"Diversity: From Rome to Rwanda” with Jens Heycke
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- čas přidán 31. 08. 2023
- My guest today is Jens Heycke. Jens is a researcher, writer, and competitive cyclist. He studied economics and Near East Studies at U. Chicago, the London School of Economics, and Princeton. His book is called "Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire: Multiculturalism in the World's Past and America's Future"
In this episode, we talk about the origin of the term "melting pot", as well as the origin of the concept of multiculturalism. We talk about the goal of cultural assimilation. We talk about how ancient Rome tackled the issue of cultural diversity among its subjects. We discuss the early Islamic empires; modern-day Sri Lanka; Rwanda and Botswana; the Ottoman Empire; the French color-blind system; Singapore; and much more. This conversation is basically a survey of how all of these different societies have tackled the issue of cultural diversity and what lessons we can draw from their successes and failures. I enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do too.
Check out Jen's Book:
"Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire: Multiculturalism in the World's Past and America's Future" - bit.ly/3qU2DKc
Pre-order my book:
"The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America" - bit.ly/48VUw17
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Definitely one of the best episodes so far. It is absolutely axiomatic: you can't have a functional nation if you balkanize people into different groups. Once you divide people, the natural instinct is for them to hate and attack each other. It is incredible to me that this point, which is so obvious, is even controversial.
Agreed...such an excellent journey and so enlightening.
Most individuals with good intentions have Zero historical reference for polies such as "Affirmative Action" and downstream repercussions
Absolutely - though it can be difficult to prevent people Balkanising themselves.
This is a really important interview for our times. Well done Coleman and Jens.
This is my favorite Coleman conversation so far! Fantastic amount of information that I never knew before.
When I attended schools in California as a kid, they were saying the "melting pot" is a failure, and we should be more of a salad bowl. As a kid, I remember thinking that was odd.
I am Indian and I know people in the US from India. Their kids who have grown up in the US are very American. There is no way that their world view and perspective is like that of kids who have grown up in India.
“Mixed race (black/white) has been a strong trend the last 40-50 years at a rapidly accelerating rate. I’m in my 8th decade of life, when I was young, to be mixed race was highly highly unusual, but these barriers have been rapidly breaking down. When my dad was 14, growing up on the farm in South Dakota, my immigrant grandfather (from Germany) took him 30 miles to Sioux Falls to see the traveling Harlem Globetrotters, not because they were into basketball, but because my grandpa wanted to show my dad some black people for the first time in his 14 years. If assimilation has not been quick, it is partly because of geographical isolation, black people lived almost entirely in the South, and only slowly moved north. And, as of the end of the Civil War, 80% of the white population lived in the north. Move forward 100 years from the Civil War and while there were no segregated schools in my upper Midwest state, but nonetheless of 900 students in my 1960 high school, there was one ( yes, one) black kid in my school. We almost never saw them, not even on TV, the blacks from the south that did move north went to industrial centers like Detroit and Chicago, but not in small towns (unlike the south). Not saying there was no prejudice, it’s just that black people were out-of-sight, out-of-mind. I ended up marrying a Moroccan immigrant. There wasn’t any “mixing” just because of geography before that.
Mixed race is the fastest growing demographic in the UK (though I think that includes all mixing, not just black and white). The UK is a very different landscape to the US though. For most of my life and in my experience (a meagre 3 decades) race was basically irrelevant, beyond for descriptive purposes (except in the case of encountering the odd racist or person who wanted to focus on it). But that changed in 2020 and race became relevant. I am pretty sad about this. I am not sure if it is just my personality or also has to do with the fact that I am mixed race, but I really don't fall in for all the racialising stuff. I can understand though how in countries where race and geography are tightly linked that it might be or seem more relevant. Ps. I hope I am still writing CZcams comments in my 8th decade of life!
Coleman, I've heard several of your programs over the past few months, both as interviewer and interviewee. As a woman of 72, it's refreshing to hear someone clearly articulate so many of my own decades-long thoughts that are outside the mainstream and always have been. Keep up the good work and don't let the attention change you except for the better.
Learned a ton from this conversation. Thank you Coleman and Jens.
The captions called Ibram X Kendi "Uber Max Candy" 😅
Such a good discussion. Bosnia is another example of division leads to genocide.
Awesome conversation! I can't wait to get the book.
34:45 *Ibn Battuta* Definitely look this guy up, everybody. He was an extensive traveller at the same time as Marco Polo, and his travel writing was written while he was travelling rather than just from memory after the fact like Marco Polo did. It's fantastic writing.
Also, as a Leftist, I'm really glad to see Coleman wearing a Bill Maher shirt. Maher's one of the very few leftist comedians that hasn't gone down the dumbass woke hellhole. Stephen Colbert probably being the absolute worst, sadly.
Very insightful conversation. Thank you.
Very informative conversation as usual!
Thanks for watching my latest episode. Let me know your thoughts and opinions down below in a comment. If you like my content and want to support me, consider becoming a paying member of the Coleman Unfiltered Community here --> bit.ly/3B1GAlS
Hmmm . In my reading on Islamic acquisition I’m unaware of peaceful seeking to join . The primary acquisition was riding the army to the gate and meeting with leadership . The outcome was either pleading fealty ( hardly voluntary ) , siege, conquer .
But you need to explain why Islam spread with such rapid speed in the first place and not just boil it down to a few desert herders conquering the whole Maghreb within the span of 50 years. The Romans and Byzantines really either ignored or exacerbated tensions between themselves and Arabs/Berbers. The Byzantines particularly pressured the populations of the Middle East, which were largely following heretical Christian sects, to convert to mainstream Orthodox Christianity, which did not sit all too well with those populations and thus readily accepted the Caliphate. Plus there were more in common between the heretical sects of Christianity and Islam. One must remember that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all belonged to the Abrahamic religions and thus weren't all that different.
All minorities had to do under Muslim rule was to pay the jizyia tax and (under the Ottomans) provide child conscripts for the prestigious Ottoman Jannisaries (which is seen is cruel by our modern standards but not of those times). In comparison, European rulers did not mind expelling Jews from their empires or committed pogroms against them (the Ottomans welcomed in fleeing Spanish Jews when Spain expelled their Jewish population in the 15th century).
Sources:
Sean Gabb's Byzantium series
UsefulChart's Christian denomination series
Thersites the Historian' Islam series
Here you go:
One contemporary Christian archbishop wrote: "For also these Arabs . . . are no enemy to Christianity, but they are even praisers of our faith, honorers of our Lord’s priests and holy ones, and supporters of churches and monasteries"
Johan bar Penkaye, another contemporary Christian, wrote in Syriac that the Islamic state grew: "not with war or battle, but in a menial fashion."
According to the 8th-century chronicler Baladhuri, the Christian Taghlib tribe fought on behalf of Muslim leaders, marching into battle bearing crosses. The al-Jarajimah, who were also Christian, fought alongside Muslim forces.
Baladhuri also relates that Christians and Jews of Hims vowed to hold their city for the Islamic state against the Byzantines: "no governor of Heraclius shall enter the city of Hims unless we are first vanquished and exhausted."
At the end of the day, the early Islamic State was more inclusive of Jews and heterodox Christians (Nestorians, Monophysites, etc.) than Byzantium. And that worked tremendously in its favor. Of course that inclusiveness eventually changed. But you'll have to read about that in the book.
But all of this is really beside the point, because the pivotal question being considered is not Islam good/bad or tolerant/intolerant. The question is really whether this one thing that early Islam did very differently (the melting pot paradigm) worked. The results are pretty clear.
A lot of people don't see early Islam as so great. Mohammed took revenge on the first Jewish tribe (Banu Qurayzah) that didn't want to convert, and murdered them. Or, at least the men, teens and pubescent boys, beheaded them in front of their families, and took the wives, and daughters.
One had a choice to either convert, or pay jizya. If you didn't pay jizya, you were killed, at least that's what I learned.
Much also depended on the particular Muslim leader. The horrid destruction, and conquering of N. India, the burning down of the Library of the University at Narala was to destroy all their history, and education. Only the Quran was seen to be valuable, and unfortunately, that's the myopic nature of much of Islam today.
Very brutal oppression in India. Ask the Hindus, and Sikhs.
Christiandom had to fight off the Islamic Jihad for almost 1,000 years. I am glad Christiandom won out at the battle of Vienna, 1683. Islam ended up spreading the dark ages, before, and after that.
(Maybe this is covered in the video, don't know). I started reading posts first.
cammac...Have you watched debates between Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maajid Nawaz, and others. Douglas Murray has some good ones too.I enjoyed them anyway.
I also recommend reading Hirsi if so inclined.
There was a very good documentary (the longer one), partial reenactment of the Battle of Vienna, 1683 on here a few years ago. Worth watching if it's still here. Quite fascinating.
@@serpentines6356 Good Morning , I’m familiar with your references . Yes , really god work .
The dangerous shadow of in group moral psychology haunts the modern multicultural nation state.
48:00 The Özil story was a bit more complicated. Özil promoted Erdoğan, a totalitarian politician who attack Germany on a regular basis. If you promote anti-German propaganda for a foreign country, you can't claim victimhood for being seen as a foreigner. Ilkay Gündogan originated from Turkey too, and lost a lot in the last few years, but he never had the Özil problem.
Despite the name, most Germans haven't even realized that Mehmet Scholl, has Turkish heritage. Intermarriage and adopting the names of your new location is a two-way street.
Most Germans in foreign countries, have adopted names of their new home country pretty quick: Gustavo Müller, or John Smith are pretty common names of German immigrants in north and South America.
If you try to keep 100% of the culture of your origin country, you can't fit into your new country. You have to leaf 50% behind to have a chance to assimilate..
Anybody can search google and see pictures of gundogan and ozil when they both went to see erdogan. The difference is ozil criticized china on uyghur issue while gundogan didn't. And germany have big trade relationship with china. Everybody knows china takes countries hostages to do what they want to get access to trade.
This is great stuff. I never knew about other country's AA before and how often it makes things worse.
Looking forward to watching this - thanks CH!
Watching Jens talk on that blue couch. with a blue background, wearing a blue suit - it feels like I'm watching a Memphis Tigers basketball game.
When it comes to Sri Lanka and that politician focusing on ethnicity, I wonder if it was part of the wave of communist/Marxist ideology that was becoming more popular around the world at that time. Was it another example of the ideology screwing things up more and causing more harm than good?
Communism is a funny onw, despite its noxiousness it tends to be a unifying ideology.
Except its unity consists of bringing together a lot of different groups against one 'oppresor' group upon which any evil can be inflicted, lol.
Canada has had multiculturalism as its official policy toward immigration and has been using "cultural mosaic" as an official description of Canadian society for decades. Most Canadians find the "melting pot" model problematic, and while we have a national obsession with attempting to define "Canadian", we eschew idealised archetypes like "all-American". The implications of this are beyond the scope of CZcams comments section, but we have managed to find a way for French and English live under one roof, and are in the midst of the thorny but promising process of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. It is telling, though, that a couple of very smart Americans can have a discussion about it and not mention their next-door neighbour who has been working on these principles for decades.
To learn about melting pot read conversation between Israel Zangwill and Samuel Roth.
"For the Jew, it is either the Melting Pot or the Ghetto." He forgets, evidently, that the Melting Pot is itself an invention of the Jewish genius, that your copyright on it is still good in Washington. We are the only ones who really know how to operate the Melting Pot, and I submit to Dr. Gibbons that we cannot stir the Melting Pot and be boiled in it at the same time.
8:34 The impressive thing in that is that traveling around the world was nowhere near as fast as it is these days. I feel like we tend to glaze over that. We live in modern times, where access to information as well as to other far-off parts of the world has become so easy that we tend to forget people couldn't get around like that just a little over a century ago. People who were well-traveled back then had to be even more dedicated to being well-educated, as well, in terms of acquiring first-hand experiences, at least. They may have had the luxury to order some printed works through a library that would track it down and ship it to them in weeks or months, but some also took the effort to go to a place and see it for themselves, not wanting to rely just on one person's written accounts and opinions on a particular subject.
Thanks for discussing Islamic conquest in more depth. My understanding was/is the same as yours.
Yet Singapore has Little India and Chinatown... not quite the multicultural housing you are talking about here.
I mean the 'success' of the Ottoman Empire was that sectarian violence was put on hold for a bit (until it came back stronger). But in the meantime people were continually called and classified as infidels, had their children kidnapped, made to pay head taxes, and over all were second class citizens. This is rather far from any kind of meaningful 'tolerance'. The lack of violence was mostly a function of the Empire being huge. When they actually intervened somewhere internally, it took the form of massacres and mass rapes - not 'tolerance'
The Ottomans were indeed quite benevolent rulers, especially compared to the Christian rulers of the same time period (i.e. the Spanish and English expelling their Jews while the Ottomans welcolmed Jews and allowed non-Turks to hold high positions within their bureaucracy. Source: Roderick Beaton "Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation" and a CZcams lecture about Jews in the Ottoman Empire). We can all be relativist all we want. I mean most of us didn't have flush toilets a hundred years ago. Most of human history humans had it tough, some more so than others. You can't use modernity to judge the past and call the rulers of past empires "stupid" for not knowing what we were like in the future.
@@Urlocallordandsavior They used non-Turks who they had converted or kids of non-Turks whom they had kidnapped. It was common for them to go into villages and snatch kids. Those who did not convert (i.e., majority of people) remained second class citizens and paid head taxes (as dictated by the quran, which hates infidels). They lived as serfs, as the local land was given to Ottoman conquerors. Also, non-Muslims were banned from ridding horses etc (making economic life difficult). There were a bunch of ways that made life impossible for the people the quran hates. I don't think this is relativism. It is stating things exactly as they were. This was not benevolence. It was simply the most efficient way to run an empire. As I stated, when they had to intervene, they intervened with massacres and gang rapes, not with benevolence. This was far from a 'tolerant' society, unless your view of a tolerant society includes second-class citizens, in reality serfs, discriminated against on every level.
@@UrlocallordandsaviorWhat aboutism. You are also completely ignoring the fact, that the situation in Spain is the backlash to muslim imperialism, trying to rid itself from all that is not Christian and thus perceived as potentially dangerous.
Lol your an apologist
Tak!
I prefer the idea of a metallurgic forging of different elements that makes a stronger alloy.
I'm wondering if Coleman Hughes has studied the ideas & ideals of Albert L. Murray (1916-2013), author of The Omni-Americans (1970). Murray's notion of the "omni-American" seems right up Hughes' intellectual alley.
The thumb made me think you were interviewing the ghost of a Jedi.
The Hawaiian "melting pot " is not popular with original Hawaiians who are a minority in their own country. I had some Hawaiian friends who had a clothing business there which was also a cultural centre. They called themselves "Hawaiian Hawaiian" in recognition of that minority status.
"Kanaka maoli" is the term I hear used. NB: full-blooded native Hawaiians had already been a minority for many years when the U.S. stole Hawaii ("fair and square" as they say). Things might have turned out very differently if McKinley had not been assassinated (he may have reversed the whole thing).
And their culture will die as a result.
Coleman, please have a conversation with Dan Carlin !
love the t-shirt
Very interesting conversation. As a French, I found the commentary on the French assimilation system interesting for two reasons. It is quite right that France indeed expects people with foreign background to abandon their culture and become French (the "one way process", with French culture not adapting to foreigners). The conversation also shows the American perspective on the matter, which is that America being a country built on diverse immigrants has to find the best compromise in order to build the nation on solid grounds.
The French perspective is different by nature. The country was not built by immigrants. For more than a millennium, the country has not seen any major influx of foreign population (be it massive lower-class population influx, or a few high-class rulers (as the romans and the franks were) ). The challenge of assimilation for France is not about the very existence of the nation, contrary to the US, assimilation is a tool used by a relatively homogenized ethnostate to preserve this homogeneity. The unflinching assimilation policy only becomes a source of instability today because of the massive influx of immigrants, which is the result of modern French (and EU) policies. This is the main contradiction : France must either limit the influx of foreigners, in order to properly assimilate them, as they did for at least 2 centuries with the regional cultures, the Spanish, the Italian, and 1950's Algerian immigrants, or revise its assimilation model to what Jens Heycke suggests (adapting French culture to foreigners culture in order to create a "Middle Ground" to quote Richard White).
As Coleman points out at the end of the interview, multiculturalism, even when done right, is a fragile equilibrium. It gave great things to nations that succeeded in doing so, like the US or the Romans. But you also discussed plenty of examples of functioning multicultural societies which ended up falling apart once the worm got into the apple : Rwanda, Sri Lanka, even the Eastern Roman Empire (which is supposed to be the inheritor of the classic Roman Empire which did things right)... It is very much possible that a homogenized society, an "ethnostate", is the most stable kind of society, and I would say France and other countries which already are homogenized should try to preserve that state of affairs. The main pitfall of ethnostate is that it cannot reach the rest of the world like the Romans or the US did and still do today (because those multicultural societies have a universal message), and the main danger of ethnostate is to barricade from any foreign ideas and people to the point of becoming a backwards, weak, delusional country that becomes a danger to itself or to neighboring countries (North Korea, Japan during late Tokugawa era...)
For the USA, the goal is not the same. Aiming at becoming an ethnostate would mean having to forcefully convert very large portions of its historical population (I'm not even speaking of 1st gen or 2nd gen imigrants) to a single'ish culture. That, and culturally the US was founded on this principle of universalism, the "new Rome", the manifest destiny. France and other western European countries are slowly shifting into this paradigm of being multicultural, as immigration goes on. As I said, the question is not the same. For Europe, it is whether they want to get into this situation or not.
Go on, very interesting podcast :)
Wow. Very nicely stated. They should have had you on the podcast too!
Not as directly on point with most current points of controversy...
Still I found Paul Collier's book from a few years back "Migration" also contained useful and relevant sets of understandings and interpretations.
You can probably also still find some recordings on CZcams of talks he gave around the time the book was coming out.
He explains how a number of different variable conditions tend to affect migration, integration, etc.
Tolerating does not mean much if it must be accompanied by subordinating.
*Question for Americans from a Canadian:* Why do so many Americans believe Multiculturalism vs Assimilation is an *either/or* proposition?
While Canada's immigration experience is by no means perfect, we talk of ourselves as having a "Canadian Mosaic." What we mean by this is that the various peoples that comprise Canadian citizens are welcome to to assimilate into the Canadian cultural norms as much (or as little) as they choose. At the same time, everybody is just as welcome to retain as many elements as they wish of their former countries and cultures in their daily lives in Canada.
We call it a "Canadian Mosaic" because a mosaic is comprised of small, individual pieces that have their own individual colour, but when you combine all of this individual identities it becomes a finished artwork that is only made complete and beautiful when all the individual identities can be seen at the same time while looking at the artwork as a whole.
For Canadians, the idea of Multiculturalism vs Assimilation is more of a *both/and* proposition rather than an *either/or* proposition. Our citizens can BOTH retain their previous cultural identities, AND at the same time combine these individual identities into a complete artwork called the "Canadian Mosaic.".
Again ... why do so many Americans believe Multiculturalism vs Assimilation is a strictly *either/or* proposition?
Why do so many Americans have such difficulty looking at Multiculturalism vs Assimilation as a *both/and* proposition?
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Postscript: As I wrote at the very beginning, Canada's immigration experience is NOT perfect. Look up some of what my neighbour, Jordan Peterson, says about the "multiculturalism problem" to see an intelligent Canadian talking about its problems. My personal take on some of Peterson's beliefs is that he exaggerates some of the problems. But at the same time, he definitely brings up relevant problems with the "Canadian Mosaic" that definitely need to be worked on.
Because evolutionary biology… because in group moral psychology… because teams and tribalism. Large diverse nation states can flourish under federalism and a wide open Overton window. They quake however when the window closes and the central government creeps into everyday life.
Around 47", when it is about France and being French myself, I would say that Mr Heycke has not totally understood what French integration process means. It is absolutely not ethical, it is essentially societal and political. The concept of "laïcité", so difficult to translate ( there is in fact even a strong debate within the French speaking space about the meaning of the concept itself), is the hardest to grasp from"abroad" and it is precisely what explains our attitude towards hijabs and burkinis.
I'm now 48 minutes in to this interview, and we're continuously comparing the US with France and saying how well the US integrates its Muslim immigrants compared to France. I call bullshit. The immigrants coming to France are statistically not the same group as the immigrants coming to the US. There's an ocean between the Muslim world and the US, that France doesn't have. That means that the US decides which immigrants to allow in, and it overwhelmingly allows in highly educated and secular immigrants. In France, it is not France but the immigrant who decides, and it gets mostly uneducated extremely religious immigrants. I'd wager a bet that if the US took the immigrants of France and vice versa, you'd quickly conclude that the success of the US has very little to do with the US, and a lot to do with the Atlantic Ocean. That isn't the ONLY factor, obviously, e.g., France has a much more solid welfare state, which further exacerbates the negative self-selection problem. This interview ignores the elephant in the room. Interview a Frenchman to get a much more accurate perspective.
The conversation on India is completely wrong. The issue there is the social hierarchy that is enforced via the caste system. And your caste determines your social standing, occupation and what social spaces you are to be included or excluded. The reservation system (affirmative action) seeks to reverse this by giving opportunity to lower "backward" castes opportunities that they are otherwise systematically denied. And this causes resentment from the highest castes now that lower caste individuals have achieved success and can be their boss. Much more complicated picture and Mr. Heycke's ideologically driven answer was completely off the mark.
The barbar entered it and it collapsed. Exactly like Europe
The United States need to demand allegiance in this country. Some Americans are not for country
¡Coleman no sabe español!
😢
I was going to invite him to speak in Chile.
Rumble has been made unavailable in France
29:00 Persian empire also acquired terrifies peacefully. The Persians ambassadors asked to Greeks polis to enter the empire peacefully. The war that followed was due to the fact the polis refused. The fact that they also killed the ambassadors didn’t help.
North Africans are basically somewhat dark Mediterraneans. Differences must have been gradient, and so would not provide any basis for a racial or sub-racial divide.
Very interesting broad view across history, countries and peoples. I think however he generalised a bit too much.
As we all know the devil is in the detail. Eg the Tamils in Sri Lanka are not a totally homogenous group of Hindus. They are divided between those who came from India in more recent times and the original settlers. They also include Buddhists, Jains and Muslims.
A small point but one of many over-simplifications that were produced to support a line of argument. I mentioned a couple of other inexactitudes below. This is not to disparage the speaker whose research is over a very wide area but Coleman asked for our thoughts, so...
Thanks for the comments! You're quite right that much was simplified in this conversation. As you note, it's a lot of history to cover in an hour, so that was necessary.
The book provides vastly more detail and nuance. To use your example, it discusses Indian Tamils vs. Sri Lankan Tamils; Kandyan Sinhalese vs. low country; Moors; Burghers; Veddas; etc. These distinctions are very important and played a role in the various incarnations of affirmative action.
The one comment I've gotten from at least one reader in each of the regions involved is: "your book taught me things I didn't know about my own country." If you like detail, there are 40 pages of footnotes and another 20 of appendixes.
@@JensHeycke-ij2pq Thanks very much. I have no excuse not to buy it now 🙂
There is a very serious methodological problem with Jones's argument. To use Italians as an example, Italians who still see themselves as Italians are, by definition, those who did not "assimilate", in a world where many do. For example, my mother-in-law is only 1/2 Italian, my wife is only 1/4 Italian, and my kids are only 1/8 Italian. All of my mother-in-laws grandkids are 1/8 Italian, and it would never occur to any of them to regard themselves as Italian.
37:18 the hybrid war, happening right now
The conversation is interesting, but i think he is way offbase in regards to France and our assimilation.
The ban on burqa and burkini is the logical follow up of what has been asked of other religion, including the historic catholic faith. Those vestments are also used and pushed by the muslim brotherhood, wwhose aim is basicly to make a very islamized society everywhere it can, and in doing so reduce the place of women among other things.
There is a two way assimilation, but immigrants are coming to an old country with a rich history. It's not gonna be 1 to 1 and we dont want to have our history in flux, by contrast with the USA. France is fine with foreign cooking, and several outside cultural things, we've had a chinatown for a while, with folks doing big celebration of the chinese new year.
As for the riots over Nael's death, keep in mind that with outrage culture and social media, it's easy to create a riot over lies or distorsions. The rioters weren't horribly excluded folks, more like they were looking for an opportunity to have fun by burning things down and stealing.
Cortes had a lot of critical support of from the enemies of the Mexica or Aztecs in terms of thousands of fighters, guides and advisors, growing and distribution of food, transport of supplies and equipment , construction of roads and buildings, interpreters and advisors, administrators and leadership roles . To say Cortes dismantled the Aztec expire with several hundred Spaniards is clearly misleading.
You're pretty much saying what the book says. I just didn't make it clear enough in the interview what I meant by the Aztec empire being a "disaster."
The Aztecs failed to foster any sense of cohesion among the three principal groups of the Triple Alliance or the dozens of subordinate groups (Totonacs, Tlaxcalans, etc.). As a result, these groups were in a perpetual state of discord (the Aztec codexes describe how the same areas had to be repeatedly pacified). So many of these groups readily joined Cortes. This contrasts starkly with Rome, which fostered a sense of cohesion all over Latium so that other towns joined it to resist Hannibal.
Here's a quote from the book
"We might expect the Spanish sources to exaggerate their own role in toppling the Aztec Empire. However, even by their accounts, it is obvious that the multitude of Aztec defectors, not the handful of Spanish, really won the war.......If the natives joined Cortes as allies, it was not because they worshipped or even liked, the Spanish. The constituent tribes of the Aztec Empire were so eager to annihilate the Mexica-Tenochca...."
NB: my account is based on a thorough reading of every extant Aztec codex, as well as every extant Spanish source (Cortes, Bernal Diaz, conquistador anónimo, etc.), along with archaeological surveys.
You can see more details in the comments below. Or you could always.... read the book!
Without watching the video: it collapsed.
So the woke oppressed vs. oppresser is a formula for division, which we kinda can feel intuitively and the wrong road to go down.
I was so relieved that Coleman called out Heycke on his misrepresentation of the Islamic expansion. The guy just breezes over well-established facts like the jizya (the humiliating protection price non-Muslims had to pay their Muslim conquerors and which became a further incentive to convert).
I appreciate your thoughts, though I suspect you might agree with the more nuanced viewpoint expressed in the book (which I perhaps failed to convey in a short interview):
"Whatever its underlying motivation, the confessional differentiation of believers became the basis for differential treatment: Jews, Christians, and members of other faiths were eventually relegated to a distinct subordinate status outside the ummah, designated as dhimmis, rather than believers. As dhimmis, they received protection and enjoyed substantial religious freedom. However, under most later Islamic regimes, they had considerable legal and social disadvantages. They had to pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and obey a set of rules that distinguished them from Muslims and subordinated and humiliated them. For example....."
@@JensHeycke-ij2pq Yes, I would have no issue with what you say in this paragraph ... it's certainly more aligned with my understanding of the early Arab expansion. But I would add that there is a clear theological basis for this differential treatment in the Quran and Hadiths (especially in the later Medinan verses of the Quran), so any deterioration in this regard is not solely attributable to political factors. And ultimately, my point was that people did not always 'happily' convert to Islam as there were a lot of pressures to do so (and, of course, that's not specific just to Islam).
Thanks for your reply, and I will now definitely pick up a copy of your book.
@@DocnoXXX Thanks for you support! There are no contemporary Islamic historical sources for the first Islamic century. All we have is Christian and Jewish accounts. As you will see in the book, they tell a story that is very much at odds with the Muslim sources from the following century. In particular, most didn't see Islam as a distinct religion at the time (see, for example, Hoyland, "Seeing Islam as Others Saw It"). Rather than "Muslims," they describe "Hagerenes" and "Saracens" that were often quite accommodative to Jews and Christians. Perhaps the most reliable bits of evidence are coins (ca 650-700 AD). These have crucifixes or menorahs on one side and Quranic text on the other! Coins deprecating Christianity don't appear until the 8th century.
All of this has led to some interesting theorizing: e.g., that early "Islam" embraced believers that included Muslims and Jews (Donner, "Muhammad and the Believers"); that early Islam was really a Jewish or Samaritan sect (Cook and Crone, "Hagarism"); that the center of Islam was not Mecca, but a location near the Dead Sea (Crone) -- or at the extreme, that Muhammad never existed at all (Nevo and Koren, "Crossroads to Islam"). Some scholars question whether the Qur'an existed as a singular work until fairly late; some contend that the Quran was seriously modified by al-Hajjaj in 695.
Keep in mind there were no printing presses spinning out thousands of Qurans in 650. So even if the Quran was compiled and solidified in the first 50 years of Islam, many promoters of the faith probably weren't that clear on the fine points.
The consensus among non-Muslim scholars, BTW, is that the overwhelming majority of ahadith were fabricated. Even Muslim scholars concede that many are "weak" (da'eef). The first book of Hadith wasn't even compiled until 150 years after the beginning of the Islamic era! So we can hardly count on their historicity or influence on policy in the early years.
islamic wasn't successful until muhammad became a warlord, before that the society was ignoring muhammad
@@JensHeycke-ij2pq Jens, your most recent reply showed up in my email but when I came here, it doesn't appear. Not sure if that means it was shadow-banned for some reason (CZcams is unpredictable). I just wanted to say that we're quite aligned on our respective understandings of early Islam. I'm currently reading the Quran for a third time (my wife is Muslim, I'm secular), on this occasion with a tasfir, and I'm convinced more than ever that Muhammad intended Islam as an extension of and 'correction' to Judaism ... that he expected to be accepted as a prophet in the Judaic 'lineage'. This comes through in the stories that are 'borrowed' from the Torah, without a lot of context provided, and in the fact that the early Muslims even prayed in the direction of Jerusalem rather than Mecca. But you can see him turn against the Jews as you move from the Meccan to later Medinan verses. (Also interesting are the elements of Arian Christianity that find their way into the Quran as well as snippets of apocryphal gospels, like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.) Thanks for sharing your thinking, and apologies for my delayed reply -- work is sucking up all my time this month.
The ethnic Burmese also destroyed their university system developed by the British during colonial times; Rangoon University was one of Asia's top universities at the time of Burmese independence in 1948, nowadays it's probably ranked as a mid-tier Asian university.
The Ottomans were also quite multicultural too, highlighted by the fact that the population of the Ottoman Balkans remained largely Christian and that Christian Greeks made up much of the Ottoman bureaucracy and ruling class during its 500 years of existence. It wouldn't be until the turn of the 20th century that European nationalism pressured the Ottomans and later Turkey to adopt Turkish ethno-nationalism and force non-Turks to either assimilate or expel them.
Now for those people who say that Europe=bad because this, most of this was caused by Europe's economic success and industrialization (unless you want to follow Mao or Pol Pot's footsteps of agricultural life being the best form of human life for a highly populated modern world...).
But the Ottoman Empire victimized its minorities by taking slaves and taxation.
Literally almost all the bad things we suffer todays links bad to Europe, Europeans and/or their beliefs (religiously or secularly). Pol Pot drew a lot of his beliefs from Plato's Republic lol
@@seanskywalka5172 All the good once too
A list of a few bad things developed by non-European:
French totalitarianism was inspired by Japan. Versailles' centralism just appeared a few years after the first French people wrote about Kyoto.
Confucian bureaucracy. (China)
Paper money (China)
Imperialism (Middle East)
Most pandemics in history (China)
Taxes
Kings
Europe was more like an idea catalyst and not the source of all bad ideas.
Two comments...
1) You might want to read J. C. DeGraft-Johnson's "African Glory" to better understand the reason for what were two very distinct Arab invasions of North Africa. What was the distinction? The first was by the ORIGINAL Arabs, a much darker people than the later (and current) Arabs, who were essentially European Crusader transplants. I'd be happy to provide some sources.
2) How did you manage not to ask him to talk about the DeSantis "War on Woke" and anti-CRT movement in the context of his book?!
They probably didn't waste their time worrying about it. Diversity is more of a problem now than it was then. At least back then you knew your place. Now? The derivative keeps changing in the narrative. This confuses the issue.
The Britons never saw themselves as Romans. That is why they refused to adopt Latin. This is in turn why the language of Britain became Germanic rather than Latin/Romance: Germanic was of higher-status than Celtic. If the language of Roman Britain, at the time of the (early) Anglo-Saxon Conquest, had been Latin/Romance, then the language we are now using would be a close relative of French, much as the language of Gaul was a close relative of the language of Britain. The people of Britain were, unlike the people of Gaul, quite hostile to the Romans. And so it is that there were never any British senators, while there were many Gaulish senators.
There is a rule that predicts when the people of Britain adopted the language of conquerors: they did so when the conquerors were (at first) seen as ruling Britain from Britain. So the Celtic conquest of Britain and the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain resulted in "language-shift", whereas the Roman conquest of Britain and the Norman conquest of Britain did not. Though the Normans eventually ruled Britain from Britain, this was only after about 150 years of rule from France, and it seems that the initial decision of the English not to adopt French was not affected by later developments. As late as the Wars of the Roses, the English were noted for rabid hostility toward foreigners. That is what having a clear border will do: increase "out-group hostility".
31:15 Bro says he's knows the Berbers blah, blah, blah. Bro, you can't know this. Yes there might be some historical record of it but most history is written by the victors. generally to make themselves look good. Coleman preempts this quite masterfully in the minute prior.
31:12 Correct -- not by choice, rather under the threat of annihilation.
At 1'02", this exactly why we, in France, do not allow "ethnical" statistics, this is exactly why we consider our dark skin football players French and not "African-French" and why we are shocked by the way you in the US make an extensive use of the world "race". This is considered aboslutely racist here ...let us try to understand one another and be carefull not to be too affirmative even after a serious "study" of a topic. That said, I personally do not mind being criticised as a Frenchman and I am a big fan of Mr Hughes podcast !!
I have not looked at any of this guys evidence but I am experienced with formal historical research and I am skeptical about some of the historical claims he is making just based on how few primary documents are available and how narrow the source of those documents is. My experience is more with the Republic and early imperial period and I can't think of a single thing that would make me think the Romans were eager to assimilate. Citizenship was exchanged for military service as a practical way of bolstering the army. Foreign cultures were unashamedly looked down on as backward and very much other. I'm sure at the ground level average people may have felt differently but its hard to know because their thoughts and feelings are rarely preserved, they didn't write a lot and what they did write were usually very short letters that just don't discuss these types of matters very often.
edit add: I just want to clarify that I found a lot of ideas presented made sense, and regardless of what was going on with the Romans, it wouldn't change all the other examples given in the video. I just thought it important to say because tribalism tends to make people throw the baby out with the bathwater.
"Is it regretted that the Cornelii Balbi immigrated from Spain and other equally distinguished men from southern Gaul? Their descendants are with us; and they love Rome as much as we do. What proved fatal to Sparta and Athens for their military strength was their segregation of conquered subjects as aliens. Our founder Romulus, on the other hand, had the wisdom-more than once-to transform whole enemy peoples into Roman citizens within the course of a single day." -- Claudius
"without any dispute, that has been the most solid foundation of our empire, and the thing which has above all others increased the renown of the Roman name, that that first man, the creator of this city, Romulus, taught by the treaty which he made with the Sabines, that it was expedient to increase the population of this city by the adoption of even enemies as citizens." -- Cicero
@@JensHeycke-ij2pq I appreciate the relevant texts. My interpretation would be that they are supporting 1 way integration rather than a 2 way. They obviously saw the benefit of welcoming outsiders into Roman society but I would say they were almost xenophobic to foreign influence on them.
@@shock_n_Aweful The proof is in the pudding, as they say. From the very beginning, during the early Republican era, cultural elements we think of as quintessentially Roman were actually incorporated from multiple other cultures. For example, the toga and fasces were actually Etruscan, and Rome's legal structure came from the Sabines. I could go on and talk about contributions from the Volscians and Samnites. And let's not forget the biggest foreign influence of all: the Greeks. Just ponder how much of Roman art, architecture, religion, etc., derived from the Greeks. So there was plenty of two-way assimilation from the get-go.
This cultural integration extended through the Imperial period. I highly recommend a visit to the well-preserved ruins of Ostia Antica. (superior in many ways to Herculaneum or Pompeii, IMO). There you will find many, many structures devoted to cults and deities from around the ecumene: Egypt,, Persia, Phrygia, Lydia, and Africa. The number and size of these suggest that they were mainstreamed and not just frequented by tiny minorities.
Did Rome attempt to infuse everyone with a sense of Romanitas? Absolutely. But that Romanitas was a syncretic fusion of many cultures.
Actual racial differences being real destroys this guy's whole case
Especially psychological differences
I saw someone being so uncomfortable not willing to accept FACT...😅
well, he can't compare an immigrant country like America to the old world Europe in terms of assimilation of migrants/refugees. Completely different social and cultutal conditions
After GEORGE FLOYD was ASSASSINATED in May 2020, I am fully awokened to injustice in the USA.
I haven't blinked in three years and my eyes are turning into dust. Please tell me this is a normal thing for wokesters! My doctor and I are worried.
floyd was a drug addict
I knew yall were going to ignore Natives. If your Native assimilation is unequivocally a dirty word and concept
Coleman should consider dressing more professional
Why it's his show
Botswana has the highest rape rate in the world (or is a close second to South Africa, depending on the source).
It's second from comparing multiple sources
Like the term African-American is false on it's face since there are very few blacks with any real connection to Africa. It's a way to separate from the whole
So their ancestors were not African people who were enslaved on American soil?? 🫥
What you need beyond mere color-blindness is not having Muslims. Tribalism is baked into Islam: "the super-tribe of the faithful".
I notice this conversation always talks about white people dying out in positive tones.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. It’s chilling to hear it said so casually.
Enjoying the convo, but He is wrong on the aztecs, BTW. Cortes allied forces was like 95% indigenous and historians have described the event as an "INdian coup de etat". Cortes did not conquer anything, but the military collapse of Tenochtitlan, One city state, was due to the harranging and increased tribute payments from their conquered territories. They had alienated their neighbors and Cortes was smart enough to ally with these folks when he was forced to destroy that one city block by block....
Umm, you're kind of making the same point I was making. First off, the name "Aztec" is a European misnomer. The Aztecs were really the "triple alliance" -- a multicultural coalition of Acolhuas, Tepanecs, and Mexica-Tenochca that rode herd over a vast array of other groups -- Totonacs, Chalcoans, etc. It was precisely the failure of the Triple Alliance leadership to integrate these different groups under a superordinate identity in the way the Romans did, that spelled their downfall.
It was thus very easy for Cortez to peel off groups like the Totonacs--and particularly the Tlaxcalans--to his side. So yeah, it was really these groups that defeated the "Aztecs" rather than Cortez. Heck, in the Battle of Chalco, the Chalcoans and Huexotzincans crushed an army of twenty thousand Aztecs before the Spanish even reached the battlefield.
Contrast this with Hannibal ravaging Italy. He was unable to win any of the Italian groups to his side and was thus left isolated and ultimately failed.
Integrating or "melting" the groups in your domain and imbuing them with a sense of shared identity yields a more cohesive and resilient polity. By contrast, maintaining separate groups with group distinctions (as the Aztecs did), yields a society bereft of cohesion -- or "asabiyah" (you'll have to read the book to learn about that). For that reason, Rome was stunningly resilient while the "Aztec" empire was incredibly fragile.
@@JensHeycke-ij2pq No. you didn't listen to him. He said 300 spaniards conquered the aztec empire, which as you've noted, was more of a confederation or a tepid triple alliance. We are NOT saying the same thing since he regurgitates a ninteenth century trope about the supposed "superiority" of the europeans. WRONG. About asabiyah: I've read the muqadimmah but don't see its relevance here since Ibn Khaldun is discussing the rise and fall of civilizations among bedouin societies...how they get soft and enjoy too much luxuriousnes, etc.... So no, we are NOT saying the same thing and I also don't believe there was any "conquest' of Mexico...that is for sure. In fact, no one does anymore...only this guy apparently...
@@coahuiltejano
Just in case it wasn't clear: "this guy" is me (note the names).
Whatever I said in an interview (in which I occasionally misspoke), here's what I mean and what the book actually says:
"We might expect the Spanish sources to exaggerate their own role in toppling the Aztec Empire. However, even by their accounts, it is obvious that the multitude of Aztec defectors, not the handful of Spanish, really won the war.......If the natives joined Cortes as allies, it was not because they worshipped, or even liked, the Spanish. The constituent tribes of the Aztec Empire were so eager to annihilate the Mexica-Tenochca...."
There are also amusing accounts of how venal, greedy, and incompetent the Spaniards were. I disagree with Victor Hansen on this point: everything Cortez did after the "conquest" of the Mexica (e.g. Baja & Spice Island expeditions) ended in abject failure. So it's likely that he was more lucky than competent. NB: This chapter of the book was based on a thorough reading of every single extant Aztec codex (all footnoted); I even enlisted the help of a Nahuatl speaker. So it's really not a Euro-centric account.
I'll leave any further discussion until after you've actually read it.
And, incidentally, I am currently translating the entire Kitab al-'ibar (the "Muqadimmah" is literally just the introduction to this larger work). So stay tuned for a broader discussion of asabiyah. It's about more than just Bedouin tribes. See, for example, Abdarrahman b. Muhammad Ibn Khaldun, al-Muqaddimah, ed. Ali Abdalwahid Wafi , vol. 2 (Cairo: Lajna al-Bayan al-Arabi, 1957), 434-40.
@@JensHeycke-ij2pq Dear Sir, in light of what you wrote in your book, which I've not read, it now appears that your comments at 33:00 was a throw away sentence. Yeah, the way you said it did not have all the complexity that you've just shared. Thank you for taking the time to clarify. I will purchase your book for sure now.
I applaud you for using the extant codices to get the Nahuatl POV and I would also highly recommend the new works by Restall, Susan Schroeder, Laura Matthews, et al where they are now making the argument, based on nahuatl translations, that the mesoamericans considered themselves conquerors!!!
www.google.com/books/edition/Indian_Conquistadors/3yzaAgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
Thank you for your time and really enjoyed the podcast.
@@coahuiltejano Thank you for bearing with me!
Live interviews are not my forte. So that was just one point where I failed to convey the nuance and depth that's actually in the book. There were others-- as you'll find in reading.
He's only partially correct about Rwanda history.
*Question for Americans from a Canadian:* Why do so many Americans believe Multiculturalism vs Assimilation is an *either/or* proposition?
While Canada's immigration experience is by no means perfect, we talk of ourselves as having a "Canadian Mosaic." What we mean by this is that the various peoples that comprise Canadian citizens are welcome to to assimilate into the Canadian cultural norms as much (or as little) as they choose. At the same time, everybody is just as welcome to retain as many elements as they wish of their former countries and cultures in their daily lives in Canada.
We call it a "Canadian Mosaic" because a mosaic is comprised of small, individual pieces that have their own individual colour, but when you combine all of these individual identities it becomes a finished artwork that is only made complete and beautiful when all the individual identities can be seen at the same time while looking at the artwork as a whole.
For Canadians, the idea of Multiculturalism vs Assimilation is more of a *both/and* proposition rather than an *either/or* proposition. Our citizens can BOTH retain their previous cultural identities, AND at the same time combine these individual identities into a complete artwork called the "Canadian Mosaic.".
Again ... why do so many Americans believe Multiculturalism vs Assimilation is a strictly *either/or* proposition?
Why do so many Americans have such difficulty looking at Multiculturalism vs Assimilation as a *both/and* proposition?
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Postscript: As I wrote at the very beginning, Canada's immigration experience is NOT perfect. Look up some of what my neighbour, Jordan Peterson, says about the "multiculturalism problem" to see an intelligent Canadian criticising its problems. My personal take on some of Peterson's beliefs is that he exaggerates some of the problems. But at the same time, he definitely brings up relevant problems with the "Canadian Mosaic" that definitely need to be worked on.