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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2246 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 16, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The Eurovision Song Contest was held this evening, which I haven't watched in about twenty years. A friend of mine suggested that we watch it, but was unsure if she'd be able to host, as her flatmate was insistent on boycotting it in light of Israel being "allowed" to participate. In the end her flatmate was out of the house so we were able to watch it in her flat.

I'd assumed that, given the absence of her anti-Zionist flatmate, we'd be able to enjoy the Eurovision as the trashy, campy experience that was intended, without politics intruding. I was mistaken: my friend, her boyfriend and one of her friends insisted on turning off the stream during Israel's performance and made innumerable derisive comments about them during the night. I'm a coward who wants to keep the peace so I held my tongue for the most part.

Israel received modest double-digit votes from the national juries, but after the audience vote, they rocketed up to first place with an astonishing 357 votes, total. In second place was Austria with 258 jury votes, and in the end Austria clinched it. (I honestly cannot say who deserved it more as, as previously mentioned, they turned off the stream during the Israeli performance. I found the Austrian one a little annoying, and if it had been up to me, based on the performances I actually saw, I would have given it to the Germans.)

I was rather dismayed with how quickly my friend retreated into semi-ironic conspiritorialism: saying that the Eurovision would have to investigate their voting procedures next year to ensure no ballot-stuffing was taking place, or attributing Israel's massive success among the audiences as the result of concerted, strategic voting efforts by "the right". (The idea that foul play must have been involved seems to be a consensus opinion, if /r/Ireland is any indication.) The possibilities that a) normie Europeans legitimately liked Israel's performance on a musical level more than the other countries; or b) normie Europeans voted for Israel for political reasons because they're more sympathetic to the Israeli cause than the Palestinian - seem not to have occurred to her.

I am growing increasingly dismayed by the level of ambient nominally pro-Palestinian (but really anti-Israeli) sentiment in Ireland, but it's comforting to be reminded that it's quite the outlier among European countries.

Things took an even weirder turn when Armenia performed and the conversation turned to the Armenian genocide of the 1910s. My friend's Turkish boyfriend, who'd been enthusiastically participating in the Israel-bashing, suddenly became rather defensive, explaining how it wasn't a genocide but merely ethnic cleansing, and anyway forced marches are completely different from genocide, and anyway how do you even establish intent to exterminate a particular ethnic group, and it's hypocritical of European nations to accuse the Turks of genocide when they've done things that were just as bad if not worse* (it was a real mask-off, vino veritas moment, and even my friend seemed to be a bit taken aback by how worked up he got). I felt like saying - it's a bit rich of you to accuse Israel of genocide on the basis of their having killed ~110,000 Palestinians in the span of 75 years, but dismiss the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in one year as "mere" ethnic cleansing. My girlfriend, who's nowhere near as sympathetic to the Israelis as I am, admitted that I had a point here. I hate to say it, but the "it's antisemitism" theory seems to have greater predictive power than many of its competing alternatives.

*On this point I agreed with him: the Armenian genocide is at least as reprehensible as, to pick one example, Belgian conduct in the Congo.

the Armenian genocide is at least as reprehensible as, to pick one example, Belgian conduct in the Congo

Could you elaborate on this? I've been seeing a lot of arguments lately to the effect that the Belgians weren't nearly as bad as they're made out to be, e.g. those "hands chopped off" pictures are something the natives did to each other and the Belgians actually tried to stop. So far when I look such things up I first find that the official story is everywhere, but when digging deeper it falls apart. At this point I don't know what to believe.

On the other hand (jeez no pun intended) I can very easily believe that it's massively overblown for to cast colonialism in the worst possible light.

e.g. those "hands chopped off" pictures are something the natives did to each other and the Belgians actually tried to stop.

That part isn’t actually considered to be controversial at all. Leopold ordered a local armed force (gendarmerie) to be set up, commanded by European mercenaries and recruited from locals, with arms and ammunition being shipped in at great expense from Europe. As the officials were worried that the recruits would use the ammunition to poach local wildlife, they forbid hunting and ordered the hands of any killed rebel/saboteur/bandit/deserter etc. to be severed, collected and presented to command as evidence. Instead of suppressing poaching, this resulted in a black market where soldiers bought up severed hands from local tribesmen. It’s a simple case of perverse incentives. Everybody in power knew well that cutting of the hands to plantation workers for whatever reason is counterproductive and thus not to be condoned.

The time during which the Congo was the personal property of King Leopold was so bad that the Belgian parliament took it away from him. The time of being a Belgian colony was not as bad.

It’s funny how practically every poster on the Motte suddenly turns into SecureSignals when any other tragic mass killing in human history is mentioned. “Only 200,000 Congans died at worst! Mostly from typhus!”

Hah I love how inside baseball this comment is.

The situation in the Belgian Congo was poorly documented and almost none of the survivors had their stories documented.

Colonial ethnic violence in general took many forms, some are closer to the Holodomor than the Holocaust, for example. It’s disingenuous to suggest that King Leopold wanted all the Congolese Bantus (primary victims; the pygmies were considered too small to work for the most part and had already been genocided by the Bantus during the great migration) dead or expelled. The transatlantic slave trade was brutal and cruel, but it likewise wasn’t a ‘genocide’.

That’s the exact same spiel that any good motivated tankie would use when talking about the Holodomor.

The mainstreamed Atlanticist narrative is that the Soviet famine of 1932-33 was a genocidal policy of mongolized Russian imperialists masquerading as Communists specifically intended to exterminate the proud and ancient Ukrainian nation. It should be pointed out that questioning any part of this claim openly will earn you condemnation for being a Russian agent.

Love how starvation and disease suddenly become acceptable excuses.

Yeah, how do you think most people died in concentration camps ? (Extermination camps != concentration camps)

Well, at this point I think it's an observable truth that the history of colonialism is generally presented in, to put it charitably, the least-charitable possible light.

That isnt my experience. Colonialism is frequently presented as one/all of.

  1. Yes it was extractive, but still more competent than the natives.

  2. Yeah, but we civilized them.

  3. They killed themselves in civil wars after we left anyway.

Worst of all, even in 2025, Colonial powers have little remorse for their actions.

France still lays claim to the 150 million in Haitian ransom. The British refuse to accept blame imposed on Churchill for the Bengal famine. The portugese inquistion was famous for grotesque torture in Goa. The Spanish straight up genocided the entire now-world despite knowing it was their germs causing it. Not many apologies to go around.

Yes, they werent as effective as communists or nazis at killing. And they werent as comically cruel as imperial japan. But, these were still fairly fucked up periods for the colonized nations. IMO, Pretty close to slavery.

I don't know where you grew up, what media you consume, or who you're talking to, but this is not my experience whatsoever. The first time I encountered anything like an opinion that colonialism wasn't an unalloyed evil was in spaces like this one. In school we spent a lot of time hammering home the point that colonialism (and American slavery) are the worst things that have ever happened excepting the holocaust.

'Decolonization' is a popular buzzword all over the place.

Okay. Even granting all that, what now? Blame current-day Europeans for the sins of their forefathers? Spend all of eternity re-heating old grievances concerning harm done by dead people to other dead people? Try to conclusively settle that which is impossible to settle, so that the next generation can turn around and call a foul and claim that the settlement was in itself unjust, so our descendants can all have another go at the merry-go-round?

in 2025, Colonial powers have little remorse for their actions.

The colonial powers of yestercentury don't exist anymore. You can go and extract apologies from the current French, Spanish, British or Belgian governments and what the hell are those worth? The people in charge now and the people who live in those countries now aren't the same people who committed whatever crime happened in the colonial era. It's trivially easy for them to apologize; especially in the current environment of "colonialism bad, europeans bad, africans good" in which you can thus put yourself on the right side of history, no matter whether there is any substance to the subject matter of the apology.

And that's completely eliding the question of whether we need to also account for the good the colonial powers may have done if we already weigh up the bad. Let's say there was no good, for argument's sake.

What would you want us Germans to do? Kowtow even further to Israel? Bend over backwards a little more to accept our great German guilt?

Fuck. This is the Friday Fun Thread?

And even if you, for the sake of argument, assume Erbschuld is a thing, you're still a long way from actually establishing a connection to the current countries. As far as I know, my ancestry is entirely lowborn small-scale local farmers and workers, with a small admixture of lowborn inter-european wage immigrants. Let alone me, wtf do my ancestors have to do with what some aristocrats got up to? Why do we have to pay penance & higher taxes now to assuage your guilt?

Another fun aspect is - what about the former colonial powers the current countries of which have enjoyed significant immigration from their former colony countries? Have those immigrants now also assumed part of the guilt?

Lmao this is true. Reminds me of this.

I have a Belgian friend who told me he learned in school that the death toll was in the same ballpark as the Holocaust, but I haven't personally researched the topic.

Just reading the Wikipedia article leaves me with the naive impression that we know that it was a horror show of abuse and barbarism but that we have a very poor idea what happened on a demographic level (what percentage of the population died? How much of the decline was reduced briths as opposed to deaths? Was the decline 10% or 50%? Etc.) and to what degree the Belgians were directly responsible as opposed to criminally negligent.

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