[stratocumulus0]

> I have yet to see even the most progressive Western European country that didn’t have a huge hate against Roma/Travelers

You don't even have to go this deep. Each and every friend of mine who's German of mixed heritage (Black, Asian) has struggled with people who can't imagine a German not being white. As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white, you have to be a tourist.

[rayiner]

Germany is an ethnostate, so why is that surprising? The country’s name is literally “land of the people” in the language of a group of tribes of people who happened to have fair skin. Our languages’ names for Germany are derived from the names of specific tribes.

It’s like “Bangladesh.” Literally, “country of the Bengalis.” If you aren’t brown with vaguely southeast Asian features then you’ll always be considered a foreigner. That’s not “racism.” That’s the nature of nations that arise from being the homeland of specific ethnolinguistic groups.

Ethnocultural groups like germans and Bangladeshis have ancient shared history, language, and culture. When you say that people should assume that anyone who looks any way should be assumed to be German, that erases Germans as a distinct ethnocultural group. It’s completely different than saying the same thing in a country like America.

My family has been in Bangladesh since before anyone can remember, likely back before the language split from vernacular Sanskrit. My parent’s generation fought the Pakistanis to establish the country as a homeland. You cannot, out of a desire to avoid offending a small minority, erase that shared history and reduce being Bangladeshi (or German or Japanese) to a legal designation established with some paperwork.

[ekianjo]

> As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white,

Not sure why you find that surprising. Being German is not written on your face. Since most Germans are white, most people will make the correct assumption that if someone is not white, there is a stronger likelihood that they are not German. The same happens in Japan with mixed race kids who get treated like foreigners even though they were born and spent their whole life in Japan. That's just how brains work.

If you had no prior assumption you could assume that nobody is who they seem to be and that would make things very complicated for everyday life.

[portaouflop]

The easy fix is to stop assuming and start talking to people in German - it’s really easy to do. If they don’t understand the language you will notice immediately.

A bit of an aside but I find it very condescending by fellow Germans to address people immediately in English if they don’t speak perfect fluent German - give the people some chance to learn and practice the language for god sakes

[AYBABTME]

You know it's the same everywhere? It's hopeless to wish for all of humanity to change their common intuitions and independently reproduced heuristics.

I'm white and spend a lot of time in Korea. I can get around in Korean. Do I take offence when a Korean talks to me in English first? No, it wouldn't make sense. If they switch to English when they notice that my Korean is imperfect? Neither. I'd have unrealistic expectations about my fellow humans if I blamed people for easily explainable interactions. Better to presume good intentions than to take offence at the banality of such interactions.

[gottorf]

There's a white Korean member of the National Assembly[0], whose existence I find fascinating. I have no doubt that he would also get spoken to in English on the streets, if the speaker does not know who he is. And even more funnily, supposedly his Korean has a thick Jeolla accent!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ihn_Yo-han

[lazide]

Also, born and grew up in Korea to missionaries, only to be deported to the US by the Japanese when they took over Korea. Then moved back later in life.

Talk about an unusual life!

[portaouflop]

You are correct of course.

I’m not saying you should take offence - I just know that it can be corrosive for people in that position. Being never seen as part of the culture does something to you, you feel apart, forever, even across generations.

I’m saying to give your fellow humans more consideration when you interact with them.

It might not affect you much because you didn’t build your whole life in Korea.

But imagine you are 3rd generation living there, your parents have been born in Korea but you still aren’t seen as part of the country. It builds resentment and segregates the citizens which makes life harder for everyone.

[gottorf]

> I just know that it can be corrosive for people in that position

The reverse is also true: it can be corrosive for the people on the other side of that equation. Of course the 3rd generation "foreign" descendant had no choice on where to be born, but you can imagine that for the generation of the "natives" that took in the immigrants, it might have felt strange to see among their community people that looked different, spoke a different language, and had different cultural customs. It's hard not to think that this was corrosive to the social fabric, especially for the people who didn't feel that they had agreed to that particular change in the social contract.

> your parents have been born in Korea but you still aren’t seen as part of the country

Some immigrant groups don't integrate very well, even after generations. Naturally, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem; do the immigrants not integrate because the natives reject them, or do the natives reject them because the immigrants don't integrate?

As an immigrant myself, I believe the onus is on the immigrant to integrate, and to raise one's children to be even further integrated. Again, it sucks for those who had no choice but to be born in a country as the descendants of immigrants, who nevertheless get judged as an immigrant unwilling to integrate; but that's not a problem particular to immigration. It always sucks to be judged not as an individual but as a member of a group.

We should all strive to judge people by who they are and not what group they belong to, which I suppose was your overall message; but I just want to point out that everything is a two-way street.

[rayiner]

Nobody owes you anything.

[portaouflop]

And?

[thunky]

> The easy fix is to stop assuming and start talking to people in German

If 9 times out of 10 English is actually the correct choice, then it probably makes less sense to do this.

[portaouflop]

Even if that number would hold up - Why? It’s still more dignified for all involved. Not every human interaction needs to be made as efficient as possible.

[lazide]

Clearly as evidenced by your irritation, most people don’t work the way you think they should? At least by default. If they’re German.

Honestly, being part German, I’m surprised there isn’t a law about this already! Though I guess there was an attempt that ended badly not that long ago…

[portaouflop]

Yes there is something deeply wrong in German society - as evidenced by the recent stellar rise of a popular racist and facist party and the more and more common casual racism that is just accepted by the majority of the population.

I for one am sad that Germany once again seems to head toward embracing some death-cult ideology that in the past did unimaginable damage to the people it was supposed to serve.

It makes me feel that all the progress we made in the past 80 years is built on sand and we can slide back anytime in a highly fragmented, tribalistic and cruel society.

[AdrianB1]

Because probability and logic says it is the best way.

[ashoeafoot]

If they started talking german first, you would rant about "Incestdorfhinterwäldler".. whatever you do you are cooked and thats by intent

[boringg]

It’s honestly like an odds calculation in those environment. The odds of someone who looks different that is local is incredibly low so they default to assuming said individual is a tourist.

[portaouflop]

It might be the case in certain Asian countries but in Germany the odds are definitely not incredibly low - something around 40% of the population don’t look like what most people think of when speaking of Germans.

[klooney]

The point of all the tiny European states is that they're blood and soil ethnostates. A lot of people got killed to establish that point.

[dotancohen]

As a non-European I'd like to read more. What exactly should I be googling to get the real history and not the clean history that is commonly told?

[esafak]

Read about the French Revolution and the origin of the nation state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state

[rnabsv]

So, Germany previously had Prussia, Bavaria and the rest. They were separate kingdoms, but all ethnically German.

There is something to be said of for the individual cultures being even stronger during those times. Perhaps the formation of the German nation state was a counter reaction to the Napoleonic wars?

Anyway, this has little to do with immigration from all over the world: All these kingdoms already had the same language and largely the same culture.

[dotancohen]

Thank you. I wouldn't exactly call France a tiny state. Are there any others that I should specifically be looking at? The Europeans pride themselves as being quote unquote civilized people, did they not have uniform ethnicities within their borders before the founding of their states? If not, then what did define those borders?

Have states such as France ethnically cleansed other peoples from within their borders? If so, then why isn't that mentioned in the well-known histories?

[lazide]

Have you not heard of the Crusades? Or the Inquisition?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Inquisition]

It did somewhat calm down once the Republic’s formed, but even today there are large conflicts with ‘Normal’ French society and the large scale ghettos from (typically Muslim) immigrants and refugees in France.

[esafak]

Killing is not the only way to ethnically homogenize a population. Other instruments are suppression of ethnic identity, deportation and encouragement of emigration.

The nation state of Turkey's establishment out of the ethnically diverse Ottoman Empire deployed all of the above.

[dotancohen]

  > Other instruments are suppression of ethnic identity, deportation and encouragement of emigration.

Thank you. Again, though, the histories of the European states don't mention efforts at suppression of ethnic identities, deportation, nor encouragement of emigration - at least not up until the 1930s.

If there are good sources to read about this occurring I would love to read them. Otherwise the insinuations are baseless.

[lazide]

Pretty much still does against the Kurds

[achenet]

France is not, and has never been, ethnically homogeneous (I'm French).

It was always a mix of different peoples - Celtic, then Romans when they invaded, then various Germanic peoples (including the Franks that gave the country it's name)... even the standardization of the French language is fairly modern. We had Occitan and Provincal and Breton spoken, it's only in the past ~200 years or so that industrialization has given a "uniform" culture.

[lazide]

What history of WW1 and WW2 did you read that seemed ‘clean’?

[hjgjhyuhy]

In some countries yes, others not. Nobody got killed to make Nordic countries ”ethnostates”. It’s just that not that many people wanted to live so far north.

In fact, in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finns. Sami minority got discriminated admittedly, but not violently persecuted.

[nordic-ethnos]

That’s gotta be among the most revisionist takes I’ve ever seen. The nordic countries subjected hundreds of thousands of individuals from mostly lower class backgrounds to mandatory sterilizations over a period of decades in order to secure the population distribution they have now.

https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/08/how-did-sweden-sterilise...

https://nordics.info/show/artikel/eugenics-in-the-nordic-cou...

[JumpCrisscross]

> Nobody got killed to make Nordic countries ”ethnostates”

Literally the Vikings [1].

> in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finn

Yes [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Norwa...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish%E2%80%93Novgorodian_...

[lazide]

People pattern match. Gender, skin color, height, hair color are intuitively and naturally the easiest things people can pattern match on. Not a whole lot of Asians or black folks in pictures like these [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/West_and...], just like you won’t see a whole lot of local folks who are white in China or India.

[nshfgav]

Germany is too small to be a so called melting pot immigration country like the U.S. around 1900. It is natural to assume that people are white.

As you say addressing non-white people in English does not happen very often. Why would it? There are so many immigrants that 30% of interactions in department stores supermarkets etc. are with non-white people.

When you are stopped by a security guard in a store, he is invariably of Arab origin.

[steveBK123]

> Germany is too small to be a so called melting pot immigration country like the U.S. around 1900.

Why? Are we talking population or space? On population, 1900 US population was 75M, current Germany population is 85M.

If we are talking space - what does that have to do with it? And even in 1900, Americans were far more clustered in cities in the Northeast/Cali/etc, so probably not terrifically more area than current footprint of Germany.

Currently we are seeing countries in Europe go through a moral panic over immigration that is probably not terribly different than the US in 1900. I've seen some historical stats that something like 80% of US urban residents in 1900 were foreign born or 1st generation. NYC alone we've had immigrants as ~35-40% of our population from 1900 thru the tightening of immigration laws in 1920s, after which it dropped to 18% by 1970. The percent has rebounded since then and is back around 35-40% again.

So nothing that is going on in Europe is terribly different or unique, and not being a melting pot is a choice that most of Europe has made by being ethnostates.

[rayiner]

It’s not a “choice” Europe has made. That’s what they are. Most European countries, as a matter of history, are ethnic tribes with flags, similar to Japan or Bangladesh or Israel.

[steveBK123]

Everything is a choice. There are differences in immigration, work visa, citizenship, social security, etc laws that perpetuate these choices. But these laws are downstream of the local culture desiring this.

Japan didn’t just end up with 97-99% Japanese population by accident.

[lazide]

When everything is a choice, the choices you make are what you are, correct?

[fhsTabv]

Space and wages of course. In Germany you are a bank slave for your entire live if you want to buy a house. Meanwhile rich people from all over the world buy up prime real estate.

Their globalist friends want more immigration to drive down wages and increase rents.

This is nothing at all like in the U.S. The U.S. is huge and I'm green with envy when I see YouTubers owning whole estates in Idaho to make their private aircraft videos. Such things are completely impossible in Germany.

Then there is the cultural aspect of course. The U.S. has been an immigration country from the start. Europe had diverse hand highly advanced cultures in music, paintings, literature etc. Frankly, since the Americanization following WW2 neither Europe nor the U.S. have produced anything comparable.

What you call ethnostate, which is a derogatory term, other people call culture.

[steveBK123]

I use ethnostate more as a statement of fact than as derogatory. Often though I do it to needle lefty euros who like to tell Americans how much more racist we we are than them.

I don’t think America has been a melting pot from the start. It was Protestant whites and slaves for 100 years or more.

Letting in Catholics and Jews was a choice and controversial at the time. Then the same for East Asians, South Asians, MENAs, and the latest drama is Latinos. I probably forgot many other groups. Different choices could have been made at each juncture. Continuing on this trend was a choice.

Germany continuing to not be a melting pot is a choice just the same as deciding to become one.

European wages are a different issue and it is to me more a problem of thinking you can tax and regulate your way to prosperity. Letting in more or less immigrants isn’t the primary problem.

Why do Americans and foreigners want to start companies in the US so much? Where are the European startups? Are any Americans moving overseas to start companies? No new firm formation leads to no new job creation leads to lagging economic growth.