show transcript
chirasul posted:
my only advice is to BE CAREFUL posting about holiday traditions around europeans. you’ll post something casual like “anyone else watch the old Grinch movie every year? what a classic” and a european will appear as if summoned and say some shit like “funny how USAmericans always CONVENIENTLY forget that Not Everyone On Earth is from The USA……… no of COURSE we dont watch ‘the grunch’ or whatever the fuck that is…. our tradition is to attend a community showing of Glummdorf the Racial Stereotype”
themainspoon replies with screenshots of several tumblr tags and comments:
riseupriseupandcomealong:
my mom’s (american) class tried doing a language exchange thing w a sister school in spain and they decided to send each other boxes of gifts for christmas. the spanish class made remarks about oh christmas in the usa is so commercialized we have ~real traditions~ here and then my mom opened a box full of blackface dolls and blackface doll ornaments and blackface clothespins in front of her students
raygender:
Did once have a Dutch woman
vehemently defend the Festive Christmas Blackface by repeating "it’s different in Europe” with increasing desperation until she was crying. Literally all anybody else present did was just like, calmly say they were uncomfortable with the practice and not change her mind when she wailed about it.
monkey-mulch:
you bring up rudolph the red nosed reindeer and they bring out Skimbo the filthy redskin and im barely even joking about that they actually had this thing called indian plays in both soviet countries and germany
themainspoon:
European children waiting patiently on Hatemas Eve for Racism Claus to slur down the chimney and segregate all of their presents by colour.
Dutch guy here. Our racist saint Nicolas “Sinterklaas” with blackface “zwarte Piet” isn’t Christmas celebration. He arrives in November and celebrates his birthday on the 5th of December by giving gifts to children.
All aspects from American Christmas celebration were stolen from European traditions. The story from Scandinavia, the character from Germany, the name from the Netherlands. But the Dutch tradition isn’t Christmas. It’s racist though, not arguing that. I’m fighting it though, because fuck racism. Also the racist part is only recent, back in the old days “zwarte Piet” was a white guy with black soot all over him from climbing through the chimney. Later it became a caricature black person which is so fucked up.
Sadly there’s a lot of systematic racism deeply nestled in European cultures and traditions. Slowly we are working to getting rid of them, although there are also many fighting to keep them. But luckily we’re making progress.
But if we’re pointing fingers here, at least we’re not celebrating genocide every year by slaughtering insane amounts of turkeys with Thanksgiving 👀
They weren’t stolen, they’re descended from. Because white Americans aren’t native to the Americas and brought their traditions with them.
It was kind of a big thing, history wise?
Because the states were new and full of mixed cultures, they desperately created national holidays to create a more general national feeling among the wide variety of people. Many were hand picked, to create a national culture as the states had none. It’s all to create unity and identity.
You mean people in America or the church in Europe? Or is that the joke
Nvm, I can’t read
You’re not exactly making progress if the progress is slowly removing a few traditions from being practiced in the open, while losing voters who go to the right wing parties.
That’s what I’m seeing, also here in Norway.
You’re temporarily gaining ground, but with no long term plan. You’re sacrificing women’s rights and gay rights in a suicide run for inoffensive perfection.
The general public is much more open towards LGBTQ+, equality is improving, there are just some extremists fighting to keep racism intact but the general politically right voters are not as much racist and against equality, but more upset about the previous government we had and about the vast amount of refugees which is a giant mess because the previous government basically did nothing to provide sufficient preperstions for it. There is still a lot of progress, even though the government is right wing at the moment. I don’t understand why you say we sacrifice women’s rights and gay rights. That may be so in the US, not over here.
“there are just some extremists”
We lost the biggest fucking election. The US is a democracy, and whether it acts like it or not it’s still true that a majority voted for discrimination, prosecution, and the most convincing antichrist we could’ve gotten. They’ve absolutely lost women’s and gay rights.
You’re deluded if you still can’t accept that you’re not dealing with a minority of extremists. The majority is far less tolerant and accepting than you understand, who takes facades at face value.
You’d start to get back to reality if you just accept the simple fact that you’ve lost people. A LOT of people.
Your political messaging has been completely naive and incompetent.
You may have missed in my previous posts that I’m from the Netherlands. I’m not talking about the US but about my own country, and other European countries. The US is completely fucked up, no doubt about it.
Europe is moving right, the fascists are the biggest party in Norway right now, expected to win next election. Idk about Netherlands but I know AfD and whatever the French and Italian ones were are also growing.
The Nazis are going to get their ethnostates, they’re going to get to dictate your life if you’re an undesirable, or just not good enough.
When that happens, any chance that creative pronouns will be respected is conpletely gone.
Yeah, the rise of the right worries me a lot. I hope things will balance out, usually this happens but sometimes it does not and we have a world war or revolution or something like that. But for what I’ve seen, there are some nazis coming out openly as the right gets more support, but that support mainly consists of people who do not agree with the nazis but because they just want change. Those voters hopefully will abandon the right as soon as they find out what they actually voted for, and I’m hoping that won’t be too late.
I know in other countries it’s different, like in far right Poland there’s a lot of hate towards LGBTQ+. I can only say that sentiment is very small here in the Netherlands, luckily.
There always will be haters. I just hope these haters only got a stage for other reasons than their hate for equality.
The state of the right in Dutch politics is almost completely irrelevant on the world stage.
Their higher tolerance for queers is about as reassuring as “Czech Nazi sympathizers didn’t have an issue with Jews, it was the Germans who went in and persecuted the Czech Jews” would’ve been. It doesn’t even matter if anything close to that was the case, it would have made no difference to the broader war and atrocities.
Are you saying Norway is planning to invade the Netherlands? Look, I’m not happy with what’s happening in the world. It’s going downhill really fast. But we’re not on the level as we were during the 30s and 40s so comparing it to invaded Czechoslovakia is wrong. Although there are nazis comfortable enough to come out in public, it doesn’t mean the right is the same as it was almost a decade ago. They are idiots destroying society without understanding the damage they do, but it’s different on so many levels then nazi Germany.
The Netherlands has a lot of influence on the world stage. Politically and economically. The secretary General of the NATO is our previous prime minister (also an idiot) and this tiny country is one of the biggest export countries of agricultural products, as well as one of the biggest trade hubs in the world. I’m definitely not proud of the way this country does business, but it sure has a lot of influence.
Dutch girl here,
The celebration of “Sinterklaas” leaving started with people from Zeeland celebrating that their children weren’t kidnapped by the slaves(most black, also some white) of a white dude who came by ship to bring mandarins.
I don’t know where your heard that story, but it’s completely false. See This Wikipedia page with a detailed history story. This Wikipedia story is confirmed by many other sources. I haven’t found any credible source supporting your claim.