Thread by @beka_valentine, also periodic reminder that almost everything you think of as "traditional european [...]

also periodic reminder that almost everything you think of as "traditional european food" is actually fusion cuisine https://twitter.com/beka_valentine/status/1380579570290552833

https://twitter.com/beka_valentine/status/1380579570290552833

pasta is Italian ok but the noodles came from China and the tomatoes came from the Americas

espresso is Italian but the coffee came from Ethiopia

chocolate is very Swiss or German but the cocoa beans came from Mexico

sauerkraut is German but is literally descended from kimchi

nothing's more British than TEA! except tea is from India

spice cakes? your cinnamon is from India too and your sugar is from India too and

its just on and on

any weirdo who wants to bolster Traditional European Culture doesn't know jack shit about European culture

Europe? there is no Europe, it's a fantasy, everything everywhere is fusion cultures, fusion this fusion that. fantasy lines between people

did you know that huge numbers of names of towns in Europe are of unknown origin? some are traceable to Latin, e.g. Köln comes from latin "colonia" (ie colony) because it was a roman garrison town

but some places are ~mysterious~

and it turns out that lots of those places are names that predate Roman, and indeed even Indo-European, linguistic takeover

there are a scant few remnants of pre-Indo-European language still alive today -- the Basque speak a non-IE language that managed to survive

but the traces are still to be found in place names and some other things

hell, if you know anything about the origins of Rome, you know that the first major city they conquered when they started getting conquer-y was the Etruscan cities next to Rome

Etruscans were speakers of a non-Indo-European language

they weren't some distant group tho, they were literally just a few miles away, in Tuscany

and they didn't go anywhere, they just were conquered. conquest is almost always political and cultural. the people stayed where they were and were just colonized by Rome

and eventually they were subsumed into Rome and lost their Etruscan identity, but some remnants remain

the same is true of so many other places in Europe. written history is older than Europe being European

hell, written EUROPEAN history is older!

fantasists who imagine some glory days of European Culture don't have a grasp on history

European Culture is a fantasy imagined past, no more real than Zeus or Odin

everything everywhere was always already Multicultural and Multiculturalism is the default state of humanity and every shred of history proves this to be true

you ever see this traditional Dutch style of porcelain called Delftware?

well its a knockoff of a popular Ming style from the 1400s

and i do literally mean knockoff

Europe got a massive boner for Chinese stuff at one point and were importing it as fast as they could, but it was expensive to go all the way to China to import vases

so some folx in Delft decided to start making knockoffs

you know the archetypal cookie tin that you find sewing supplies in?

well those are a more modern, corporatized version of a more traditional style of painted tin

but those boxes are knockoffs of Japanese and Chinese lacquer boxes that were imported around the same time, again at high prices

half the shit you think of as traditional european stuff is just knockoffs of east asian products

meanwhile folx in europe and the us today complain about shanzhais in china making knockoffs of american electronics

ignorance of how we connect with other cultures turns siblings into aliens from other worlds

we are not some far flung disparate people, we have always people part of a big multicultural world as far back as humanity goes

when we forget this, we forget not only who others are, but we forget who we ourselves are

the history of them is the history of us, and we are forgetting our history by hallucinating a different one

this isn't just a problem of Very Foreign Civilizations like China, btw

in the US, our history isn't taught as being deeply connected to English history, for instance

but until 1776, the british colonies were.. british. the people here were people from there, with very little clear distinctions

and of course the ones who were born here would have been first or second generation usually. maybe fifth if they were really old families, but rarely

but in American schools, you don't really ever get taught British history, because American history is the history of this particular country

what scraps of British history you learn is always in service of the narrative of American history

and then there's facts like, the largest ethnic group in the US is often said to be German Americans (depending on how you do breakdowns)

but no German history gets taught

millions of Americans are Irish-descent, but no Irish history gets taught

and thats to say nothing of the tens of millions of African Americans and Native Americans whose history is actively erased and wiped out

even in so far as European threads of history are concerned, America cannot even conceive of itself as situated in a European lineage enough to care about the actual historical connections there

and there's a lot to say! the social and economic conditions of Europe are intimately related to who indentured themselves to American colonial wealth and how those groups then became the foundation of regional cultures

even little things like accents can be traced directly back to migratory patterns from England, and also broader migratory patterns from elsewhere in Europe

these histories shaped the US, but aren't really taught because US culture so alienates itself from other cultures that even its **own history and origins** are cut away to reinforce the myth of America

why is the New York accent the way it is? well, because NY in the 1800s and 1900s was a major place where poor Europeans migrated. Germans, Poles, Russians, Jews, Italians, Greeks, Hungarians

English as spoken by them, with their accents, mixed together in one giant blob, for decades and decades, gave rise to a new dialect, with its own pronunciation but also its own vocabulary (and to a lesser extent, grammar)

I'm a German-English-Irish american girl who grew up on Long Island and my native dialect is very new york

the very language i speak is a melange of many european languages' influences on English

did i learn those histories in school? no

every regional dialect is like this, a rich a complicated melding, but do we learn these histories? no

we don't even learn how much of a melting pot things really are here. the dominant perception is of the US having many distinct ethnic groups

but there are no distinct ethnic groups, there are no impermeable lines between them

every new yorker has cultural heritage in all sorts of places they don't even recognize as belonging to

and this is again to say nothing of the influences of Black american culture, Puerto Rican culture, Chinese culture on NYC, which is just as important

Euro-Americans cant even conceive of their own Euro-heritage as it truly is, nevermind all the non-Euro heritage

we can't even teach euro american history properly, imagine trying to get Black american history, African history, Puerto Rican history, and Chinese history taught as *important for American history*

not just as like foreign histories but as part of American history

but how can you have a country with a huge Chinese population and not think that the history of China that lead to these folx' ancestors (or they themselves!) moving here isn't part of this country's history?

this is all just to say that there is no coherent way to draw these boundaries. the history of them is the history of us, and always has been

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