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.
this is all true as a narrative or framework but still is a fairly american-centric understanding of the western vs indigenous dichotomy. you only have to look at the caste system in latin america, for however much it actually existed since english scholars have overemphasized its racial nature and existence, to see that traditional latin american racial frameworks put the spanish at the hierarchical top, followed by peninsulares or people from iberia, followed by isleños or people from the islands around spain, then followed by non-iberian europeans. our traditional racial framework did not put anglo-saxons on top. or let’s look at the case of arabs in latin america who make up the upper elite and despite not being “western” easily integrate into westernness and further propagate this dichotomy
Arabs are not indigenous in LatAm and my point doesn’t rely on LatAm having Anglos on top, so I’m confused. The indigenous vs. Western dichotomy I mentioned reflects how the concept of being “Western” was easily adapted to instances of Eurocentric colonialism despite being a later concept mostly introduced through hegemony. Claiming LatAm to be Western wasn’t really a thing in the 19th century. Claiming anything to be simply Western wasn’t a thing until the last few decades of the 19th century. The hierarchy you mention predates the label. It wasn’t something to discuss, people used other terms for related concepts.
Its use is a result of hegemony. It was integrated into societies like those in LatAm that already had Eurocentrism.
The way in which words are used, and when they’re used, is just as important as their claimed meaning.
the term western goes as far back as the ancient greeks who used it to differentiate themselves from the persians I think you’re just confusing your terminology. I also don’t know what exactly you mean by hegemony causing the use of the term. you mean like British or american academics talking to Spanish ones which helped them propagate its usage within Latin America?
You’ve got it mixed around, you are confused about this term.
The concept we’re referring to isn’t simply the direction of west, nor even the opposite of The Orient, as multiple people have pointed out. Have you given them the benefit of the doubt and looked it up on the dictionary? The earliest claimed English use of the term in the way we are discussing, the thing you wrote a huge effort-post about, calling out a bunch of people, is in the 1890s. The racialized hierarchies you’re talking about mostly predate it.
I’m referring to the cultural hegemony of capitalism as expressed by its dominant empires, borrowing from Gramsci. Culture is shaped by what capitalism permits and promotes and its form is colored by its vectors, such as attempting to restrict the discourse to what is already in the British or American mythology. Liberalism is Capital’s political ideology, it exports it, including but not limited to the process of imperialism. The use of “Western” here is an outgrowth of Anglo imperialists with a passion for race science doing rationalizing their status from around the 1880s to the 1930s, though we obviously still see the way it was incorporated into culture widely in various forms.
I’ve read the latin works myself I know what they say. the old latin saying Ex oriente lux, ex occidente lex or “from the east comes light, from the west comes law” would not make sense if you were correct
That quote is itself apocryphal and I’d be academically curious about how old it is given that the fetishization of Rome is part of the canonization process that led to the definition of Western we’re talking about.
But that doesn’t really matter for the point being made. “The West” already has 4 or 5 meanings (maybe more) in English and you’re referring to Latin, which can easily have its very own and distinct meanings due to contextual use. In this case, a religious use that places the Western extent in Rome / Southern Europe, fitting neither of the meanings either of us have used. I doubt you think LatAm is Roman!
Anyways, it makes perfect sense so long as you acknowledge that words have multiple uses that shift over time. In this case, it seems you’re unfamiliar with this Western academic-ish movement to self-define its own “culture”, blurring together things that had previously been considered distinct or varied in order to say, “no actually they’re the same based on this new identity I discovered but it was always there because this is what defines us superior colonizers”. The term “culture”, as in how it’s used in the compound “western culture”, was invented in the mid-1800s. It’s part of the odd colonial scientism of that time, an invention of a canon that slaps various things together and says, “this is the West it started in Greece and oh also it’s British people oh yeah and now Irish and okay yeah I guess 50 years later it is in contrast to communism oh and 100 years later it includes Poland”. Previously these would be largely considered distinct and not grouped together as “the West”. The term didn’t mean that at all. Remember how weird Engels was about what it means to be German.
To understand where it comes from, you’ve gotta dive into the racist science and historiography of 1800s Europeans, it really doesn’t make any sense otherwise. Look into Nordicism, among other things.
now you’re just jumbling terms around. you said nothing was claimed to be western until the last few decades of the 19th century and when I point to an example that counters this you say its fake and double down. just because the modern definition of western civilization, western culture, and westernness didn’t exist until recently does not mean that the concept is not coming from somewhere and lacks an older origin that its pulling from.
Wrong. I said it wasn’t used in the sense I’m talking about until the last few decades of the 19th century. I think I was pretty clear on that, actually.
I never said it was fake lol. You didn’t explain exactly what you think I said was fake, but if I had to guess you’re responding to the word “apocryphal”. Apocryphal just means we don’t know who to attribute the quote to, which doesn’t mean the semantics would be wrong. I think I was pretty clear in saying that it doesn’t matter and was only an academic curiosity that it’s apocryphal.
I’m doubling down, sure, because you’re not contradicting me and I keep trying to patiently explain exactly what I’m referring because you really don’t seem to get it.
Let’s try this: can you tell me what my point is? Do you feel confident you could accurately describe it?
Basically all concepts and the words invented (or reused) to describe them build off of preexisting concepts and words. It’s not like the Anglo imperialists that invented this use created the term “Western” out of thin air. This is not a problem for my point.
The use of the term “western” or “the West” that you’re criticizing is reasonable and is specifically responding to the imperialists that made enemies of the colonized world and socialists everywhere. The conception of “western” I’m describing evolved again (directly) to have an anticommunist meaning, “the West” vs. the USSR chiefly. This also did not include LatAm, certainly not any more than it did the Russians. One of its defining features is the (disgusting) extent to which it draws on recognizable white supremacy.
As an aside, I do think you missed the point on the word “culture”. There’s no “modern” definition I’m using that contrasts to the one invented in the mid-1800s. It’s the same. It was invented a bit over 150 years ago.
you said
to which you then later to backtrack and say
which are two vastly different assertions and its quite disingenuous to pretend that you’ve been clear and consistent.
now your claim that due to cultural hegemony of capitalism, used in a completely different way to how gramsci conceptualized his theory but whatever, that spanish intellectuals and thereafter latin american ones were forced to adopt a nordicist model of western civilization by the british or whoever (but I guess the dutch or the french or the americans weren’t forced to adopt it since they had capitalism unlike the spanish so they’re intellectually equals) is false. the spanish and latin americans have never had a nordicist conception of western civilization and their conception stems from earlier concepts of The West, Christendom, and Europe. I’d also be curious to know if your idea of cultural hegemony of capitalism means that the italians didn’t invent fascism themselves but instead just imported it from capitalist countries or if hegel and nietzsche didn’t create their theories of german philosophy but instead imported it vis-a-vis capitalism to prussia. all I can say is your assertions that everyone else must be following your definition of western, or a definition which ultimately derives from yours, is americentric as I’ve said before
That is a saying, and is in the latin language, and isn’t particularly new, but is probably neo-latin or contemporary latin rather than a phrase that somehow survived this whole time.
The first half didn’t appear in English texts until the early 1800’s, and the second half until the early 1900’s, which suggests that it was added later. I don’t have a good way to search latin texts so they could appear in original sources, but considering how much we love our loan phrases it’s a lot more likely that it’s a reconstructed phrase created in the 19th century rather than an original ancient latin phrase that was passed down.
even if that specific phrase post-dates the point where the modern conception of the west occurs, which variously is being said to me to be either the 1890s or the 1850s which would be after your earliest sighting in english texts, it doesn’t discount other terminologies that would be showing up in Latin either during the late roman, medievial, or early modern periods which are conceivable predecessors to the modern conception of the west. another example being Imperium Romanum Occidentale or Hesperium Imperium which as far as I know are both attestable to the medieval period and the added benefit of Hesperium itself deriving from the greek word for western lands and help showcase the internal division between the eastern greek speaking portion of the roman empire and the western latin speaking portion.
Interestingly, both were used by Marcellinus Comes, an early 6th century Byzantine chronicler whose only surviving work was written in Latin. Why was a Illyrian-born Constantinople courtier writing a history of the Byzantine Empire in Latin? No idea, but we got a bunch of information from it. Anyway, during the time he was writing about there was one roman empire as far as either empire were concerned, they just used different administrative centres. He was using both terms to describe the western administrative portion of the empire, along with similar ones like “Imperium Romanum Oriente” to describe the eastern portion. East and West were convenient geographic descriptors of the empire, not a part of the modern conception of east and west.
are you trying to argue that the terms are entirely geographic and had taken on no political, cultural, or societal overtones until 1850 or whenever the cutoff point is said to be and aren’t predecessor terminology to the modern concept of western/eastern or are you just trying to talk about the origin of these terms because you find it interesting?
Do you have a source for that?
Even if they did, I think their understanding of west would be completely different than what we mean by the West. My understanding is the modern idea of “The West” wasn’t really developed until the 19th century and then projected backward.
To your main point: Because “the West” is a constructed category, rather than objective, I think who is inside it can expand or contract contextually and from perspective, similar to whiteness (e.g. a person who is seen as white in Puerto Rico might be seen as brown in Ohio).
I agree that conflating these categories with imperial core is an issue.
herodotus quoting xerxes in histories page 464 translated by george rawlinson
what “we” mean by west is evidently different since some of us think it describes a sort of culture while others think it describes the countries that are majority white as defined by 19th century nordicists
From this quote, I agree that Herodotus is using west different from how folks do today.
He seems to be using west as a direction to describe the nearby peoples of the known world not under Persian rule. Second, he lists the Greeks and the barbarians of the west as two separate categories.
Definitely a topic I’d like to read more about tho, thanks for sharing
well obviously its not used as it is used today but you can’t say the term didn’t have its origins that far back. things gradually change meaning over time
I honestly don’t think Western has origins that far back. I think the closet origin might be the concept of “Christendom” which is kinda analogous to western. But again, I’d have to study more to make this claim clearly.