[wcerfgba]

Does it matter if Poland overtakes Britain, if both our populations are able to survive and prosper? The phrasing has a racist and geopolitical element to it, which superceeds the issues around UK government's lack of investment in R&D and destruction of the welfare state. This is not a zero sum game.

[ambyra]

Poles used to come to England to do lower level jobs, pick fruit, clean houses. Definitely racism and resentment here. Old school European racism sees Eastern Europeans as a lower level white, a concept I don’t think a lot of Americans are familiar with. There were white slaves back in the day too. It’s where the word comes from; the Slavic people.

[tryptophan]

No that is not where the word comes from. Slav is an English-ization of “slowanie” (what slavs call their group) which means “people of the word “ or people who can talk or something along those lines.

[ambyra]

That’s what it means to the Slavic people themselves. To foreigners Slav was synonymous with slavery.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/slave

[pfannkuchen]

I believe the claim is that the word “slave” is derived from the word “slav”, not the other way around.

[ambyra]

Yeah. In Polish Slav means a speaker, or person of our word. In Latin, it meant person who we can take to do work for free, but the Polish came up with the term first.

Our old word for foreigner is the same as non speaker or mute, Niemcy, which now specifically refers to the Germans. I guess they were our first foreigners.

[pfannkuchen]

Well, it would be quite noteworthy from a historical perspective. Has Poland ever been ahead of Britain economically in the past 1000 years? Poland periodically gets chopped up by its neighbors, WW2 was the 4th time the same thing happened and also I believe Poland was significantly more destroyed than Britain during WW2. They are fairly disadvantaged geographically, no moat to speak of. Their economy suffered under communism until around 30 years ago. I don’t think any racism is required to be surprised at the prospect of Poland overtaking Britain economically.