So you're using "barbarian" as a pejorative term of culturally supremacy, rather than an objective, scientific term?
Wait.. isn't that the same thing? Of course Europe was culturally, economically and socially superior to NAs and Zulus. It's why they won, it is why history went as it did. Lets not forget the winners and losers. In the end you need huge buildings, armies, beauacracies, books, libraries and education. OF course along with those things comes oppression, hardship and social control, BUT without those things you will never be anything great. Nay, you will end up as someone's colony, or someone's slave. History has it's winners and losers, lets not forget that in our postmodern mode of political correctness.
That's not a very good way to carry out an argument. The Greeks, for example, considered the Persians- one of the largest, most successful empires in history- to be "barbarian". In this sense, "barbarian" just means- as you said- "not us", and so cannot be taken to have any value as a scientific term.
Don't be foolish, you know very well I don't mean it as the ancients meant it. Nor do I mean it to mean "bearded ones", if I had mentioned that you probably would have accused me of accosting the bearded masses. I am using it to describe a level of sophistication vs. none or little. It is relative and absolute cultural poverty.
That is an utterly groundless assertion- for a start, it implies that the Celts and Zulus never developed past a paleolithic level- clearly nonsense, as both groups possessed skill in iron-working.
Yes their poverty was not absolute, merely relative. They might make a mean spear, but that is nothing next to a ship of the line. Do I need to list every topic of which they were ignorant yet others at the same time posessed far more intellegence of? I don't think so. It seems obvious why the losers were losers and the winners were winners.
In the case of Zulus, it also confuses the fact that their development was stopped by foreign conquest with some sort of inability to develop further.
The 19th century seems late to be developing. This sentence is a fig leaf. They were barbs and had been barbs for a long time. Without Europe they'd be still living the same way. There was no development there, just stagnation.
Similarly, the reason that the Celts were never a world power is because they were taken over by various Roman and Germanic nations.
You keep making excuses for the poor performance of barbs on the pretext that some foriegn invasion stopped their supposed "development" whereas in reality its FAR more likely that they had merely been living that way for thousands of years, and without the influence of more dynamic and violent civilisations would have continued in the same vein.
Heavily influenced by England, obviously, but England was heavily influenced by France, which was heavily influenced by Rome, which was heavily influenced by Greece, etc. Point being, the Celts weren't just savages who happened to live in a region that would one day be granted civilisation.
You were absorbed by England, sorry. We're writing this in English. Here is the rub of the whole matter: this topic stirrs a lot of people's feelings about their real or imagined ethic group. They feel like they need to somehow boost the poor performance of their ancestors to the same level as that preformed by other and more sucessful civilisations, to make excuses as it were. And it is for that reason that I subscribe to an essencially marxist version if history. There have been winners and losers, the powerful and the powerless and economics and organisation of society explain why and how many times.
But who laid the foundation for their civs? You're forgetting the Greeks, the Phonecians, the Assyrians, the Hitties, the Sumerians, the Israelites, the Mycenaeans, the Minoans, the Persians, the Armenians, the Arabs, etc.As I said, only a handful of civilisations can claim to be original, and even that's only because the people before that don't warrant the title of "civilisation". As I said above, all cultures draw on others.
I agree with you there. I said myself in the same post that only a tiny handfull of civs can be called origional, and most of those don't even exist anymore. China I guess is the big exception.
Nor do I look askance at civilisations that developed as a result of learning from others. The Germans are a prime example of this, as is Japan. However there is a certain standard of complexity, power, and organisation before any group can graduate to civilisation. Age is harder to make a call on since many ethnic groups were distinct before independence from some other power, yet were pretty advanced before independence. Other ethnic groups were primitive and only learned from contacts with others, and of course yet others learned all by themselves and achieved civilisation.
So you subscribe to Eurocentric pre-determinism? Marx's theories were focused purely on Europe 700-1900, and fail to acknowledge the social structures of the ancient world or Asia- for example, he assumes that feudalism is an inevitable stage in a countries development, carefully forgetting that the civilisations of the ancient world started as city states and grew to empires through a system of expanding urban powers, without ever making use of the primarily non-urban feudal system.
He also uses "barbarism" as a clumsy label for the stage in between "wilderness" and "civilisation", which seems to be how you are using it.
Well I suppose you have me there. I base it all on the money, and Europe is where the money all came from. I suppose it's rediculous to measure the progress of humanity in comparison with the European economic system which appears to be the final economic and social system for the whole Earth.
and remember how the Chinese considered those Europeans barbarians, even though they defeated them during the opium wars? just because the NA didn't have guns, huge buildings, and millions of people - does that mean they are barbs necessarily?
