Lmao meanwhile African Diasporic and Native religions were outright illegal (and still are in much of Latin America) literally in recent memory.
Good for you the closest you got to invoke religious oppression for Pagans is before the entire Modern Period (ie 16th century onward).
General consensus is the witch trials were persecution of women, with the nuance of Tituba and people like her, being Black or Indigenous or Afro Indigenous or Romani women whose religions were possibly not Euro Christianity or Christianity otherwise.
It’s not about who had it the worst! What do you want, what kind of justice do you expect to get? We form our future today, with our actions today, but if you expect absolutely innocent people to pay for wrongs committed at a time far before they were born, then you will land on hard ground with me, I don’t do that. I am against hereditary debt.
It’s only oppression when it happens to POC, otherwise it simply doesn’t count and you’re not allowed to bring it up otherwise Typical drivel I hear a lot
Persecution takes many shapes. We can play a tit for tat of “who had it worse” for hours.
In the end, it doesn’t matter. African Diasporic and Native religious have been systematically suppressed, and Heathenry has been both culturally and systemically erased for the last several hundred years, to the point where we have to piece together our songs, rituals and customs from the remnants of what is left.
Yes violence that occurred while I and my parents were alive is more prescient than violence that occurred 1200 years ago, go figure.
I’m mad about the US arming paramilitaries in my country, I’m not mad about Alfonse X of Castilla being pressured and threatened by his cousin to cede the Holy Roman Empire thereby leading to hostilities against Jews and Muslims, and certainly not mad about the annexation of the Nasa into Chinchanisuyu by the Sapa Inca in the 14th century.
Who the hell gets mad about things that happened before the Modern period
I think many simply forget that the “white people” did not get their freedom and rights as a gift, but their ancestors had to fight for them against their own rulers.
This gift, freedom, is also a part of the European heritage which is easily forgotten.
TL:DR: Human history knows no pure victims, all are victims, all are perpetrators, and we have the obligation to do better than those before us, however, if this racism debate is constantly led, which was done far before our birth, it poisons the discussion and will poison it further and further, because if you are constantly confronted with it, it ends up that you eventually build fronts against it.
Whiteness isn’t a question of purely skin color but of how the imperial core or your immediate Nation-state considers you.
The Irish have been and I’d say still are on the periphery of Whiteness due to how the English perceive and teach and perpetuate their own history.
But that’s besides the point, the reality is the Irish have been discriminated against in recent memory, literally laws against Fenian and Irish Catholic beliefs were only abolished like, what, 20 years ago? 30?
Meanwhile I still get kicked out of restaurants for being assumed a “Moor” or “Gypsy” when I visit Europe. Or harassed on the street for being assumed a “Muslim”. So racism is still a global reality, with specific manifestations in each world region.
Meanwhile my people’s cultures are manifest in-game via specific playable races and thus are representations, whose narrative is regularly belittled or ignored, just like our histories and struggles are dismissed in real life.
Irish being discriminated against is something I’m keenly aware of Baal. I’m of Irish decent after all, I’d be ignorant not to know that. And anti-Irish hatred/discrimination goes back hundreds of years and I’m not really interested in playing this Who had it worse game
To give Baalsamael his due - he’s mentioned his own heritage several times, as well as where he’s coming from, a consideration that includes a rather important geographic element.
Most of us are commenting from within the United States, which has a strong Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage - at least when discussing the people who migrated here and who would go on to found and then run the United States - extending from New England to cover the American South, which has a similar ruling heritage, and then extended west to be expressed in territories that Spain and later Mexico would have a hard time incorporating into their colonial and then national systems due to the changes in geography and the cultural makeup of the people who were there before them. Spain for example was able to easily subjugate the Aztecs because they were able to hijack an existing culture and inject themselves into existing hierarchies, which soon evolved into the encomienda system.
In modern day Arizona, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Utah - that largely didn’t work. The various tribes here ate the Conquistadors’ lunch over and over again. The Mission system didn’t result in the wide-scale repression that was going on in Central and South America. The people who moved into those areas were fiercely independent and to an extent we still are. It took years of constant warfare and homesteading for America to say that they had control - and they did that on the back of a culture that emphasized the personal ownership of firearms.
Both legacies of European Colonialism have been somewhat eroded given the passage of time, and I would argue that we’ve made significant progress - even if there is more progress to be made - but those legacies were different. Areas that the Spanish Crown still ruled were under the Encomienda system for hundreds of years, and the legacy of corruption and racism that went along with that is still there.
I would encourage us all to keep those differences in mind when speaking with someone who comes from outside of the North American experience.
