• queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Europe is a fake continent made by fragile crackers that wanted to have their own special crackerland separate from Eurasia.

    • comedygoblin@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      I’ve always found it weird how Europe gets to be a continent but India is only a subcontinent. I mean, I get why (white supremacy) but still

      • Justice@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        The entire idea of continents is stupid anyway, really. I understand the desire to name locations on the map for easy identification and reference, that’s fine, but the execution is arbitrary as fuck as far I can tell.

        Most of the issue is Asia, Europe and, to a degree, Africa. At some point we just started using Middle East to describe the area vaguely east of Egypt and west of India. Just draw a giant fucking circle south of Russia and between those countries and call it “Middle East.” Ignore all history, ignore cultural differences. They are all one thing now.

        I could definitely rant about a bunch of other shit like “Russia? The fuck is going on there?” or “Africa: Continent or country? Don’t ask Americans!” but I really just find the entire idea of continents to be kind of silly. More silly than the usual “nations are dumb” kind of way. Even more arbitrary and ultimately meaningless.

        Also, everyone always says Australia is the only country and continent simultaneously. But isn’t New Zealand part of the Australian continent? Or are the Kiwis just special? (Yes, I’m trying to start shit between the Kiwis and the ‘stralians). What about Antarctica. Google? What the fuck is google? No thanks, I’m just typing and guessing shit now. It’s like advanced Wikipedia perverts. They read made up shit and believe it. I just make shit up and ask easily answered questions.

        Edit: apparently I posted this last night in a weird half-sleep state. I apologize for nothing. My brain is weird.

    • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      I like to call it Eurafrica when I’m talking with libs. They dislike being reminded that the foundations of European culture were almost all developed in Africa.

      Then when they’d stolen all they could, they forgot about the continent and plummeted into the dark ages until they met west Asians, whose scholarly outputs helped backwards Europe to turn the lights back on.

      After draining all they could, they stagnated again until they found the Americas, where they found parliamentary democracy and many other theretofore inconceivable inventions.

      Marx called it primitive accumulation when the capitalists started doing it but Europeans have been propping themselves up on the heritage of the rest of the world for millennia. I guess Europe could be called ‘Thievesope’ but that is a bit tautologous.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, the two supposed methods for finding continental boundaries are geology and culture, which makes absolutely no sense for Crackerland. My brain worms demand I point out that the Isthmus of Suez is, at least, a distinct geological feature.

        But the so-called boundary they drew on Eurasia is (from Wikipedia) “along the Turkish straits, the Caucasus, and the Urals and the Ural River (historically also north of the Caucasus, along the Kuma–Manych Depression or along the Don River)”. That’s such obvious nonsense lol

      • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        the foundations of European culture were almost all developed in Africa.

        Could you elaborate on this, please?

        • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          First thing to do is to peddle backwards a little bit! Maybe I went a little bit too far – in part because those foundations were also laid on other continents and some of Europe’s cultural and intellectual foundations were developed in Europe. Still, there’s evidence suggests that Ancient Greek thinkers plagiarised ‘learned a lot’ from African and Asian thinkers. All that European pride in the Ancient Greek roots of their philosophy, etc, is not European but African and Asian.

          There’s a ‘controversial’ three-part book by Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, which argues that the origins of Ancient Greek culture were not in Greece but in Africa and Asia. He argues that this was the accepted view until the nineteenth century. I’ll quote from the first book (footnotes removed):

          (drop down 1/3) ‘Black Athena: … The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985’ Introduction

          These volumes are concerned with two models of Greek history: one viewing Greece as essentially European or Aryan, and the other seeing it as Levantine, on the periphery of the Egyptian and Semitic cultural area[:] … the ‘Aryan’ and the ‘Ancient’ models. The ‘Ancient Model’ was the conventional view among Greeks in the Classical and Hellenistic ages. According to it, Greek culture had arisen as the result of colonization, around 1500 BC, by Egyptians and Phoenicians who had civilized the native inhabitants. Furthermore, Greeks had continued to borrow heavily from Near Eastern cultures.

          Most people are surprised to learn that the Aryan Model, which most of us have been brought up to believe, developed only during the first half of the 19th century. In its earlier or ‘Broad’ form, the new model denied the truth of the Egyptian settlements and questioned those of the Phoenicians. What I call the ‘Extreme’ Aryan Model, … flourished during the twin peaks of anti-Semitism in the 1890s and again in the 1920s and 30s, denied even the Phoenician cultural influence. According to the Aryan Model, there had been an invasion from the north – unreported in ancient tradition – which had over-whelmed the local ‘Aegean’ or ‘Pre-Hellenic’ culture. Greek civilization is seen as the result of the mixture of the Indo-European-speaking Hellenes and their indigenous subjects. It is from the construction of this Aryan Model that I call this volume The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985.
 I [propose a] return to the Ancient Model, but with some revisions; … [a] ‘Revised Ancient Model’. This accepts that there is a real basis to the stories of Egyptian and Phoenician colonization of Greece …. However, it sees them as beginning somewhat earlier, in the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. It also agrees with the latter that Greek civilization is the result of the cultural mixtures created by these colonizations and later borrowings from across the East Mediterranean. On the other hand, it tentatively accepts the Aryan Model’s hypothesis of invasions – or infiltrations – from the north by Indo-European speakers sometime during the 4th or 3rd millennium BC. However, the Revised Ancient Model maintains that the earlier population was speaking a related Indo-Hittite language which left little trace in Greek. In any event, it cannot be used to explain the many non-Indo-European elements in the later language.

          If I am right in urging the overthrow of the Aryan Model and its replacement by the Revised Ancient one, it will be necessary not only to rethink the fundamental bases of ‘Western Civilization’ but also to recognize the penetration of racism and ‘continental chauvinism’ into all our historiography, or philosophy of writing history. The Ancient Model had no major ‘internal’ deficiencies, or weaknesses in explanatory power. It was overthrown for external reasons. For 18th- and 19th-century Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood, to have been the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites. Therefore the Ancient Model had to be overthrown and replaced by something more acceptable.

          (drop down 2/3) Later in the text, Bernal explains (pages 105–6):

          … Athenians were concerned with the secrets of Spartan success. … [S]cholars working within the Ancient Model have no doubt that the stories about Spartan, and specifically Lykourgan, institutional borrowings from Egypt were current at the turn of the 4th century because they were true. That is to say, the tradition is confirmed not merely by the nature of certain aspects of Spartan society but by the strong Egyptian influences on Spartan Archaic art and the many plausible Late Egyptian etymologies for the names of specifically Spartan Institutions.

          Isokrates insisted that the Spartans had failed to apply the Egyptian principle of the division of labour and that their constitution fell short of the perfection of the Egyptian model, about which he wrote: 'philosophers who undertake to discuss such topics and have won the greatest reputation prefer above all others the Egyptian form of government …’

          To whom was Isokrates referring? [It was] plausibly … to the Pythagoreans, and … their concept of, or even actual writing on, ‘Egyptian Politics’. It takes the greatest Aryanist ingenuity to deny the strong ancient traditions – referred to by Herodotos and … later writers – that there was such a person as Pythagoras and that his school was established on the basis of his long studies in Egypt. Nevertheless, it has been attempted. … Isokrates was quite explicit about it: 'On a visit to Egypt he [Pythagoras] became a student of the religion of the people, and was the first to bring to the Greeks all philosophy.

          [Or,] less likely … ‘philosophers’ … meant his great rival Plato and his Republic. It is generally thought that the latter was written between 380 and 370BC, that is after Bousiris, c390. It is also believed that the work was the result of many years of thought and teaching, and that there were possibly earlier drafts. The likelihood is, however, that priority should be given to Bousiris. … [T]here are striking similarities between it and Plato’s Republic. In the latter, too, there was a division of labour based on castes ruled by enlightened Guardians produced by careful selection and rigorous education. Plato was sharply hostile to the turbulence of democratic politics in Athens, and this kind of model was clearly comforting.

          To what extent can it be related to Egypt? Apart from the resemblance to the explicitly Egyptian Bousiris we know that Egypt, where Plato had spent some time, probably around 390 BC, was a central concern of his later works. In Phaidros, Plato had Sokrates declare that 'He [Theuth-Thoth the Egyptian god of wisdom] it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry . . . and most important of all letters …’.

          In Philebos and Epinomis Plato went into more detail on Thoth as the creator of writing, even of language and all sciences. Elsewhere Plato praised Egyptian art and music and argued for their adoption in Greece. … [T]he only reason for doubting that his Republic was based on Egypt is the fact that he does not say so in the text. This omission, however, has an ancient explanation. As his earliest commentator, Krantor, wrote …:

          Plato’s contemporaries mocked him, saying that he was not the inventor of his republic, but that he had copied Egyptian institutions. He attached so much importance to the mockers that he … ma[d]e [people] say that the Athenians had really lived under this regime at a certain moment in the past.

          (drop down 3/3) Bernal cites Marx (pages 106–7):

          Faced with all this evidence in favour of an Egyptian derivation, early modem scholars still associated Plato’s Republic with Egypt. As Marx put it: 'Plato’s Republic, in so far as division of labour is treated in it, as the formative principle of the state, is merely an Athenian idealization of the Egyptian system of castes.’

          Popper, who hates Plato, would have loved to tar him with an Egyptian brush. However, he was writing in a more systematically Aryanist age and, though fully aware of Krantor’s charge, he has confined it to the footnotes and appears puzzled by Marx’s remark. … The majority [of scholars] simply omit any mention of Egypt in connection with the Republic.

          Thus, for Plato … [and] Isokrates … [t]he deeper they went towards the true Hellenic roots of Greece, the closer they came to Egypt. … [B]oth Isokrates and Plato maintained that the great lawgivers and philosophers like Lykourgos, Solon and Pythagoras had all brought back Egyptian knowledge. Furthermore, Isokrates and Plato both believed in the colonizations of Pelops, Kadmos, Aigyptos and Danaos and seem to have accepted with Herodotos that the ‘barbarians’ brought important cultural baggage with them. Even on the issue of the foundation of Athens, Plato … accepted that there was a ‘genetic’ cultural relationship between it and Sais. Thus, despite their ambivalence if not hostility to the ideas, the two leading intellectual figures of the early 4th century BC were forced to admit the critical importance of foreign colonization, and massive later cultural borrowing from Egypt and the Levant, in the formation of the Hellenic civilization they both loved so passionately.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        It could be! But when I say it’s fake, I’m saying it’s a subcontinent. It exists but there’s no material reason for Europe to be its own continent while the Indian subcontinent is part of Asia. Crackers just wanted a crackerland.

        • Bloops@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          For sure, it’s ridiculous that India (and Arabia) is excluded but Europe is not. Eurindarasia is a little silly sounding though…

    • Farman [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Because the greeks beleved the vistula was at some point connected to the deniper and then to the black sea. And i think there is a point where crosing between the 2 of them is posible or at least easier than the crossing at suez. Its not clear because the logs are missing but pytheas probably circumnavegated europe by doing this in one of the expeditions.

      It is also convinient because in classical times east of the vistula is ruled by iranians west of it by germans.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        It is also convenient later on because in more modern times it was believed that each “continent” represented a race of humans.

        The concept of continents came from Greece, but it’s not as if every continent that exists was defined by Greece. When the truth was known that the only way to divide Eurasia is by drawing arbitrary lines the whole project could have been dropped. It’s not like we kept literally every idea the Greeks had - have you had the balance of your humors checked by your physician recently?

          • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            An arbitrary region with no material or geological basis. They just drew a line and said “this is where Europe ends and Asia begins”. Nonsense.

            • huf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              they didnt draw a line, they drew 272 different lines.

              europe is the UK and france

              europe is the EU

              europe is anything west of russia

              europe is anything up to the urals

              europe is whatever people want it to mean in that particular moment.

              • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                First off, god damn America. All my homies hate America.

                Now that that’s out of the way, Europe and Asia are not countries. In fact! The dividing line between Europe and Asia runs through a damn country. That’s such obvious nonsense. Europe is just Crackerland, its so-called boundary runs through a country lol

                It’s Eurasia dwi

                  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                    1 year ago

                    The problem with white supremacy is that it is annoying, not that it’s lead to ethnic cleansing and internal colonization and mass incarceration.

                    Cool and normal opinion dude! 👍

                  • Kuori [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    people like you very often are white supremacists. no one else benefits from trying to equivocate between someone being “annoying” and someone who wants to exterminate non-white people