Alon

I guess I should write something to commemorate the day Europe became civilized?

So: the Holocaust was not a singular event. The history of Western culture is a series of genocides from the Rhineland Massacres to Treblinka. When people talk about retvrning to tradition, this is what they mean. The EU, human rights courts, and other postwar regime elements that populists hate exist in rejection of that millennium of savagery. And what they hate the most is, this new regime has been successful.

May 8, 2023 at 4:32pmWeb
Show threadColin ParkerMay 8, 2023
@Alon Why do you say millennium? Was 950-1950 really more savage than 50 BCE-950 (or 1050-50 BCE, etc.)?
Show threadAlonMay 8, 2023
@Colinvparker Because a recognizable Western culture only goes back to, at earliest, the Early Middle Ages. Roman savagery worked differently - not better or worse, just differently.
Show threadstephen judkinsMay 8, 2023
@Alon @Colinvparker @Alon genocide is a fairly standard feature of human society. Genetic evidence indicates the Indo-European migrations were pretty genocide-like
Show threadColin ParkerMay 8, 2023
@stephenjudkins @Alon Yeah, that’s what gives me pause about celebrating things like the European project. It’s not that they aren’t good (they are!), it’s that it’s 75 years against a long history where for all I know there were 75 year anomalies here and there too. But it’s also definitely better than the alternatives.
Show threadstephen judkinsMay 8, 2023
@Colinvparker I dunno, I very much agree that the post-war EU liberalism is an amazing thing worth celebrating and preserving
Show threadAlonMay 8, 2023
@Colinvparker @stephenjudkins I don't think there was a 75-year period in recorded history with peace along the current Franco-German border until now. And I don't think the line about genetic evidence is true at all - for example, England is genetically English rather than Germanic (or Roman, or Celtic).
Show threadstephen judkinsMay 8, 2023
@Alon @Colinvparker it's certainly not uniformly true and not every historical event was a genocide. There were a lot of events where elites imposed a new culture without population replacement, and lots of space in between. But there are a huge number of genetically attested events that look pretty genocide-like. Most often these are Y-chromosome bottlenecks
Show threadAlonMay 8, 2023
@stephenjudkins @Colinvparker The gap between "some prehistoric cultural diffusion events were genocidal" and "it gives me pause when people celebrate 1945 as a break point" is about as wide as the gap between what Olaf Scholz promises and what Olaf Scholz delivers.
Show threadstephen judkinsMay 8, 2023
@Alon @Colinvparker I don't think I disagree with you on that that point
Show threadAlonMay 8, 2023
@stephenjudkins @Colinvparker The other issue is, Y chromosome markings don't always denote genocide. For example, Ashkenazi Jews have Middle Eastern markers on the Y chromosome but European ones on the mtDNA, and we know it was not at all about genocide. Instead, contra the modern definition of Judaism, there were mixed marriages and conversions (conversions that were very well-documented in e.g. the early Roman Empire) and children inherited the cultural identity of the father.
Show threadstephen judkinsMay 8, 2023
@Alon @Colinvparker
Evidence does show some events where a huge % of a given generation of a very small number of men from a genetically distinct population. Pretty hard to come up with a non-violent explanation for this
Show threadAlonMay 8, 2023
@stephenjudkins @Colinvparker Yeah, some. But, again looking at England because that's been studied to death, the evidence there looks not at all like events for which we know from historic records were genocidal, like English or even Spanish settlement of the Americas.
Show threadstephen judkinsMay 8, 2023
@Alon @Colinvparker neither the Anglo-saxon migrations nor the Norman conquest were genocidal but the arrival of both the east-Mediterranean-descended farmers and the proto-Celtic populations certainly could have been
Show threadColin ParkerMay 8, 2023
@Alon @stephenjudkins Oh to be clear I’m happy about 1945 as a break point. I just worry about being overly confident that European war is a solved problem, given developments in Ukraine.