“The West”, “Western Civilization” and “Western” are all loosely defined terms our political enemies use to justify the (horrific) status quo and/or call for even more regressive political policies- to quote this article from Vox:

“Western civilization” has, for the alt-right, become culturally acceptable code for “white culture.” So celebration of Western civilization is really a way to celebrate the cultural achievements of white men. They see ancient Greece and Rome as a starting point for this imagined idea of Western civilization, and later it evolves to include Christianity in the medieval period.

It gives them a unified cultural narrative to draw on.

(The only amendment I’d make is that this term, “Western Civilization”, has a longer history as a dog-whistle for white supremacy than just its use by the alt-right as the article suggests, and that the alt-right has since been mainstreamed and reabsorbed into the right wing proper in the anglosphere since the time that this article was published.)

Since almost everyone on this forum is some form of Leftist opposed to the unjust hierarchy’s imposed upon us by Capitalism, Imperialism, White Supremacy and Patriarchy, naturally we would be suspicious of anyone who would seek to adopt these terms, since we oppose those very things and would like to see them torn down. I think maybe there’s been a miscommunication?

Hegemony/ imperial hegemony refers to ideas elaborated upon by Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in which he describes the mechanisms for how capitalism supports colonialism as a means of extracting labour/wealth from the global south.

Cultural hegemony is a further elaboration of those ideas by Antonio Gramsci, focusing on ways that the ruling class impose their values upon their subjects through culture. White supremacists invoking “Western Civilization” as a sort of mythology is an example of that.

Imperial core is a term from World Systems Analysis by Wallerstein, which is a further development of Lenin’s work in Imperialism (ok, this is a gross oversimplification but I don’t want to spend too much time on that) in analyzing the mechanism’s of how capitalists in the global north extract wealth from the global south today.

You’ll of course note that Latin America is marked in the the “semi-periphery”. The map measures flows of capital, based on trade, which is empirical data. Yet all the countries marked orange on the map (barring Japan, and even then) are the ones that our political opponents would say are the heirs to “Western Civilization”. This is deliberate.

When our political opponent’s invoke “Western Civilization”, they’re almost always doing so as a defense for the current hegemon, the United States, to maintain it’s current imperial status in order to justify the continuing plunder of the global south and the accumulation of capital in the global north. This project is intrinsically linked to white supremacy as a justification for the continuing plunder, for reasons too numerous to get into here.

When we (Leftists) point out that our political opponents won’t consider Latin America as part of “Western Civilization”, we’re not trying to downplay the historical role Latin America played and will continue to play, or it’s many struggles- we’re just pointing out that those whose hands are on the levers of power are the one’s who get the decide who is or isn’t in the club, and it just so happens that those hands are overwhelmingly white. Don’t shoot the messenger.

OP sees descriptions of racism as racism in and of itself by the person describing it. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of our point and your entire argument is flawed because you are arguing against nobody. You are shooting the messenger who is telling you how racist the “west” is.

You don’t seem interested in the actual political economy of the western world at all lol. I guess that makes sense considering you’re critiquing a rage comic.

You spent days writing and still haven’t mustered a reply to me

supafuzz taking even further saying

I’d also argue Japan is more “western” than, say, Colombia in most cultural ways too. Full internalization of Western art, music, and most importantly political and governance structures, which are sort of a superficial veneer in most of Latam.

this comes from an old trope that japan is honourary aryan and that the japanese are special enough to be allowed in an anglo-japanese alliance.

Hold on, this comment is easily readable as pointing out how thoroughly Japan was made a vassal state of the US after its unconditional surrender in WWII. It bears the direct and recent marks of an unambiguously “Western” culture. Constitution literally written by Americans during the occupation, music and animation hugely informed by Americans, etc. Tremendous cultural influence (and destruction of what was there before). The same is true for former West Germany; if they weren’t “western” before they certainly are now. Such a theory might tell us that Columbia kicked out the Spanish 200 years ago and has had more time to go in their own cultural direction, or that the Spanish cultural hegemony was less complete, or whatever. The racist trope of Japanese people having a special predilection to “Western culture” is an explanatory myth created for racist Americans to make ideological sense of the real historical fact of the sudden postwar anglo-japanese alliance; recognizing the very real fact of the occupation and subsequent trade relationship doesn’t imply acceptance of the myth.

The text you’ve reproduced here does not support your assertion that it reflects a belief that Japanese people are intrinsically racially special. I was not involved in these old threads, but it sure looks like you’re assuming bad faith from people, quoting them out of context, and not linking the source so we can’t investigate.

which are sort of a superficial veneer in most of Latam.

This part sounds bad to me but maybe it was supported by a non-chauvinist argument. What was the reason you didn’t link the source comments or tag the users?

I don’t understand your motivation in writing this massive tl;dr post. Regardless of what you think of the West, the West is in terminal decline, and as it spins down the toilet and is relegated to the dustbin of history where it rightfully belongs, it will drag its various vassal states and other unwilling victims along with it. Why latch yourself to the sinking ship that is the West?

I’m very intrigued by this drama but also not bored enough to read this giant post and all these comment walls

TL;DR anybody?

i think the hegemonic western powers are anglo-saxon nordicist themselves and a lot of what folks were doing is describing what the hegemonic in-group is (not what the kool kids klub claims, because, ukraine lol) rather than endorsing the underlying racist jingoist etc framework.

it’s fine to want these terms to be only geographic, and in an equal world we wouldn’t have a reason to make a different distinction, but that shift of language probably requires the west being destroyed.

So, I’ve softened my position since this all happened. For a few reasons, Apolonio’s thread helped me see better (and i think its unfortunate they deleted, even though i dont think they were really bullied). Also, a private conversation with a comrade with a non-gusano Cuban partner who said that even Cubans see themselves as western and that our rhetoric here might indeed be called racist in latine circles. Also that they took reputable classes where latam was called part of the west. Though they also found this article which they said that, best they could translate it, describes latam socialist making an effort to cease latam people calling themselves part of the west, though this ALSO confirms that people in latam do refer to themselves that way. Finally i tested the whole “white americans dont see Hondorus as the west” hypothesis with a fairly normal white guy, and he said if is. Anecdotal, but still.

That said… yeah i still have to echo the “dont shoot the messanger” sentiments others have said. People here describing describing things that seem like nordicism doesnt mean they are nordicist white supremacists themselves. If means they are describing the views of those who do hold those opinions. And those opinions arent fringe, their central to the white supremacist ideology. Their central to the way “western culture” is vewied by people who use that term in white dominanf countries. And theyre central to the neoliberal order.

I still think you saying “why are you obsessed with race?” to people in the old thread was widly inappropriate. Its reality that white supremacists use that kind of rhetoric when lefitsts try to describe racism. And that did seem to be what was going on. It was racism-jacketing anti-racists describing racism.

Also, since you brought it up however breifly.

This past week a post was made by autismdragon criticizing a Spanish meme calling out those who hypocritically denounce reformism and social democracy/democratic socialism in the United States or Europe but are ardent supporters of Latin American reformism and social democracy. within this post I and several Latin American comrades criticized this position from my our perspectives as abandoning revolution and being conciliatory to capitalists and capitalism in our countries.

Yeah, you made a few critical errors in that thread.

1. “Social democracy in the imperial core is fundementally different from social democracy in the global south because the former relies on imperialism and the later does not” is not an abandonment of revolution. Its a statement of fact.
2. You just assumed western hexbears were against communists in latam doing revolutions in latam social democracies. Which none of us are, certainly not in Hondorus. The most someone might say is that the Venezualan communist party are ultras who oppose Maduro for bad reasons that will help the imperial order, and i dont even think i agree with that. And thats one country, and just because a party calls themselves communist does not mean they are good. There might also be opposition here to a revolution against Evo, but Evo is again a very special case. None of it applies to your situation in Hondorus.
3. You failed to understand the revolutionairy defeatist position of leftists living in the imperial core.

There were other problems, but i want to focus on these. That meme i posted was made by a leftcom to support leftcom ideology. And leftcoms are not antimperialist.

The idea that Latin america is not Western is or could not pass as white weird to me.

I also disagree with the idea that Spain or Italy is not white they whould be considerd so in litteraly any part of the world like you all know that most white people dont have blonde hair and blue eyes right?

Some Crotian tourist going to Zambia whould be indistinguable from brit.

“Some racist white people from group A dont Consider White people from B to be white”

Thats not something unique to white people to? like no one whould care if some japanese facist said that chinese people arent true asians we moatly look at people out (insert racial category) Expect for white people for some reason

When did excluding people from whiteness become progressive? It was the opposite back then

Spain Portgual and Italy should not hsve their past whitewashed and think its disrepectful to any person who were killed by their colonial empires.

It’s useful to prioritize how terms are used de facto and in context, where their boundaries lie in context, how people react, etc. You’re of course doing this, but I think we can learn almost everything we need to know about what “Western” means by looking at the incorporation of Greece into the “Western” canon, whereas they had been considered solidly of The Orient for ages by the people throwing these terms around (mostly the British and French and Dutch).

It’s fairly clear that incorporating Greece was part of bringing ancient Greece into the mythology of the self-labeled superior cultures of the industrialized colonial powers, them telling themselves as well as those they colonized why they deserved to invade and pillage and destroy and oppress. One of these justifications emerged as “Western” values traced back to a fetishization of ancient Greece, including its forms of democracy.

But the story doesn’t end there, as the same people helping construct these myths quickly ran into a contradiction in something else created to justify colonialism: their own racism. Greeks were “swarthy” and melanic on the kkkracker scale of the time, so they only wanted to get ancient Greece on their origin story and divorce it from modern Greece, who they still wanted to fuck over and condescend to. This lead to decades and decades of discourse over the entirely evidenceless claim that ancient Greeks were actually Nordic, blonde-haired and blue-eyed and light-skinned, thus resolving the perceived contradiction between Greeks having accomplished anything to be venerated, thus demonstrating the superiority of “the West” and its values, despite not being white (per the race rules of the time).

The idea of tracing “Western values” to the Greeks is still hegemonic, kids learn it in school all around the world. The idea that they were Nordic faded away, particularly as Greeks were directly incorporated into British and American whiteness.

What we see today is the legacy of creating a mythology of what it is to be “Western”, necessarily a dichotomy framed against “the Orient”, built on the racism built from colonists requiring psychological justification for their oppressions.

LatAm, which is not monolithic, exists as continents colonized by European powers, though mostly before the canonization of what it means to be “Western”. These are ideas spread largely by the British and French in the 1800s and early 1900s, and then Americans in the middle of the 20th century, as they all established forms of cultural hegemony. They retroactively applied “Westernness” to all Western European colonists, including, begrudgingly, to the Spanish (who they also considered swarthy), and thus to the various LatAm demographics that could assign that label to themselves. LatAm does not have a single unified set of rules on race, so this was incorporated in different ways, but today we are all familiar with the reactionary nature of so many white-adjascent groups in LatAm and their bigotry towards the indigenous populations. This is the result of centuries of colonization and the merging with the thinking of the British/American/French canonization of their own special “burden” to invade and rule.

Spend a lot of time with indigenous people in your country and you’ll find a visceral self-recognition of the national dichotomy of Western vs. indigenous.

Hey I think you’re selling my comment a bit short here. My comment had very little to do with race. The reason I said Spain was not part of the west was because I placed the development of modern liberal capitalism in the locus of Britain and France, which is how I defined “the west.” Spain is peripheral to this development and so is not truly “the west,” or at least not central to that definition. That was my main point which I thought was at the least an interesting take.

The point about race was to agree with what other people had said, that non-Protestants and Southern Europeans often occupy a position on the margins of whiteness, more sharp historically but it still exists - at least this is how it’s been in the US - and to point out that there is a racial component to “the west” in that the US would like to portray themselves as having cultural continuity with Protestant European traditions, the foothold of Mother Europe in America, and distance themselves from the imperial colonies in the rest of America. Of course leftists are also using the term so I agree with you that maybe we should replace it with “imperial core” or something which most people agree it’s a synonym for. However my take still stands, imperial core is not really referring to Spain either, but again this locus of France and Britain (or maybe the Western Germany-France-Britain triangle as I said), and the (esp Northeast) US.

Its weird how the userbase can mock how concepts like whiteness and the west have been historically arbitrary and have no consistent logic but the minute a latino user pointed that out sudenly they are irrefutable truths that cant be challenged

In your “Why it Matters” section, you say that there’s an “orientalization” of Latin Americans. I think I get what you’re saying with it and I think you’re right.

I think what you’re missing with is this: on a far-left site like this, whiteness is typically associated with shame for the failure to stop - or try to stop - the crimes of “Western” countries against non-western countries. This is a majority American site, and many of the crimes of the United States were and are committed against Latin American countries. When the users on this site exclude Latin America from “The West” or from whiteness, it’s because they’re thinking more with their own national shame (maybe there’s a better way to phrase it) in mind, rather than the history of Latin America, in which countries have their own patterns of exploitation and marginalization of native communities. In other words, because they see Latin American countries as exploited victims of racism, they see them as sinless non-Western countries.

Within an American context, the shame for the treatment of Latin Americans (and, historically, Southern Europeans) is justified. It’s just that when asked to start looking at things in a Latin American context, it can be difficult to change that point of view.

Sorry if this comes across as rambling, I’m an American with a weird relationship with my latin ancestry that very few in my family have come to terms with in a positive way, and also I’m pretty drunk

This aligns with Spengler’s view of Western Civilization not being defined in racial terms, he was actually ardently opposed to the racists of his time and believed a “race” was a population united in outlook not ethnicity or dna and believed that mesoamerican culture was overthrown and replaced with western culture to join western civilization.

This is also irrelevant and even poisonous

if half the population just wants to assimilate you under their “cultural model” which puts their own people at the top, and the other half of the population wants to actually genocide you, guess what the end result will be? yes, genocide.

Also Spengler literally justifies my position:

Spengler’s idea of race had nothing to do with ethnic identity, and indeed he was hostile to racists in that sense. The book talks about a population becoming a race when it is united in outlook, regardless of ethnic origins.

In other words, Spengler’s idea of race isn’t actual race. It’s nation and material interests. Therefore, Latin America is not Western. Latin America is…wait for it…Latin American.

I think India is an interesting example here. As poor and genetically diverse as India is, the bourgeois there do not really carry out ethnic-related terrorism crimes against other Indian ethnicities (religious terrorism though, totally different ballgame). But there’s basically no such thing as a wealthy Punjabi guy just fucking off one day and deciding to kill a bunch of Tamil people for no reason. Not so in America, where this happens literally all the time irrespective of religion

and if India can hold it together I don’t see any reason Latin America can’t? I don’t think the trivial minutiae of “having a virgin mary statue in your cabinet” is really going to trump your collective material interests is it?

In my opinion it should not be acceptable to base arguments on race theory here on hexbear, it’s an outdated concept that has been disproven many times. I’m a bit disappointed to see so many people defending their usage of it in this thread. Great post though.