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.

Like, maybe previously your conquered peoples were — admittedly, forcefully integrated into the conquering society, but that didn't mean you had no rights — eventually you might marry into, and your children might be full-fledged members of that society.

Seen in this light, genocide and chattel slavery might not be seen as the actions of a note “advanced” society, but one that is depraved, like someone who eats their own seed corn or does sibling-sibling incest.

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.

for one, it's pretty fucking expensive to do that as policy. maybe once or twice, or maybe for about a generation, or under a ruler who likes that shit? but it's not formalized, you don't spend as much time justifying it, and your kids tend to not have the stomach for doing it. they get “soft” and want to make poop jokes and have lots of sex and write about poop jokes and sex.

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.

people: wait, why do we need to clearly define the rights of people to not have their children eaten? isn't it obvious that this is a bad thing?

Christopher Columbus, gnawing on the femur of a 10-year old Taino child: NO ONE SAID I COULDN'T DO IT!!!!1

people: ...o-kay... maybe we should.

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.

@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.

@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 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

@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.