expand in the "traditional" way that powers historically expanded (by enlarging their borders in an ever expanding outward pattern and annexing local territory to exploit resources and wealth) with what, on the one hand, England, Portugal and Spain did in America on the one hand and what England did in China and India on the other. 

[Handsome Jack]

that is not what actual aboriginal Americans are like at all, it's a make-believe image of them you have in your head

 

Man, hush up on the free speech. We live in a progressive society. The Indians never had genocide wars or scalped innocent people, they were perfect and upright stewards of the land who were mercilessly slaughtered by the evil white devil.

[CDR Aedan Cousland]

I have to agree with Handsome Jack, though I personally wouldn't have gone with such a tactless way to enforce my side of the argument.

 

I'm most bothered by the fact that there's a trope that is racist in its way (and, in this case, is racist against white people) and that people in this thread are using it.

[Aimi]

You're entirely right that Russian wasn't different in kind at all from the other colonial powers. When I say continental, I didn't mean to distinguish the conduct so much as the scope. Russia was confined to the continent and I couldn't find a better phrase for it than "continental" (which I know has connotations of what power simply happened to dominate the local landmass, cf. France during the Napoelonic period). 
 
I think - in the context of post 16th century European politics - we need some kind of demarcating term for those powers that looked to expand in the "traditional" way that powers historically expanded (by enlarging their borders in an ever expanding outward pattern and annexing local territory to exploit resources and wealth) with what, on the one hand, England, Portugal and Spain did in America on the one hand and what England did in China and India on the other.

I guess, but I don't see that - continental vs. 'imperial' - as a meaningful or useful distinction. It seems to imply that there's something fundamentally different about crossing an ocean to conquer foreigners and take their stuff compared to not crossing the ocean, and that's probably the least interesting aspect of colonialism or imperialism to use for a dividing line.

For some scholars, e.g. Paul Schroeder, it isn't a distinction at all; he has referred to Bonaparte's Empire and Hitler's Germany as being colonial-imperial ventures within Europe on a vast scale. Schroeder argued that Bonaparte's Empire failed precisely because he was trying to do to Europe what European countries typically did to non-Europeans. Schroeder's understanding of colonial empire, though, mostly seems to consist of large-scale territorial annexation and assumption of political control, and one might be forgiven for asking what exactly distinguishes that from any other sort of territorial aggression save scale and success rate. Then again, that might be part of the point - most forms of territorial aggression involve forms of colonization, whether by physically planting colonies of people in newly conquered territory or by slightly less direct cultural and political forms.

But categorizing 'continental' imperialism differently from any other kind yields strange results, too. Take the "Scramble for China" in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. France, Britain, Japan, and Germany approached their Chinese spoils from across the water, and Russia approached its own from across Siberia. What purpose does it serve to lump everybody else into one mode of analysis, and Russia into another? Surely, say, Japanese policy and French policy differed more from each other than did Japanese and Russian policy.

Russian rule over Siberian, Chinese, and Turkic peoples also ties into the original reason for this tangent's existence (as I understand it), namely, the racial aspect of imperialism and colonialism. Russia's empire in the East was and is one of the most prominent examples of outright rule by white persons over non-white persons. Unlike the raj or the African empires, it still unquestionably exists, even if it's a little bit shrunken from its glory days 112 years ago.

[Sartoz]

that is not what actual aboriginal Americans are like at all, it's a make-believe image of them you have in your head

 

 

If so, I can't find in my history books that they were tech advanced. 

 

For example: the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota were nomadic  tribes and were reliant on the buffalo for food and clothing and shelter. So, when the buffalo was plentiful and roaming free, the tribes grew and prospered. Opposite occured when the food was not plentiful. Nomadic tribes can't evolve into tech cultures.. My opinion. and source on nomadic tribes:  http://www.sd4histor...falolesson2.htm

 

Now I'm not sure what you mean by "actual aboriginal Americans are like at all" but there is always room for learning. Anyway, I used the Indians, aboriginals, if you like that better, as an example of a nomadic tribe, like the Dalish , that can't climb the tech ladder because of their reliance on migratory food.  No negative connotations on aboriginals intended.

[Sartoz]

I guess, but I don't see that - continental vs. 'imperial' - as a meaningful or useful distinction. It seems to imply that there's something fundamentally different about crossing an ocean to conquer foreigners and take their stuff compared to not crossing the ocean, and that's probably the least interesting aspect of colonialism or imperialism to use for a dividing line.

For some scholars, e.g. Paul Schroeder, it isn't a distinction at all; he has referred to Bonaparte's Empire and Hitler's Germany as being colonial-imperial ventures within Europe on a vast scale. Schroeder argued that Bonaparte's Empire failed precisely because he was trying to do to Europe what European countries typically did to non-Europeans. Schroeder's understanding of colonial empire, though, mostly seems to consist of large-scale territorial annexation and assumption of political control, and one might be forgiven for asking what exactly distinguishes that from any other sort of territorial aggression save scale and success rate. Then again, that might be part of the point - most forms of territorial aggression involve forms of colonization, whether by physically planting colonies of people in newly conquered territory or by slightly less direct cultural and political forms.

But categorizing 'continental' imperialism differently from any other kind yields strange results, too. Take the "Scramble for China" in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. France, Britain, Japan, and Germany approached their Chinese spoils from across the water, and Russia approached its own from across Siberia. What purpose does it serve to lump everybody else into one mode of analysis, and Russia into another? Surely, say, Japanese policy and French policy differed more from each other than did Japanese and Russian policy.

Russian rule over Siberian, Chinese, and Turkic peoples also ties into the original reason for this tangent's existence (as I understand it), namely, the racial aspect of imperialism and colonialism. Russia's empire in the East was and is one of the most prominent examples of outright rule by white persons over non-white persons. Unlike the raj or the African empires, it still unquestionably exists, even if it's a little bit shrunken from its glory days 112 years ago.

 

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Interesting discussion but are "we" nitpicking on procedural colonial/imperial adventures? Anyway, what has this to do with the Dalish clans somehow getting the short end of the stick regarding magical power?

 

The Lore indicates they deliberately lived in the forest(s) to: 1) get away from the conquerors and 2) to recapture their "old glory" via understanding their past.

 

Fact is, after centuries of living in the forest(s), they show to be a stagnant culture. 

[Patchwork]

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Interesting discussion but are "we" nitpicking on procedural colonial/imperial adventures? Anyway, what has this to do with the Dalish clans somehow getting the short end of the stick regarding magical power?

 

The Lore indicates they deliberately lived in the forest(s) to: 1) get away from the conquerors and 2) to recapture their "old glory" via understanding their past.

 

Fact is, after centuries of living in the forest(s), they show to be a stagnant culture. 

 

 

To be fair all cultures in Dragon Age are pretty static both in technology and in how their society functions. Elves got a reprieve for a while but then the Fall of the Dales happened and they were right back to being the lowest strata in human societies. There's been some wars, land has changed hands, a few end of the world scenarios and there's been little change or growth because the writer's want DA to remain a medieval fantasy.   

[Torgette]

Pretty sure all cultures are portrayed as dysfunctional in Dragon Age, much like real life.    

 

Also Morrigan hardly has a handle on anything, letting her drink the water results in hilarity when you find out who Mythal is.

[Handsome Jack]

Well the climate is right for White Superiority to take over and eliminate the inferior people with darker pigmentation. Too many of us Asians. Need to make room for the Superior White people!

 

 

This White Supremacy attitude is really sickening!

 

It's not white supremacy, it's fact. If you'd rather put your fingers in your ears and say "DAS RACIST" just because the biggest and most powerful nations in history were European or North American, then you're delusional. It's the same case in DA:I. The Elves are weak because the Humans are strong. Humans are indeed superior, and the lore makes this quite clear. The Elves are a bygone people that are all but wiped out, and it's humans who currently rule the stage of Thedas, challenged by Qunari and by Darkspawn for that title.

 

I love how SJWs scream that we need to respect and be proud of all races... but if you're proud of and respect being White? Nope, you're a horrible racist bigot transphobe patriarchal cis scum bla bla bla insert problematic buzzword here.

[AppalachianApex]

I came to talk about fictional elves in a fantasy video role-playing game. I don;t know what the hell happened over the course of 3 pages of conversation to devolve into this madness lol.

[Darkly Tranquil]

[thats1evildude]

It jumped up a notch.

[Torgette]

I came to talk about fictional elves in a fantasy video role-playing game. I don;t know what the hell happened over the course of 3 pages of conversation to devolve into this madness lol.

 

Some people here think video games are as serious as real life. 

[BioWareMod03]

We are locking this thread because it has derailed into real world history and political discussion.