What are some forms of information that undermine the simple 'oppressor vs oppressed' western narrative

Great Debates
1

So let me try to explain what I mean. I am talking about how in the west, there is a narrative on the left (I consider myself left leaning) that all of history and culture can be looked at through the lens of campism. The evil, oppressive west and the morally pure, mistreated non-west.

By west I don’t just mean caucasian and western. I also mean judeo-christian, patriarchal, heteronormative.

For example, slavery. Slavery is viewed through this lens as evil judeo-christian, caucasian westerners going to Africa and kidnapping slaves and bringing them to the US. However the reality is more complex. Africans enslaved each other long before the west got there, and Africans would enslave each other through wars and debt bondage, then sell each other to westerners in exchange for firearms so Africans could declare war on each other. Also the west learned quite a bit about the slave trade in Africa from the Arabs, who had been taking slaves from Africa for centuries before the west got there.

Add in the fact that in the US, whites were both the main perpetrators of slavery, but also major proponents of abolition.

Another example would be imperialism. In the campist narrative, the west is imperialistic. But the USSR was also imperialistic and colonialist. They conquered lots of territory in eastern europe and viewed these territories as parts of an empire. Once these nations got a chance to escape, a lot of eastern european nations joined the EU and NATO to escape Russian imperialism and colonialism in the future.

Trump’s victory was not a simplistic men vs women narrative. A lot of women supported Trump. Studies like this show that when white women support Trump, its usually because they like Trump’s racism.

The researchers suggest this could be due to the relative racial privilege white women experience, which allows them more leeway to focus on race-based concerns over gender-related ones. Essentially, as “second in sex to men” but “first in race to minorities,” white women may experience and express a different set of political priorities compared to women of color, who are more frequently subjected to intersecting forms of racial and gender discrimination.

With Israel, you could argue that Israel itself is anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist. The narrative from campism is that Israel is a western outpost in the middle east on land stolen by the west. Which has some truth to it. At the same time, the Jews were native to the land for thousands of years, and it was Arab muslims who invaded, conquered and colonized the land in the 7th and 8th centuries. Israel could just as easily be argued as an attempt to recapture land stolen by Arab Muslim colonizers and giving it back to its original owners.

Or the narrative that the Palestinians are the good guys. Something like 72% of Palestinians supported the Oct 7th attacks. Hamas was democratically elected by the Palestinian people in 2006. Not only that, but Hamas is very misogynistic, heteronormative, racist and theocratic, all values that western leftists generally despise. You could easily argue that the Arab muslims want to recapture a colony they lost in WW1 (Israel) and subject it to oppressive religious rule.

Or the fact that divorce is more common in lesbian relationships than in heterosexual or gay relationships (undermining the idea that men are the reason for divorce). Or the fact that DV is higher in LGBTQ relationships than heterosexual relationships. But the DV could be a side effect of the psychological trauma that LGBTQ people go through living in a heteronormative society that rejects them.

I’m kind of not sure where the line between punching down on marginalized people and discussing how the oppressor vs oppressed narrative is blurry breaks down though. I’m not saying any of this justifies mistreating marginalized people, nor does it excuse the evil things privileged groups have done.

I guess I’m more discussing how humans in general have both good and bad traits, and these span across all cultures. Trying to pigeonhole negative and positive traits of human beings that apply across all humans (and non-human animals) within the western campist narrative of the evil dominant groups (men, whites, judeochristians, cishet, western) mistreating the marginalized groups (women, non-whites, non-christians, LGBTQ, non-western) really doesn’t fit how complex humanity is.

2

I’m curious about your use of “Judeo-Christian” on these lists, seeing as that term itself frequently (some would say only) serves to elide the vast historical, doctrinal and cultural differences between Judaism and Christianity that complicate any simple “oppressor/oppressed” narrative involving either or both.

3

I find it hard to believe that this is a narrative on the left, at any sort of meaningful scale. It fits very well with right-wing narratives about how irrational liberals are, though. I’ve seen lots of conservative thinkers complain about it, but I’ve never actually seen it expressed as a progressive belief, by progressives. What I’ve heard from progressives is that pointing out that oppressed people can also be oppressors in no way excuses oppression.

One of the core ideas of modern progressive thought is intersectionality. The notion of intersectionality - that people as individuals contain all sorts of identities, some marginalized and some privileged - goes at least as far back as Freire.

4

I suspect it’s more a matter of winners and losers. It just so happened, by the random chance or whatever, that the particular groups you mention as the evil dominant groups are the ones that ended up as being in charge, while the ones you mention as the marginalized groups ended up as the ones not being in charge. What corrupts (some of) those in the evil dominant group is having power, not that they happen to be men, or Christian, or cisgender, or whatever.

5

I had a history teacher in 8th grade who forced us to write an essay supporting the thesis: “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I was so mad about this because to my mind, there were good people who could not be corrupted so I resented having to defend such a categorical statement.

Looking back, I think she was right, dammit.

6

Simians share with other mammals two survival tactics: 1. strong family bonds, 2. Aggression. Above that us apes have 3. deception.

The ultimate survival of Homo sapiens require we expand 1. to include all other humans, suppress 2. (or at least channel it into sports), and shift 3. into overall creative thinking that enriches both the individual and the collective.

7

I think the younger you was correct. There are some powerful people who resist the call to be corrupt. I have long believed, and still believe, that a large part of the reason the US managed to be successful compared to so many other countries that got their start in a revolutionary war was because George Washington somehow managed to resist the impulse to declare himself a king. Of course there’s an awful lot of people who aren’t able to resist, and there are many examples I could point to of revolutionary leaders who declared themselves leader for life (regardless of the actual title they may have gone by) whose countries ended up not progressing due to having a dictator.

8

In the very least, power seems to make abusive people worse.

I don’t know much about Washington. Maybe in very trying times certain people can be led by their principles through dangerous waters. They seem few and far between these days.

I think oppression when we’re talking about categorical groups is largely a function of opportunity. Oppression also seems to breed the desire for the oppressed to be oppressive too. I think culture is also a factor. It’s not quite as simple as “any group who can oppress, will," but that’s not a terrible shorthand, either.

9

Just a note on this. There are a few reasons this could be true. The first is that some surveys treat all interpersonal intimate partner violence as domestic violence, but domestic violence in the classic sense is more often defined as a systemic pattern of power and control exerted by one partner over another. It requires an unequal power dynamic. Violence in the context of more equal dynamics (I throw something at you, you hit me, we have a slap fight) seems to be more common in LGBTQ relationships. I’m not implying this is acceptable, just different. So for that study I wanna know how they are defining domestic violence.

The other point is that LGBTQ abusers have more tools in their arsenal to exert power and control than straight people do. They tend to have more insular communities where social pressure is higher to stay together (similar to rural communities), and they can threaten to out the victim to their family or employer. If someone is trans, the abuser can threaten to withhold their medication. LGBTQ people also have higher rates of homelessness which makes it easier for them to get trapped. Do I stay with this dangerous person, or face homelessness again, where I’m likely to get assaulted or worse? In short, if it happens more often, it’s probably just because it’s easier.

10

I think once you have a group of people in charge, it allows for the transmission of cultural values, which may be something like, “stomp on the weak," or “women should submit" or whatever. If a people is in charge long enough, it becomes their birthright to be in charge and they design entire structures to maintain their hegemony. And when they start to lose that power they think they are being mistreated. Which makes them crack down even harder.

I think when you have a long history of cultural hegemony you (as a group) are more likely to be oppressive than other groups, and your oppression is likely to be worse (in duration, in scale etc.) than other forms of oppression. Is pointing that out “campism"?

11

From what I’ve seen, the anti-Western side typically excuses the actions of the Soviet Union by placing them in the context of defending itself against Western aggression. Typically the argument goes that the West invaded Russia during their civil war, so the Soviet Union had a reasonable fear the West could invade at any time, and whatever they did to make sure they were safe was either justified or something to blame the West for. i.e. They perform a lot of mental gymnastics to absolve their side from any blame of wrong doing.

Did I miss something in the OP? Because I didn’t see anything about this being prevalent among progressives. Being on the left isn’t the same as being a progressive, is it?

12

I consider them interchangeable. YMMV.

13

I think what the right wing is assuming is a narrative, or agenda on the left is what they’re perceiving as a relentless desire to puncture the Western/American cultural mythology as it has been taught for decades or centuries, and portray the erstwhile heroes as villains, while simultaneously elevating the villains to victims. It may be the truth, but people don’t really like having their cultural myths busted and being told that their cultural heroes and legends were far from that.

They also perceive any sort of victory of a minority/marginalized group as being orthogonal to what they perceive as the normal and natural way of things. It’s a sort of A OR B type thinking, rather than being A AND B. So when someone is saying for example, “Black Lives Matter”, they’re perceiving this as anti-police, anti-civil order, and the like, when in fact, it wasn’t anything of the sort.

They also tend to view any sort of situation where they’re forced to admit/acknowledge anything other than what they consider normal as being oppressed/forced. To wit: not being allowed to exclusively dominate public spaces with Christian iconography. Nobody’s oppressing them, they’re just saying that if they get the 10 Commandments in the courthouse square, the Jews get a Menorah, and the Satanists get a statue of Baphomet. Or everyone gets nothing.

Combine the three, and it can look to many on that side of things like there’s a concerted effort for people to break down the cultural pillars of our society and substitute elements that they don’t like or approve of. It’s ridiculous, but it’s also a very un-nuanced and provincial view of things, which is pretty much part and parcel of the right-wing core.

14

I don’t think it’s a question of who is most morally pure. Personally I don’t see any of this as germane to the question of whether so many Palestinian civilians should be killed. What is this information relevant to? I could see it being relevant if we were discussing Palestinian theocracy or whatever but apropos of nothing, or worse, apropos of discussing the Israel/Palestine conflict I don’t understand why their views toward women would matter when it came to the question of whether thousands of them should be displaced and killed.

A long time ago I was talking with a conservative on Facebook (I know) and they were defending the Confederate statues as teaching history or whatever, so at some point in their argument they started talking about how Northern soldiers raped Southern women. I don’t doubt for a second it’s true, which is awful, but it was wholly irrelevant. The conversation was not about whether the South was more sinful than the North, it was about statues of Confederate soldiers. This was a deflection tactic that had nothing to do with the discussion.

In my experience people are only really interested in this kind of nuance when they’re deflecting.

I realize this may sound like an accusation and I want to be clear I’m not accusing you of deflecting. You don’t seem to be focused on one particular subject and I have no reason to believe you have an axe to grind. But the wiki you linked to is flagged as having its neutrality in question and I’m hesitant to take it at face value as a real and pervasive phenomenon.

15

Although slavery—typically of war prisoners—was a common practice in many sub-Saharan African cultures (and frankly most cultures around the world until quite recently) the practice of European and American chattel slavery is distinct in both scope and constitutive brutality. Chattel slavery captured or bought Africans, transported them thousands of miles across oceans from their homelands in utterly inhumane and often deadly conditions, and then typically worked them to death to produce sugar cane, tobacco, and (later) cotton. Chattel slavery was hereditary—the child of an enslaved mother was by default property of her owner—and while there were occasional owners who would permit manumission of ‘exceptional’ slaves (usually ones they had fathered through rape)—in general there was no way for a slave to purchase or work for their freedom, much less gain citizenship or hold any basic rights.

Although the Atlantic slave trade was ended through a series of national acts in the first two decades of the 19th Century, illegal importation of African-born slaves to the Americas continued until 1867. Britain eliminated slavery in its possessions by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 through compensated emancipation (i.e. the government paid slave owners to ‘compensate’ them for their ‘loss of property, and the loans that the British took out to make these awards were still being paid off through the beginning of the 21st Century while the enslaved peoples and their decedents have received no compensation whatsoever for their labor or hardships). The United States, on the other hand, didn’t end the practice of slavery or domestic slave trade until the 13th Amendment in 1865 (making it one of the last developed nations to formally prohibit slavery), and was very lax on enforcing laws permitting convict leasing, sharecropping, and peonage collectively known as “Black Codes” through the 1960s.

So, no, just because other groups practiced forms of slavery does not mean that the Europeans did so less evil, or that chattel slavery wasn’t uniquely horrific even in the context of the pre-industrial era.

This is utter nonsense. There were, naturally, many African-American abolitionists, both former slaves like Frederick Douglass, and born freemen (and women), but because of who writes standard history textbooks and makes the laws those names are only briefly mentioned and rarely given full shrift of their contributions, both politically and culturally to not only the abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude, but equal standing under law and in the electoral franchise. In fact, many white abolitionists (or those, like Jefferson, who sometimes wrote of the evils of slavery but then hypocritically not only owned but promoted slavery in law and culture) were quite apologetic about their views and advocated a gradualist path toward replacing slavery with less ‘slavey’ concepts like sharecropping or ‘partial citizenship’ contingent upon working on white plantations or for powerful white men.

It is certainly fair to question simplistic narratives of “oppressor versus oppressed” because no broad social, cultural, or historical movements are simple, and one can be both abuser and abused—often simultaneously—but that doesn’t mean that one is justified in marginalizing the oppression of a people because they were or even are oppressed or abused themselves. If you go back long enough in history, everybody has roots in a culture that has been oppressed, subjugated, forcibly emigrated, or essentially eradicated or assimilated into the conquering culture. That is not justification to oppress, subjugate, or commit genocide on others even though it is often used as an excuse to do so.

Which is the real problem. Having a legitimate discussion about actual historical impetus and consequences requires this kind of nuance (and the detailed understanding of both verifiable facts and interpretations to support it) but often people want to undermine a discussion about cultural or political oppression by just actually deflecting from the discussion, or else arguing that it was just a result of “men of their time”, as if there weren’t contemporaries of Christophorus Columbus who weren’t pretty horrified of what he was doing, and his own patrons objecting to his promotion of slave trade above and beyond what was needed to get a return on their investments.

Stranger

16

Well said. Per usual.

17

Oh, and Behind the Bastards has a great series on Jefferson.

18

I don’t want to minimize the scope nor the horrors of American and European slave practices, but the Islamic slave trade went on for some 1300 years (!), and was an order of magnitude greater in scope. Moreover, slavery has existed for as long as human civilization have, so to focus ONLY or even primarily on the American practice is certainly campist in nature as mentioned by the OP.

19

How about focusing on the present, and not the past? Does that work for you?

20

As it happens, I’m halfway through listening that series on Jefferson right now.:grin: Now, you can’t take Behind the Bastards to be an objective or authoritative take on anything because host Robert Evans usually reads a book or two on the subject, writes a script where he emphasizes the most prurient and monstrous things about the person in question, and brings on a comedian or some other non-expert to get hot takes, so it’s really meant as a kind of verbal long-form Twitter thread rather than a deep historical analysis, but it’s pretty entertaining and this one in particular emphasizes a lot of contradictory things about Jefferson that most people don’t get through the veneration as a *primus inter pares “*Founding Father” (and I haven’t even gotten to the entire Sally Hemmings child-rape controversy yet).

If you really want to get a ‘contrarian’ historian’s take on this, Tad Stoermer has a lot of well-founded if unconventional takes on the Constitution and the Founders about what they actually intended (and did in the their personal and political lives) versus the candy-coated version of history you get from high school and even undergraduate history education. Of course, the classical reference his Howard Zinn and his A Peoples’ History of the United States as essentially the first text that attempted to make a comprehensive ‘alternative’ interpretation of American history from the perspective of people looking up events from below rather than down from the view of leaders and their historical myth-makers.

Is anyone in American politics trying to minimize or diminish the impact of the Islamic (and more generally, North African and Mediterranean) slave trade? No? Then my dog likes peanut butter.

Stranger