I was thinking about more Mastodon wank and running through my head several circumstances when I suddenly thought about Iain M Bank's “Excession”, and suddenly realized: the Outside Context Problem examples I've seen so far have all been about differences between technology levels between two societies, and how the more technologically-proficient (I refuse the term “advanced”) always dominates the less-tech-proficient one.
I'm thinking about it more now and I'm realising how useless that conception of OCP is, though. Like, it's not about a “less-advanced” civilisation encountering a “more-advanced” one. It wasn't that they couldn't “comprehend” what was happening. It was that the invaders behaved in ways that were completely alien to the subjugated people's experiences.
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the narrative we're given presupposes that because a conquering polity's technology was more advanced, that's why the subject people were wiped out. except... for the most part, that's not true, pre-Western colonialism?
like, the Romans didn't do that, despite the fact they had better tech. The Mongols didn't. Neither the Huns, the Muslims, the Persians...
oh, they killed and took slaves, no doubt. but they didn't do the sort of devastation we now take for granted when talking about conquest.
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actually i wanted to talk about how societies failed and how outside context problems didn't just cover external, “more advanced” threats but also the fundamental fault lines that consensus within a society papers over but I've derailed my own thoughts by getting all Edward Said on my own ass.
now I'm discombobulated.
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let's be real, if any pre-modern imperial power acted like western colonialists, the shape of history would have been very different. literally probably less diverse.
...hey, wait a minute. would it be like D&D?
like, i know James Maliszewski presupposed that the reason we had all of the D&D trappings in his Dwimmermount campaign was because before recorded history began, all the sapient species were subjugated by a malign, depraved yet magically-advanced civilisation—
oh. uh oh. I'm getting GM plot-bunnies.
I mean. The idea's not original. I first encountered it with Raymond E Feist's Valheru. Then there's Michael Moorcock's Menilbonéans. That the First People Were Depraved Conquerors is kind of an early SF idea, too.
@SuzanEraslan I didn't deny that the Mongols, Huns and the Romans weren't violent or expansionistic — in actual fact, I used them as examples of violent expansionism to prove a particular point.
I mean, they were super-violent and brutal. Let's be clear there! (though judging by how horrified the Romans were with the European tribes, who practiced human sacrifice, there were lines that even they didn't cross)
But as bloody as they were, they had nothing on someone like, say, Columbus.
@tariqk Oh, absolutely, but I think Columbus suffered from a kind of proto-white-guy-tourist syndrome: what happens in Vegas (or the Americas) stays in Vegas. It's ok to destroy people provided that you do it abroad. It happened with a number of "civilized" men-- the people didn't count, and your actions among them didn't count because they weren't "really" people. But that's pretty standard practice.
@tariqk What I think made colonialism different was the technological advancements that allowed for it to happen so (relatively) quickly-- ships and guns-- and the new driving force of capitalism. It wasn't enough to just take a subject people's land, you now had to take the people's labour, as well, in order to make more money.
@SuzanEraslan that's not all it did. it also assaulted identity and the past of the peoples it subjugated.
we're still dealing with this fallout, both in economic and psychological terms.
@tariqk It's interesting, though, that your post made me think of specifically Muslim empires as opposed to Western Christian ones-- Muslim empires were generally rather live and let live (the Ottoman Empire, for example, simply levying taxes but allowing their citizens of other religions be judged in the courts of their religion rather than a state court) and prospered from not unusual taxation, rather than resource and labour exploitation.
@tariqk Which is not to say they didn't enact horrors on people who weren't Turks (the way they made eunuchs of Black East Africans was particularly horrifying) but it wasn't a wholesale slaughtering in the way that Western imperialism was(/is).
@SuzanEraslan EXACTLY
and we started going for the megadeaths, we FOLLOWED the Western model of genocide. because it was prior art.
@tariqk Oh, yeah, exactly-- the west LOVES to invoke the Armenian genocide as proof that Muslim invented genocide and it's like... uh, no, bro, we learned it from watching you. Wahhabism, as well, had the examples of centuries of Western European "Christian" colonialism wiping out those who didn't convert hard and fast enough.
@SuzanEraslan oh god Wahhabism don't get me started on that ughhhhh how much of that resembles Western Christian fundamentalism up to the reliance ONLY on scripture do you know how eager to takfir these people are and how alien that is to prior Muslim religious movements ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
@tariqk Oh, completely-- Wahhabis murdered my great, great grandfather (who was an Ottoman governor in Mecca) so I have NO love for them or their Al-Qaeda/ISIS offspring. But the entire idea of killing not only People of the Book, but other Muslims is so anathema to Islam as to be apostasy-- and is totally modeled on the Christian extremism that went on for hundreds of years during the various reformations. They are basically the violent early anabaptists of Islam.
@SuzanEraslan and i could go on about how that model for genocide came AFTER the Ottomans “modernized” themselves, as in, patterning their administration to match WESTERN empiressssss
@SuzanEraslan and when someone calls the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and Da'esh “medieval” I want to close my eyes and say 1) not only are you insulting medieval Muslims, who were the OPPOSITE of barbaric and brutal, also 2) you DON'T know what medieval Europe was like, stop listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson on history 😑
@tariqk Yeah, its medieval ONLY in the sense that its equivalent to EUROPEAN medieval times. Medieval Muslims were doing successful cataract surgery with anaesthesia while medieval Europeans were shitting themselves to death because they didn't bathe and drank the same water they used as their toilet in order to be "holy."
@SuzanEraslan ironically, not even. did medieval Europeans have our modern understanding of what gender and orientation was? no. was there scriptural literalism? no, because biblical scholarship was limited. witch persecution? not until the eve of the enlightenment.
like, literally all of this bad shit had it's roots in modernism brooooo. fundamentalism is modern movement with its influences in the enlightenment but sure “medieval” whatever makes u sleep at niiiiiiight
@tariqk I just want to say how much I appreciate being able to have a conversation with a fellow Muslim (I don't practice, but I identify as culturally, familially Muslim) without having a bunch of islamophobic dickbags descend on our conversation to tell us what savages we are. Yet another wonderful thing about Mastodon.
@SuzanEraslan lol i was primed for it. i had my fight-gland primed up 😂
@tariqk Same-- I was like, "Ok, any moment now, some guy is going to pop in to explain Islam to me when they don't personally know any Muslims." Instead, we just had a wonderful, bonding conversation. I think it's important to have these conversations that are not for the Western Christian gaze, as well-- to be able to be critical of extremist Muslims without having to waste time defending Muslims in general to American/European islamophobes is a blessing.
@SuzanEraslan ...yeah, it's a nice experience, that's true.
I'm just so hesitant to attribute it to the inherent nature of Mastodon or the fediverse, because I can't see why this level of safety could be attributed to those factors rather than... i don't know, limited audience size or curation on an instance level.
@tariqk But it's exactly that-- I feel (cautiously) safe on this instance because of @CobaltVelvet's excellent moderation and federation policies.
@SuzanEraslan @tariqk i mean, this bad stuff was very present in the reconquista, the Inquisition, and the crusades which were all very mideval. the western world was doing this way pre modernism.
@tariqk @SuzanEraslan western europe has been doing this stuff for a very very long time.
@SuzanEraslan @imallmostgone you know what? yeah, you're right. the anti-Semitism is something that has deep origins in Western Europe from the medieval period.
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@tariqk Oh, yes, EXACTLY this-- the Ottomans went full tilt French, then the Young Turks were attempting to instate an Anglicized form of constitutional-ish, parliamentary monarchy... and we're supposed to think that it's a coincidence that THAT's when they started slaughtering people, because it was somehow just latent in them the whole time but didn't rear its head at the height of their military and economic prowess but at its nadir?
@SuzanEraslan and you know what?
after the initial slaughter, EVEN THE MONGOLS DID THAT!!!!1
some of Genghis Khan's children EVEN CONVERTED TO THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE HIS FATHER SLAUGHTERED!!!11
can you imagine a colonial nation that was affected by it's subject peoples the way the people of Baghdad changed Genghis Khan's?
@tariqk Yeah, that's true-- Genghis Khan and the mongols in general prayed to whatever god they felt might be beneficial to the Mongols. And as long as you said, "Ok, Genghis is our emperor, nbd," you were spared and they just moved on to the next place to "conquer."
@SuzanEraslan and i really want to point out that the first thing you thought was Muslim empires, who, for all their sins, for the most part, up until the 20th century, didn't start pulling this shit with the megadeaths.
@SuzanEraslan like there are people who'll say, hey, the English killed 10 million of us, but they have us civilisation and trains.
or that they reconfigured our ideas of gender and sexuality, to the point where now if our people deviate from VICTORIAN CISHET NORMS, they're “deviant” and “Western”.
there's an entire English city — I'm calling you out, Bristol — whose prosperity depended on slaves... who think the slaves descendants ought to be GRATEFUL.
@SuzanEraslan that's the thing, though! it's not! even by his contemporaries' standards, i.e. Bartholomew de las Casas’ he was *bad*.
not that de las Casas was any better... he advocated that the colonizers used African slaves instead. THAT'LL SOLVE THE PROBLEM 😒
@SuzanEraslan (also IIRC the Romans were one of the first to record the sacrifices that the Carthaginians did to Moloch, but that's propaganda and was basically their justification as to why they wiped Carthage off the map, so that's neither here nor there)
@SuzanEraslan (oops sorry it was Cronus, allegedly, still propaganda tho)
@tariqk Uh... I see where you're going with this, but the Mongols certainly wiped entire cities off the map, and even sent warriors back to ensure anyone who had been hiding or arrived back to a city from being out of town was killed if they saw fit to destroy a city. The Romans entirely destroyed Carthage. The Huns set civilization back hundreds of years in many former Roman colonies. The major difference isn't the level of slaughter, it's how much it was driven by trade.