Quote:
Originally Posted by Capsicum
That's the logic of settler colonialism. The "settlers" set up whatever culture and dictate the terms that others have to assimilate to (regardless of who came before, the actual natives, whose cultures they displaced). Others, who came either voluntarily (eg. immigrants), or involuntarily (eg. African slaves whose African cultures and languages were forcibly taken away from them) are assimilated into the colonizers' culture.
Luckily, our society's getting more tolerant and pluralistic and less of the "we'll make you change or give up your culture by gunpoint" nowadays, like what is happening to the Uighurs in China, or what was done to native Americans and Canadians in the past with forced education camps/schools, so that's a pretty low bar for cultural tolerance.
Still, we're writing comments to one another in English, the colonial tongue, and as far as I can see our (mostly American and Canadian) posters aren't replying to one another in non-English languages, so I guess assimilation still kind of won, in that regard!
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Hehe well, between the US and Canada, English is only an official language of Canada; like I said earlier, the US doesn't have an official language (at the federal level). English could also be thought of as the de facto lingua franca in the US, since it's not an official language.
Reading through the previous comments again, it's apparent that many people look at the world through the modern lens of nationalism, that somehow everyone who lives in a sovereign nation all (must) have one national identity. That's far from the reality, and for thousands of years, that was never the case. Take the Roman Empire, for example. Did the Jews in the Middle East, though they lived in and were part of the Roman Empire, think of themselves as Romans?? Most likely not, nor did the Romans. They lived under the umbrella of the Roman Empire and had to pay taxes to Rome, but otherwise they weren't forced to assimilate, they just continued to do their own thing.
Same with the Greeks. For hundreds of years they were part of the Ottoman Empire, but did they consider themselves to be Ottomans? Nope. And they were allowed to keep their own culture and language. Of course there were some cultural borrowings, but essentially they were, and remained, ethnically Greek.
And look at the Renaissance painter El Greco. Spaniards referred to him as "The Greek," but did they mean that he was from the sovereign nation of Greece? Of course not. He was "the Greek" because he spoke Greek, and was ethnically Greek. But he was from Crete, which at the time of his life, was a colony of Venice. Mainland Greece at the time was part of the Ottoman Empire. And with the rise of nationalism that started sweeping Europe in the 1800s, Greece became an independent nation, which united all the Greek-speaking territories. So when you think about it, it was kind of artificially created. Kind of like modern Germany and Italy. I read that Marlene Dietrich referred to herself as being Prussian, not German. And Sophia Loren for the longest time would say that she is Neapolitan. Italy used to be a bunch of independent city-states, republics and kingdoms, and the Papal States. I find it no coincidence that Germany and Italy became fascist in the 20th Century because I don't doubt they were still trying to assert a new national identity (that's just my opinion). Even now, supposedly many Sicilians don't even consider themselves to be Italian. They really have their own dialect and culture separate from mainland Italy.
Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon. In my opinion, it's a very unnatural and artificial notion---and can be a problem. Even Zionism started out as a secular nationalism movement in the 1800s. It wasn't until later that people started putting a religious angle on it.
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