I'll start with the Eastern Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. What are some other extremely 'Reddit' countries?
"Rhodesians Never Die"
dunno havent seen many around in the last half a century :owned:
To play devil's advocate for the Eastern Roman Empire it was probably a lot better to live there than in western cities like Paris or Ravenna. The grain dole there lasted until the 7th century, allowing for the poorest citizens to have state subsidized food.
The walls and existence of an actual army allowed for safety against invaders or bandits at least in theory. Look how they stood up against Attila who was pretty fucking bad for your average peasant.
Lastly the reddit opinion of them is fucking stupid. They hated like all of the crusader states and even had mosques in their territory. They even used those mosques to appeal to Muslim powers in their general area, switching them from sunni to shia depending on who they needed an alliance with.
While they weren't perfect by any means, they were probably a decent place to live compared to a lot of other places, at least from the perspective of someone that lives in the west. I'd probably rather be a farmer of some sort in mesoamerica where the food situation was better though.
I don't disagree, Western Europe was a backwater for quite a while and I would in fact extend the same sentiment to the Ottoman Empire for at least the first 3 centuries of its existence (before Europeans really starting benefitting from Colonialism). I mostly take issue with it gets portrayed in its last century or so, when it was just a rump state in Constantinople. There was a pretty cool paper I read a while back about the nationalistic myths surrounding the fall of Constantinople and specifically 'Emperor' Constantine XI Palaiologos, basically establishing that he was a boringly mediocre bureaucrat that didn't really exhibit much military acumen, in opposition to some narratives I've run into that he was somehow actually a good ruler put into an impossible situation.
Yeah for sure. It would be stupid to want to live in rump state, isolated Constantinople rather than the effective government of the ottoman empire. In both of those societies you could be pretty sure that the rich were paying some degree of taxes and they were going to public works construction of some sort, even if they were religious buildings. Contrast that with western Europe even as late as the late 1700s. One of the reasons that France was broke was that the nobles could buy their way out of paying taxes. The entire society was existing on the backs of poor peasants and a lot of taxes. There's a lot of theories that the western Roman empire's collapse is at least partially because rich nobles were able to evade taxes and withdraw to their estates. I really agree with those.
Another way to think about this is in the whole feudalism thing. Sure you could be a poor and nearly destitute peasant in Ottoman Anatolia or ERE Anatolia but in both situations at least you weren't a serf, legally in land tied, semi slavery in England.
What made either society good had nothing to do with their kings or whatever you want to call them because they really didn't matter. The ERE dying sucked for those that were living in the city at the time but I doubt your average Greek person would have been that sad. The better standards of living for them would have died away a long time before the theodosian walls were breached.
When we're thinking about how good a society in the past was, please imagine yourself as a peasant and imagine your standard of living:
Hunter gatherer: basically living in a tribal proto-communism. Food scarcity, disease and injury were pretty fucking bad for people but there was a social safety net of people who would care about you.
Mesoamerican farmer: you are farming but growing a variety of crops that are nutritionally pretty healthy. The Spanish came over and were all amazed about how much corn was everywhere. This allowed for a healthier lifestyle for many people.
Roman citizen: if you're living in Rome congrats you have free grain, free entertainment and sanitation. Your city is probably pretty safe from being attacked by an outside power and you can walk around all day without any worry of being killed by a delivery wagon (they only allowed deliveries at night) Could be a lot worse.
Feudal peasant: You are a serf. Bitch, you live in Alsace. You are a peasant. You need to give your fuckin' lord the grain. Your fucking children, you've had 15 children. You've never taken a bath. You've literally never. washed. your. penis. You've never used toilet paper. Motherfucker, you have worms. You are dying. You've had 40 children, 3 of them are alive. 2 of them are child soldiers in the Duke's army.
Bitch, the greatest thing you can hope for is to die at the old age of 36. You fucking can't read. You don't know what TV is. If you were transported into today, you would be the worst gamer of all time. You don't know shit. You literally probably don't even know what the direction 'left' is. I'm sure some Medieval guy is gonna get mad at me for this, bitch I've been to the Renaissance Fair. I've eaten a large turkey wing, which the Juggalos call 'bitch beaters', which I think is problematic but a funny thing to call them.
Motherfucker, you gotta recognize where you are, and then you gotta get passed that. You gotta be unemotional. You can't sink into this hole. You live in the oubliette. Your job is to crawl up the ladder, motherfucker. You live in the HOLE. You're in the HOLE. You are a RAT. And the rat, when he's in the hole gets fucked. People only throw trash in the hole.
You need to eat a body. And you need to carry the plague. And you need to carry a plague around this whole world, that will change this whole fuckin world. And all your enemies will vomit black bile and will choke on blood and will grow boils and die. But only if you get together with your other RATS. And you come up with some kind of super plague, to fuckin end your enemies and...
End. This. Nightmare.
Never ask
A woman her age
A man his salary
A /r/kaiserreich user what they think about colonial empires
Qing Empire and Republic of China (1912-1949) cuz le epic troll the CCP. I doubt any of them know the intricate histories of these states beyond what you get from HOI IV
Yeah, if you ask most Chinese people who are educated on their History, most people consider the Qing one of the worst dynasties because they really failed to resist imperialism or create a state capable of doing so. I've heard it argued that that's because of le Chinese racism against Manchurians, but given the Qing's track record I really think it's a perfectly reasonable view given that the European powers didn't even really plan on colonising China until like the mid-late 19th Century, giving them ample time to just not shit the bed and get China back on track. This isn't to say that they didn't try, just that their government structures didn't really allow for the comprehensive changes needed to really transform China into the state it needed to be. Even the Ming could have been better suited to it, paralyzed by eunuch bureaucrats at the end as they were - at least they had the administrative infrastructure needed to carry it out.
I'm actually living in Auckland at the moment and New Zealand being the least shit anglo country isn't really much of an achievement tbh. The Maori/Pasifika here still face shit tonnes of racism, the best example being dumb culture war issues such as Pakeha malding when the Maori language gets taught in schools and decolonising of certain street names by giving them Maori names instead. Obviously some people would pretend otherwise, but stuff like opposing education in Maori language is pure racism, no matter how much people complain about how useless and marginalised the language is - that is exactly why it needs to be promoted. Also Ardern has had quite a few :bruh-moment:s when it comes to respecting indigenous land. The social-democratic state laid out by Savage is absolutely mangled, and of course liberals love to support further gutting it because of their fear that Maori/Pasifika benefit from 'the dole'.
New Zealand being the least shit anglo country
Congrats to NZ for walking over a bar that’s buried 20 feet under ground lol
love this blog series about Sparta that repeatedly underscores how bullshit 300 is
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/
I stan Messina for being bad enough dudes to overthrow Sparta while having been slaves under constant threat of assassination for longer than anyone living there had been alive.
That's more of a 4chan thing I find, Redditors much prefer jerking off like the British, Commonwealth, Polish and sometimes American troops when it comes to WW2.
I mean I guess it depends on what type of redditor you're talking about, because there's a lot of liberals on subs like ShitWehraboosSay and BadHistory that will at least call Nazis out on shit like that and Clean Wehrmacht (while being imperialist neocon ghouls).
Yeah, the people in subs like r/shitwehraboossay are the living embodiment of "Hitler's crime was doing imperialism to Europeans"
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the last pagan state of Europe that preceded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was pretty neat too.
Manchukuo always shows up in maps of
balkanized"free democratic chinese successor states :so-true: " as though it wasn't an actual fascist puppetOne that I'm surprised doesn't get more attention is the Frankish Empire.
you need to actually go beyond the confines of pop history in order to know much about the Frankish Empire, which requires reading something that isn't a meme, and that's not something most redditors are prepared to do
Not like the Byzantine Empire or PLC are that famous in pop culture either (half of the PLC wank is just because of a single Sabaton song). I guess the main difference is that there are no total wars or paradox games from the time period following the fall of Rome to medieval times. You have the death of Charlemagne as the start of CK I guess. You'd think the chuds would be all over stuff like the battle of Tours.
Also not sure why Charlemagne isn't as big a deal as Arthur in popular culture. Charlemagne legend > Arthurian legend.
I guess the main difference is that there are no total wars or paradox games from the time period following the fall of Rome to medieval times.
which sucks, because it's a really interesting period!
Also not sure why Charlemagne isn’t as big a deal as Arthur in popular culture
assuming you're in the anglosphere, that's probably anglo bias talking - fairly sure charlemagne is a much bigger deal in france
Atilla total war covers the migration peroid and even had a dlc about charlemagne
Mostly Swedish. But if we look at popular culture outputs, the most famous depictions of the paladins of Charlemagne is as femboys in gacha games. You'd think there's be something else.
The term Paladin is pretty well known though, so I guess there is that.
I guess the main difference is that there are no total wars or paradox games from the time period following the fall of Rome to medieval times.
It doesn't go all the way back to the fall of Rome but there is a Crusader Kings II DLC literally titled "Charlemagne" which introduced the 769 AD start date where Charlemange and Carloman each rule half of Francia.
I’ve seen “4000 SAXON MEN” getting passed around as a meme but that’s the extent of it.
They like the 'Prussia' that the Hohenzollerns ruled, which came to go by "Prussian" mainly because it was their territory outside the HRE so they could call themselves kings in it/of it.
For some reason they never talk about the pagan Old Prussia that was invaded by the Teutonic Knights and subjected to Germanization (i.e. cultural genocide) by from the Northern Crusade until their language and culture ceased to exist.
Eastern Roman Empire
Hey I Jerk Up to the Eastern Roman Empire !
Byzantium ... Blindings ... Eunuchs .. Huns .. Konstantin .. Christianity ....Nicea ..
Awars ... Slavs ....Purple Birth ...Prince Islands ... Dromons .. ...Tartars ...,Konstantinople ... Vikings ...Manichäer .. Paulikaner .. Ikonoclasten..... Zoroastrians ... Persia ...
Islam ...the Kalifat... Crusaders .. Bulgars , ... Rum Seldujks .. Germans ... Normans.. ..Franks... Venice ... Genua ... Fatimiden ...
Fall to the West .. Reclamaition .. Fall to the East .... Istanbul ...
why are there no movies ....? Turkey and Greece is full of Ruins for Backround shots ...
Love to tell them what happened to its ruler though, very satisfying
