<@Peacemonger373> #127843
Don’t really disagree with you, but I’d definitely note that whether those atrocities were committed by the “in-group” or the “out-group” (inasmuch any such distinction is relevant at all considering that, well, we’re talking about genocides) definitely gets rather iffy. Especially when it gets to how the people ordering and organizing it see the victim group, which is really the only relevant perspective in it. During the Yugoslav wars for example, especially the Serbian leaders framed their mostly Muslim victims as “Turks” who they claimed to be invaders who weren’t Slavic, or even European, at all, and whether a significant number of the Soviet top brass felt any serious kinship with the Ukrainians during the Holodomor given how multiethnic it was, not to mention that the main division in the USSR was class rather than race or ethnicity, is questionable.
Sure, for modern people mostly used to the Anglosphere notion of a few, arbitrabily-defined, artificial “races” being the main way to divide the world’s population, those conflicts might seem rather nonsensical, with both the victims and the perpetrators seemingly the same, but that doesn’t mean that they saw it the same way.
And, of course, just to be pedantic (and because I wanted to mention this stuff at least somewhere for a while) when you look into the past, you can of course find a lot of atrocities happening to just about any ethnic group (not making Slavs any special as the OP might’ve hoped for.) The world is a nasty place, and its history is suitably grim. Coming back to Slavs in particular, I was quite surprised recently to have learned how much ethnic strife and tension, even separation, followed as a result of Ostsiedlung, especially after it kicked into the high gear following the Mongol invasions which, in terms of depopulation of the affected areas, were comparable to some of the nastier colonial invasions of Africa. Specifically, in modern day Slovakia, where the German newcomers quickly gained dominance in cities and towns, a surprising number of such settlements are recorded as having their German inhabitants forbidding the natives from the surrounding areas, and further, to move in, or trying to force the ones already living there out, or forcibly assimilating them, all with the explicit goal of keeping a German majority there.
Admittedly, I don’t have the sources at hand for the situation in the other places which received high amounts of German migrants during that time, mostly the other West Slavic countries as well as the Baltic ones, but I would be surprised if it were notably different. It’s quite surprising to me since the main dividing line in the Middle Ages is popularly seen as being religion, rather that ethnicity, which is believed to have come into the play later, but, well, I guess some things simply never change…
<@Bastethotep> #127865
Finally: What is up with Svalbard uniquely having an unexplained dark green colour?
A joke from the OP. It’s because of the polar bears living there. I just cut out the explanation because of the length.
funny how the demarkation neatly follows contemporary national borders
He actually mentioned that this map is just a simplification, mostly because of the amount of Mediterranean posters attacking him for it (the typical North Italy vs. South Italy stuff, mostly), and that there are intra-national differences as well, but he was too lazy to do that much.