"You live on stolen land" (user search)
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  "You live on stolen land" (search mode)
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Author Topic: "You live on stolen land"  (Read 2903 times)
Battista Minola 1616
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Posts: 11,491
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E: -5.55, S: -1.57

« on: July 17, 2020, 09:28:41 AM »
« edited: July 17, 2020, 09:37:53 AM by Battista Minola 1616 »

Impressive work. This doesn't come close to applying any sort of consistent standard, of course (I could quibble the hell out of your European map) but still a remarkable effort. And your point is correct, of course, though I suspect we take very different conclusions from it.

Feel free to quibble. I'll probably find a more high-resolution map and do a third version of this, because by the time I got to the Balkans I was so squished in I didn't have the patience for it. Also, some of the boundaries are nebulously defined at best.

21 is pretty dumb, because I) modern-day Italians are not direct descendants of Romans, or at least not any more than they are of Goths, Lombards, Byzantines, Arabs, and others who mixed during the Early Middle Ages while they ripped apart Italy in a zillion of fiefs and II) Italy still for many centuries was a jagged patchwork of Holy Roman Empire dependencies, then city-states, then regional states, the Papal State, dependencies of foreign national kingdoms and what not, and while ordinary people did not necessarily care about this*, most intellectuals were deeply committed to the ideal of a united Italy whereas especially after the XVI century most rulers were representatives of foreign powers (France, Spain, then Austria) which controlled each a piece of Italy and treated it mostly like an opportunity to amass land and power.
*Italian dialects ("vulgar") emerged during roughly the High Middle Ages, so you can trace modern "Italian" ethnicity to then, but what really sparked the flames of national identity in a widespread manner was the French Revolution and Napoleon briefly unifying all of Italy (which was a mess for various reasons and still foreign rule, though).

And this is still an oversimplification!

So, most of Italy was stolen and stolen again and stolen again during the centuries, but unless you are a neo-Bourbonic revisionist reactionary (or an Austrian imperialist reactionary - I'm not sure those exist), the only part that fits the expression "stolen land" is really Südtirol. Or more tenuously, maybe Sardinia, which developed independently from the rest in various ways.

I hope this is helpful!

P.S. Then there is the issue of the incredible amount of groups who lived in pre-Roman Italy, but that was already covered by Antonio.

P.S. P.S. Of course there are similar quibbles to be made with pretty much every European nation, but since Italy has a history of land changing hands a zillion of times during Late Middle Ages and Early Modern era that places like Spain, France and especially the United Kingdom do not have, I think our case is particularly egregious.
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Battista Minola 1616
Atlas Icon
*****
Posts: 11,491
Vatican City State


Political Matrix
E: -5.55, S: -1.57

« Reply #1 on: August 18, 2020, 12:17:46 AM »

You are missing my point. I am not trying to downplay what happened to the Natives; I'm just pointing out that America is hardly unique in the quality of being "built on stolen land." The experiences you just described can be applied to half a hundred ethnic groups around the world just in the last fifty years. So if you're going to argue that the US is built on stolen land but the rest of the world isn't, you need a better case for it than that.
This is true, but I don't think they would disagree with you here

I know this post is pretty old but it gets at something important.

I'm not going to speculate on Dule's specific motives here but a lot of the pushback you see against the "stolen land" claims and several others argues against them as if they were relative statements about world history. I don't think this is what is meant - more often they're meant to be viewed as absolute statements. It is true that US history is riddled with abusive and coercive treaties (often ignored) and land acquisition fueled through conquest and other types of brutality, often with incredibly nefarious and racist motivations.

The fact that it has happened throughout world history doesn't really change the fact it happened in the US. If anything, the comparison being made when the "stolen land" argument is invoked isn't the rest of the world, it's to the idea of American exceptionalism itself. American history like the history of most nations (especially but not limited to most large European powers) is full of conquest, perfidy, unimaginable brutality, and subjugation. The difference is that Americans teach themselves as an article of faith that their history is uniquely rid of these problems. This is why the "stolen land" arguments have gained traction in the last several decades. It's a form of self-accountability.


That's a fair enough argument.  This "motto" of the US is also how you end up with Europeans unironically calling Americans "racist" for having attitudes toward immigration that are fundamentally more liberal than most Europeans'.

In my experience as a European, people who call Americans "racist" usually don't make any reference to immigration.
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