|
|
|
|
|
by FranzFerdiNaN
2101 days ago
|
|
Everything is politics, so saying ''politics informs his scientific output'' like it is some kind of gotcha makes absolutely no sense. And it is necessary to continue to reiterate the same basic facts when new evidence continues to support it. For a variety of reasons all kinds of ideas that have been debunked decades ago about the past are still mainstream. And some people get really angry when current historians tell them that those views are wrong because it clashes with their current political ideas and views. Just look at the pure evil shit Mary Beard, a well-respected classicist, got when she dared say that during Roman times there were black people in England (a well-established fact by now). Unfortunately the alt-right has also taken hold of the past, and they continue to spread all kinds of lies so they can continue to spread their idea of the past, namely that of a white past where non-white people did not exist (just look at the outrage you see when a medieval fantasy tv show casts non-white actors). So more evidence that Scandinavia was also populated by people from southern Europe and Asia is always welcome (even though it wont do a thing to convince people who hold racist views and ideals). |
|
This raises a number of possibilities for where those beliefs come from:
Option 1: It really is true that, around 1950, those places were > 90% "white", but in ancient times they did not used to be. This would mean that the diversity present in ancient times had subsequently been forced out, either via systematic oppression that motivated out-migration, or via active genocide.
Option 2: Census and other data from the past century were systematically falsified, consistently and at a large scale, to support the regime of white supremacy that then dominated Europe, when in fact those populations were considerably more diverse; non-"white" people were just "officially invisible". Moreover, the commonly-reported subjective memories of older people who say they remember such a time are in fact misimpressions -- because memory, as we know, is unreliable, strongly affected by whatever the social reality is.
In other words, either
- large-scale population replacement occurred in these places within just the recent past, or
- the past is tremendously mutable, in which case nothing you understand as history, nor indeed anything you think you remember, can actually be trusted.
Either conclusion would be very compatible with your opening point that everything is really politics.