This past week a post was made by autismdragon criticizing a Spanish meme calling out those who hypocritically denounce reformism and social democracy/democratic socialism in the United States or Europe but are ardent supporters of Latin American reformism and social democracy. within this post I and several Latin American comrades criticized this position from my our perspectives as abandoning revolution and being conciliatory to capitalists and capitalism in our countries. during this conversation I offhandedly mentioned that Honduras is also a western nation, a belief commonly held here, much to the chagrin of the general userbase who found the concept of any Latin American country being western preposterous. A comrade from Brazil, Apolonio, decided to make a separate post to expand on this topic in more detail and help explain the Latin American position so that people can understand where we are coming from. I was banned for 3 days for being a white supremacist for believing my country is western and Apolonio was bullied off the platform and went on to delete their account and every message they have ever made. its within this hostile atmosphere that I am going to analyze the oppositional view and its origins and analyze the chauvinistic attitude toward the predominant Latin American perspective.
1. The Beliefs Of The Userbase
User Dirt_Possum says
The way I’ve always thought of it is that “Western” is just an informal way of saying Imperial Core. That it’s all a matter of who is doing imperialism to whom, who is benefiting from imperialism and who is being exploited by it. That it’s not a matter of culture, language, etc., and is only a matter of race and racism because it’s racist reasoning and racist justification at the heart of imperialism
and SeventyTwoTrillion says
“Western” and “imperial core” are synonymous to me, too, and thus Honduras is not in the imperial core and I assume is in the periphery
while sooper_dooper_roofer adds
This whole debate is pointless because “Western” is just another weasel word, a euphemism, a dogwhistle, for “White”. The point was to make it sound softer and tamer, and the fact that this debate even exists, means they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. “The White World” sounds awkward and racist to the POC across the globe, but “The Western World” sounds soft and tame and inclusive–mission accomplished!
and autismdragon themself who made the original post says
For me, “the west”, “the imperial core”, and “the global north” are very close to being synonymous in how i understand them. But maybe they shouldnt be. This is why i usually use imperial core though, since it seems the most specific.
finally to end with we have supafuzz saying
The white bourgeois insistence on ‘cultural westernism’ or whatever in these countries is just aspiration to the Imperial core that they ain’t in
viewing all these different statements combined, none of which are being detracted by other people as being blatantly wrong and all being surrounded by a conversation about the definition of white and whiteness it is safe to assume that for the community there is no nuanced difference between all these different terminologies and they are not defined in significantly different ways. The West is the Imperial Core is White is The Global North is each other. Western Culture is not a defined set of beliefs, values, culture, religion, or anything else that can be viewed concretely but viewed holistically as just what white people do. This is a racial categorizational view of the world or a racially reductionized view that begs us to ask the question of what is white or more importantly who is white.
on the topic of eastern europeans we have Egon who says
Croatia, while being perceived as a “white” country most certainly is not perceived as western. Polish people, Czech people, Croatians, these people are not treated as equals when they come into “western” European countries. There is immense racism against them. You should hear how people speak of old “east block” countries.
and yet this seems contradictory to what has been established beforehand about western and white being synonymous. thankfully, in the past this sort of contradiction was found and rectified by categorizing eastern europeans in their own subracial category called the alpine race. This categorization allowed for the continued differentiation of eastern europeans in their own group while still allowing them to be caucasian which was the fancy term for white in the past.
on the topic of southern europeans we have sooper_dooper_roofer adding
Italian was considered a different racial category from northern European as late as the 1980s, I’ve seen it on official job applications. Italians also just look different in a way which doesn’t exist for Irish Polish or even Russian people. They’re darker, and they look more proximal to Arabs or Mexicans depending on who you ask. only from the (visibly darker pigmented) European periphery of Spain
or TupamarosShakur who says
However I think another point is that “the west” doesn’t apply to even Spain, I mean not really. There is of course the racial component that someone touched on, where Italians, southern Europeans, are not considered white
from this we can see that southern europeans are both included and disincluded from whiteness with the added fact that unlike eastern europeans, or the alpine race as it would’ve been called, southern europeans are significantly more tan than the real whites. thankfully this problem was also rectified with the sub-racial categorization of the Mediterranean race. this subracial categorization also conveniently solved the next problem on the list; Latin America.
sooper_dooper_roofer explains extensively through talking about admixture within latin american communities saying
that’s like 90% of Latin America or 75% of South America. They’re not white, they’re admixed with Europeans. Just like Black Americans are. I know a lot of you think you’re white because you’re lighter skinned than black people. Arabs and lighter skinned Indians also think that a lot of the time. They’re not. Almost everyone in Northern Europe and Anglo America can tell the difference and tbh even Argentinians don’t really look that white to me on average.
America is technically mixed race, but the average white American is 98.5% white (and western european to boot), unlike any “white” person in any Latin country where even the least mixed people are still 20% Native admixed
Latinos are basically only half white (from a darker than average white country like Spain), that means that Latinos are not Western
while Egon talks similar with
The argument that a lot of Italians went to Brazil, and so the place is “white” is funny to me too. Italians were still treated like an exotic “other” up to the late 90’s lol.
within these arguments we can see that Latin Americans are made up of Mediterraneans and natives and since Mediterraneans aren’t truly white either you end up with non whites and ergo non westerns. this also contains an age old classic The One Drop Rule. Since all Latin Americans are considered to have at least one drop of non-white in them they’re all tainted to be non-white while since the united states is made up of English and Germans mixing with Italians or other Caucasians this has a purifying effect creating real whites.
to further expand we have JohnBrownNote saying
yeah japan is sometimes part of “the west” but it’s not western. i mentioned in another comment that this is perhaps an opposite to the latam situation.
or supafuzz taking even further saying
I’d also argue Japan is more “western” than, say, Colombia in most cultural ways too. Full internalization of Western art, music, and most importantly political and governance structures, which are sort of a superficial veneer in most of Latam.
this comes from an old trope that japan is honourary aryan and that the japanese are special enough to be allowed in an anglo-japanese alliance. this further highlights the underlying racial aspect of this since anyone can very plainly see that very little about japan is culturally similar to western european countries and ties into the final point
in a little bonus 420stalin69 concludes with
I think of latam as having a western layer in the upper and more white classes that exploit a non-western majority.
this highlights the well established in other comments belief in white inherently being successful and dominant. those within latin american societies which are rich and do well obviously have to be white in the same way japan must be atleast honourary white in order to explain their similar success despite being asian. this also explains why the west is also the richest place on earth due to their dominance
now what does this all add up towards? this forum fundamentally believes in Anglo-Saxonism or Nordicism which is an outdated racialist ideology that divides the world into differing Caucasian races who predominantly inhabit different countries of which the Nordic race is the endangered and superior one destined to lead the other white races to greatness. the origin of the Nordic race comes from the Germanic tribes which went on to conquer across Europe and create Germany, The United Kingdom, France, and other countries. In fact, the only significant difference between Nordicists and the people on Hexbear seems to be the belief that white people are bad. This explains the incongruence of ideology between Latin Americans on the forum and the non-Latin American majority. Within Latin America Nordicism is not at all popular and those who espouse it are mentally tied together with the Nazis of Germany in the 30s.
2. Credibility of Those Beliefs
Now I was under the impression that after ww2 racialism was entirely discredited within academia and inside any groups in society who matter but evidently with the rise of neo-nazism, white identitarianism, and apparently this forum its an ideology that makes intuitive sense for some and has grand explanations for others. keeping in line with the talk of admixture some people have done before I am going to start by saying there is no such thing as races and its a concept that makes no sense whatsoever biologically.
https://www.eupedia.com/europe/autosomal_maps_dodecad.shtml
you can see in these simple autosomal admixture maps that genetic diversity is the rule and not the exception when it comes to Europe even within these countries that are labeled as “true white”. the United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, and France do not have their entire population share any haplogroup which could be used as the basis of this racial theory and the majorities in the UK share with Ireland, France share with Spain, Germany share with Poland haplogroups that they don’t share with other “true whites”. this is also entirely ignoring the fact that hapolgroups from outside Europe is found in abundance within Europe. The lack of scientific rigor for race is precisely why in South Africa they did not follow this ideology but instead used the Pencil Test to gauge who was and wasn’t white. now the only defense for why the need to adopt crazy racialist theory always amounts to “well a lot of people believe this stuff is true so we need to too” which apparently is true for nordicism but isn’t true for the belief that communism is evil or that lowering taxes is good. conveniently, too, no singular person or group is ever pointed to as holding these beliefs its always an amorphous “everyone”. well, as a counterfactual to this apparent majority who all think that western culture and civilization is just white I will point to the two most well known authors on Western Civilization. Oswald Spengler who wrote The Decline of the West in 1918 which popularized talk of western civilization and gave it universal terminology said in volume 2 page 46
But that which distinguished Faustian man, even then, from the man of any other Culture was his irrepressible urge into distance. It was this, in the last resort, that killed and even annihilated the Mexican and Peruvian Culture — the unparalleled drive that was ready for service in any and every domain… the relation between this forceful young Civilization and the still remaining old ones — is that it covers them, all alike, with ever-thickening layers of West-European-American life-forms under which, slowly, the ancient native form disappears.
This aligns with Spengler’s view of Western Civilization not being defined in racial terms, he was actually ardently opposed to the racists of his time and believed a “race” was a population united in outlook not ethnicity or dna and believed that mesoamerican culture was overthrown and replaced with western culture to join western civilization. Samuel Huntington who wrote the foremost modern book on Western Civilization, Clash of Civilizations, writes on page 45 a simple description of Western Civilization as
Western. Western civilization is usually dated as emerging about A.D. 700 or 800. It is generally viewed by scholars as having three major components, in Europe, North America, and Latin America.
more specifically regarding Latin America he says
Latin America could be considered either a subcivilization within Western civilization or a separate civilization closely affiliated with the West and divided as to whether it belongs in the West.
This underpins his disbelief in race being the objective definer of western civilization. this in fact highlights the widely accepted belief within academia, since I sau it once again racialism is no longer the vogue in academia, that other factors such as culture define whether or not someone is within western civilization not race.
3. Why it Matters
Some at this point may believe its fine to have outdated racialist concepts considered reactionary in the early 20th century and that they help explain the world very well despite being demonstrably false. I say that this theory ironically orientalizes Latin Americans, papers over the realities and differences in our specific countries, and promotes chauvanistic and paternalistic thinking towards Latin Americans. Latin American society was born from western conquerers and is defined in this and is not defined in whatever “brownness” that is prescribed onto us by foreigners. when a latino talks to another latino from another country its through a european language, spanish or portuguese, not through a native language. this language, spanish or portuguese is our native language which may not mean much to americans who have no concept of knowing more than one language but it makes a great deal more difference when your family, government, friends, and workplace all speak and express themselves and their identity through that language than when you have to use your second language, which you’re usually not very good at, to negotiate through society as a foreigner or other. we act in a fashion mimicking the mannerisms brought to us by conquers from long ago and believe in ourselves in a way brought to us by these same conquerers. and finally many of us can trace our lineage very recently from elsewhere and may not have any kind of genetic connection to natives. plenty of chinese, italian, german, or in my particular case arab immigrants moved to our countries very recently. I can very easily trace my family leaving palestine in 1922 but nobody in my own country would deny my latinness since we’re not racist in that way. even further, people talk about being hatecrimed immediately upon stepping foot in rural united states, which I have done and can say I am not dead and nobody cared quite as much as it was made out to me, yet you can literally say the same thing about mexicans hatecriming hondurans upon entering mexico and deporting them or mention the fact that the majority of border patrol in the united states is latinos themselves. fundamentally, the theory just does not understand latin america which is why its there is an issue and why it needs to be done away with.
Hey I think you’re selling my comment a bit short here. My comment had very little to do with race. The reason I said Spain was not part of the west was because I placed the development of modern liberal capitalism in the locus of Britain and France, which is how I defined “the west.” Spain is peripheral to this development and so is not truly “the west,” or at least not central to that definition. That was my main point which I thought was at the least an interesting take.
The point about race was to agree with what other people had said, that non-Protestants and Southern Europeans often occupy a position on the margins of whiteness, more sharp historically but it still exists - at least this is how it’s been in the US - and to point out that there is a racial component to “the west” in that the US would like to portray themselves as having cultural continuity with Protestant European traditions, the foothold of Mother Europe in America, and distance themselves from the imperial colonies in the rest of America. Of course leftists are also using the term so I agree with you that maybe we should replace it with “imperial core” or something which most people agree it’s a synonym for. However my take still stands, imperial core is not really referring to Spain either, but again this locus of France and Britain (or maybe the Western Germany-France-Britain triangle as I said), and the (esp Northeast) US.
I did ignore your non-racial differentiation between spain and the countries north of it but including that didn’t help the point I was trying to make and would’ve required a whole tangent on how “the genius to invent capitalism and develop the world” is attributed to anglo-saxon conception of blood and race. maybe that can be part 2
Yeah I mean I understand why you didn’t include the whole comment, I just don’t think my comment should be included at all. From my perspective what I was trying to do was move away from any race-based definition of “the west.”
Also I noted in my original comment the important contributions of Italy and Southern Europe in the development of capitalism, understanding that it’s not wholly an anglo invention, springing fully formed from the minds of English and Scottish industrialists and economists. But as I also noted, Spain is in decline through the 1600s. By the time we can talk about capitalism as a modern economic system, as opposed to reaching back to figure out its murky origins, the center is France and Britain. And of course surely the triumph of liberal capitalism is in these two countries, which imo is more important than just the development. My point was not that capitalism is an anglo invention, but that the historic development and triumph of liberal capitalism ensured that these two countries would be in the core, turning the periphery, Eastern Europe and America, into by and large sources of raw materials for growth.
The only reason the US is included in my definition of “the west” is because the economies of the New England and Middle colonies ensured that it would develop along a different path from much of the rest of the continent. Had the US consisted solely of the Southern colonies, the US might today be comparable to many Caribbean countries, an imperial colony existing mainly as a source of raw materials for the imperial core. The other reason it’s included is because the “core” of capitalism has at this point moved from France-Britain to the US.
any talk of race was to acknowledge what others had said, which were points worth taking into account, and to note that even with my definition I also think race has to be acknowledged as a part of our usage of “the west” - noting that of course the US likes the term since it portrays them as the extension of the Mother Europe in America. Being that “the west” seems to refer to three things at once - the “imperial core” (my argument is this is France-Britain-Germany and the US with varying degrees of periphery, some more “core” than others), geography (Western Europe, maybe America) and the global spread of Western European culture (Western Europe, North America and possibly as you are arguing, Latin America) - does it really make sense to use such as imprecise term? Especially since what most people are referring to, at least on this site, is more accurately the “imperial core”?
can you really say spain was in decline through the 1600s when the end of the spanish golden age was by some accounts 1681 and spain maintained high regard and relevance until napoleon invaded it? its very whiggish or teleological
I’ll be honest I’m not an expert on Spain. Most things I’ve read place the Spanish decline as ongoing from the mid-1600s. I’m not saying they were some completely unimportant power, but that hegemony had moved to France and/or Britain, and by the time you get into the 1700s you’re no longer dealing with the Spain of the 1500s or something. I’d say the UK has also declined since their height nineteenth century, but surely this doesn’t mean they’re unimportant in the global system today. Same with Spain, I’m not saying they had become unimportant and unnecessary, just that they had declined from their period of hegemony.
If you want to challenge this though that’s fine, as I say I’m not an expert on Spain and this is based on what I’ve read (which is generally not dealing specifically with Spain but merely mentioning them). However I think my point still stands. The industrial revolution is not occurring in Spain. The development of liberal political ideology at some point finds its center not in Spain but in Paris. But more importantly the triumph of liberal capitalism over the ancien regimes and older modes of production does not occur in Spain but in France and Britain. That for me is what is most important, which turns France-Britain into the “core.” Spain isn’t the “periphery” in the same way the colonies are the periphery, it’s just not the core of these historical developments.
england of the mid-1600s was in the middle of a civil war and spain had the spanish netherlands until 1714 which is where capitalism as you’re defining it first developed so I would say you’re being very iffy with your timeline and being very generalizing. not to say you’re wrong. it would probably be better to break it up into different spheres so you talk about economic theory starting with physiocrats and moving to england, stock exchanges beginning in the netherlands and moving to england, etc
The English Civil War though was important for this triumph of liberal capitalism, part of the historical development I’m talking about. I don’t think Spain has anything quite equivalent. Also, yes, Spain had the Spanish Netherlands, but the Dutch East India Company was formed in the Dutch Republic.
I mean you’re right though, I’m very purposefully generalizing so as to not get so bogged down in details. I realize that we can find the origins of capitalism and trace its development very far back, and in places that are not just Northern Europe, and it’s not like everyone woke up one day and suddenly the world was capitalist. But I do think there needs to be a point where we say here is where capitalism becomes the dominant mode of production, prevailing over older anachronistic forms, where capitalism emerges from its primordial state to become what we today recognize as modern liberal capitalism. For me I place that point in late 1700s Britain and France. There are likely other possibilities, but I can’t think of an argument placing that point in Spain. Not that Spain is so unimportant as to not deserve a mention, I just don’t think it’s where we see capitalism begin to emerge in its modern form as the dominant mode of production.