the_dunk_tank
It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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Barely attested religious practices from thousands of years ago are not European religion. Christianity did not erase white people's culture. Christianity did not colonize, imperialize, texturize, or homogenize Europe (excepting, very specifically, Lithuania). Homophobia is not Abrahamic - homosexuality as understood in modern culture and homophobia as understood in modern culture are both products of modern culture, with homophobia largely anchored in industrial revolution era notions of family, society, and patriarchy. Astrology is not "pagan", it existed the whole time and was an integrated feature of Christian societies. There was never some authentic primal real spiritually and emotionally satisfying Paganism (trademark llc all rights reserved copyright disney corporation mmccxxvi) that everyone was happy with before christianty ruined everything. Human cultures - including law, religion, sexuality, gender, food - evolve, change, spread, and syncretize constantly. They only very, very rarely disapear when an entire people is extremely thoroughly wiped out, which almost never happens. Missionary imperialism as we conceive it was a 19th century project. The hacienda colonialism that the Spanish employed in the Americas was it's own thing, with infuelnce on later religious imperialisms, that employed different theories and methods with different goalsm
I cannot emphasize this enough; magic isn't real, gods aren't real, religion is stuff people believe that does not necessarily correlate to an observable external reality. Christians don't do " pagan" stuff. They do christian stuff that in some cases was either adapted from the practices of other religion, or rose out of a syncretic (same "syn" as synthesis) mixing of religions and beliefs. Thoraboos all think Christianity came along and wrecked their sigma chad viking fascist whatever the fuck. Archeology suggests there was a long period where pre-christian northern european religious practices were practised alongside, and eventually merged with, christian practice.
All of this stuff is changing all the time! The christmas tree isn't some sacrificial wotan holiday log. It's not even the same thing as the christmas tree from 20, 100, or 200 years ago. Culture changes all the time. Even when culture doesn't seem to change that's often superficial - the fabric might look the same from a distance, but the dyestufss used, the method by which the fabric was made and transported, the method of sewing, all kinds of things are changing and so people's relation to their culture and the artifacts of their culture change, and in turn that culture and those artifacts change. There is never stasis. There are no ancestral traditions handed down unchanged through the centuries!
We live in modern times, and so did our ancestors, all of our ancestors, all the way back to monke! As long as there has been writing we have records of anxiety about the rapid, sometimes overwhelming changes in cultures, norms, and traditions. Yes! Postmodernism, futureshock, alienation, all these things are real, and their distressing effects are intense in our lives! But these feelings are not unique to us! You can trace changes in fashion on the walls of ancient tombs! You can read concerns for the well being of the youth written with iron gall ink on ancient vellum! The world has never been still or static! We have always danced and sung and warred and wailed and changed! Always, always, there is change!
There were crusades not just against Lithuania, but against Frisia, Russia, the Baltics, Slavic peoples in the Balkans, East Germany and Pommerania, as well as Ireland and Finland. Hell even charlemanges Saxon wars where he literally mass-slaughtered the native leadership and burned down their holy places could be counted under erasure.
To compare medieval europe and the colonization period is wrong. But saying that whiteness and whiteness fostered through „Shared Christian Values“ didn’t erase indigenous European cultures is distorting history and strengthening white supremacy.
Yeah, no, there were no equivalent groups or organizations or states or entities or religion equivalent to modern European nation states, nor any programs or projects akin to 16th century Spanish Colonialism or 19th century Missionary Imperialism, prior to the development of those things. Equating the spread of the Christianity in the late classical and early medieval period to shit going on in the 1500s or 1800s is ahistorical.
There barely were "Shared Christian Values" until like, idk... God, when did they start to homogenize the religion? Because for like a thousand years it was just a mish-mash of idiosyncratic practices, small religious communities, weird schisms, warring factions of scholars. There wasn't a single coherent centrally organized Christianity until probably the Crusades, and even that was a complete mess. Like yeah, they were mostly using Bibles that were at least similar, and a lot of the Priests were at least able to read Latin, but there wasn't much standardization. Treating "Christians" as a single religious group, or ethnoreligious group, or nation in the medieval period does not reflect the societal practices and systems of power at that time.
"Whiteness" as we conceptualize it didn't exist until like the 16th century at the absolutely earliest, and didn't really solidify in to it's modern form until a while after that. There was no "Whiteness" in medieval Europe. Tribes, towns, linguistic groups, allegiance to various secular or religious lords, sure. Religious societies, sure. But there was no whiteness, nothing we would recognize as Nation States. The Christians that replaced, violently or not, pre-Christian Europeans weren't an organized or monolithic body. It was dozens of different cultures and language groups, some of which were only barely practicing the same religion, acting according to their own material interests. There was nothing equivalent to the US genocide of Native Americans or the Spanish conquest and mass slaughter in South America.
The closest I'm aware of would be the Teutonic Knight's crusades in to north Eastern Europe. And those guys fought other Christians as much as they fought non-Christians, and were, iirc, widely considered psychopaths by all their neighbors Christian and non-Christian alike.
Also, genuinely curious - Crusade in Ireland? I have never heard even a suggestion of anything like that, except that silly nonsense about Patrick violently expelling Pagans from Ireland.