Borzivoj
11mo ago
A thorny and ambiguous political question in many, many cases, but not particularly so in this one. None of the three parties (overlords, inhabitants, incomers) considered themselves to share ethnicities with one another. I don’t believe that either Turks or Jews would fail to notice or act if the same sort of thing were done to them. Even if the incomers are initially peaceful and they’re no worse (or even better) than the natives in tit-for-tat violence, this tends not to turn out well for recipient people.
I think the Turkification of Anatolia was bad, and would have a favorable opinion of the First Crusade if it had aimed at restoring Anatolian territory to the Byzantines instead of conquering a difficult-to-defend coastal strip of primarily symbolic significance.
Borzivoj
11mo ago
The area was never ethnically Turkish, so no? Like when the new German Empire attempted to Germanize Posen/Poznań, the local ethnicity organized to prevent it even though the Germans owned it? As any sane ethnicity would, since their overlords wanted to cement their dominance by changing the ethnic character of the territory? People tend to resist deliberate attempts to displace them by other ethnicities, regardless of who the overlord happens to be. (Incidentally, the parties & politicians that came to prominence fighting the Poznań debacle were apparently much more virulent in their nationalism than those from other regions, which had unfortunate knock-on effects after independence. Almost like people are radicalized by people trying to replace them (to be clear, Hamas are ISIS-tier murderer-zealots, and I’m not too fond of Dmowski or Endecja either).
To the extent they do, I think they should knock it off. Creating new ethnic enclaves has tended to be bad news since the rise of nationalism & nationalism-adjacent ideologies.
Borzivoj
11mo ago
I don’t think you have to a be a leftist to oppose a different people consciously forming an ethnic enclave on your current territory, regardless of the means. Would you really accept that if done to you? It seems like the sort of thing that might not turn out well.
To my knowledge, the right wing support for this in Europe derived mostly from a desire to be rid of the Jews.
Borzivoj
1yr ago
Second Dave Sim reference on this site today. Which book are you thinking of?
Borzivoj
1yr ago
It’s not surprising their direct high-cultural legacy isn’t commensurate with their success, since the economic system that partially underlay their success tends to produce small, illiterate populations. But their political-military system did in fact become dominant in Central Asia, with Timur’s and Babur’s empires (and so-called Turco-Mongol states in general) being self-consciously in that tradition. I don’t think the Timurid empire was culturally infertile, let alone the Mughals.
Borzivoj
1yr ago
Partially a conscious choice to drop all outstanding border controversies with Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus to avoid driving them into Russia’s arms - the approach was developed in the exile press during the Soviet period, and benefited from the discrediting of the interwar extreme nationalist approach by the events of WW2. They also wanted to maintain established borders to avoid reopening the question of the territories “recovered” from Germany (West Germany had earlier refused to make a final, binding agreement to respect the new borders pending a future reunification with East Germany during a period when more of the refugees from Prussia, Silesia, and Hinterpommern were both alive and unreconciled to the expulsion). Poland has already been compensated for the loss of ethnically mixed Galicia-Volhynia (main site of the Ukrainians anti-Polish massacres) and other parts of the Kresy with the newly-monoethnically-Polish German acquisitions, so it’s not like they need the area for anything.
Borzivoj
1yr ago
This is a more or less accurate summary of the Dmitriads. One of the more darkly amusing sequence of events in world history (set in motion by Ivan the Terrible randomly murdering his only non-retarded son). Highly recommend reading about the whole episode in detail for anyone into history for the entertainment value.
The phenomenon of foreign groups arriving and displacing natives long predates the appearance of nation states, and I don’t think the impulse to resist it does or should depend on having one. The details will depend on the technology levels of the parties and also their mode of subsistence (so that if the natives are pastoralists or mixed hunter-agriculturalists, the issue won’t be land rights in the same sense as with pure agriculturalists).
Conflicts over who constitutes an ethnicity for the purpose of forming a state can often be extremely murky, e.g., with Southern Slavs. I don’t necessarily have an opinion on exactly how Serbo-Croatian types should be split up any more than Levantines. But if members of some Illyrian ethnoreligious diaspora that had left the area more than a thousand years earlier started showing up in Montenegro or Bosnia to buy up land to form an ethnic enclave, I expect they’d get a chilly reception.
I don’t think the people now called Palestinians played their cards very well, and I condemn killing of civilians when the parties are operating within a system where the distinction is meaningful (I do include this whole conflict, including during the Ottoman period - contrasting with, e.g., native warfare in what’s now the Eastern U.S., where no such distinction was generally established or observed). My original point was there’s nothing left or right wing about opposing a self-consciously distinct ethnic group from acquiring your home from under your feet, whether with or without violence, whether legal or illegal by the prevailing standards of the time and place. People will tend to oppose this happening (to themselves, at any rate) regardless of the flavor of their own ideology - a right wing ideology will serve as well for this as a left wing one.
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