DSMatticus wrote:
This is not even remotely true. It's just one of those stupid things people say because... well, actually, I don't know why.
Because it happens to be true.
DSMatticus wrote:Roman provinces had basically fuck all in common beyond being required to pay their taxes and give lip service to some very basic aspects of Roman culture.
Dead wrong. To get anywhere in Imperial Rome, starting with getting a basic citizenship (until well into the time of decline, when it was granted to everyone to tax everyone equally) you had to be a good little Roman, to dress like a Roman, to speak Latin like a Roman, to change your name so it sounds like that of a Roman, and if you wanted a career you had to demonstrate passable knowledge of Greek-Roman literary classics and fashion and participate in staple Roman entertainment and shit. And of course you had to sacrifice to Roman gods. And for that matter the Roman nation itself by the end of I century BC was the result of absorbing various Italian communities that still were separate entities at the start of that century.
Powerless dirt farmers outside of the cities might have had little in common in different provinces but nobody fucking cared, the Roman culture was a city culture.
DSMatticus wrote:China has been trading with Britain for a very long fucking time and is still no closer to telling their govna to have a bloody g'day pip pip cheerio.
China is to a very large extent assimilated into the mainstream Western culture, politically, materially, and, well, culturally, given that American entertainment seems to be very popular there. For fuck's sake, the struggle that defined the Chinese society for half of 20th century was between the followers of two Western governmental and social models, indigenous Chinese ideas weren't even in the running.
If you want to look what a border between two truly, radically (not just in the sense of liking different foods, while operating on fundamentally the same assumptions about morality, role of reason, proper behavior and everything) different cultures look like, you may direct your attention towards frontlines against ISIS.
More importantly, China itself is a product of a long process of assimilation, marked with bouts of grand-scale extermination here and there. Han Chinese stand on the graves of hundreds of lesser tribes; China exists in its current borders due to successfully assimiliating its Manchu conquerors (who in turn were assimilating other Tungusic people at the height of their power) so that while they still exist as an ethnic minority, their culture was effectively replaced with Chinese mainstream; and Han are an overwhelming majority because the most troublesome minorities were subjected to brutal suppression up to and including outright genocide in XIX century.
DSMatticus wrote:The fact is that there is and always has been a fuckton of interaction between stably heterogeneous peoples, and things like assimilation, expulsion, and extermination are almost never the goal
That's an illusion stemming from living in a world where an uncommon amount of peace and order is imposed by a dominant power with the idea that just taking what you want is not how things should be done between nations. And in all likelyhood in a particularly nice part of this world. Yet ethnic assimilation and expulsion are a present-day fucking reality in several corners of the world, and the last full-blown deliberate and organized extermination attempt happened only 22 years ago (not counting various smaller tribal massacres or "convert or die" campaigns).
These "stably heterogenous people" you speak about are, by and large, results of great and often deliberate assimilation processes, that did not go without bloody struggles. As you mentioned English - ancestors of the English people were the result of two waves of conquerors, both of whose completely extirpated the old elite and imposed new laws and customs, and the first wave also imposed their language, while the second failed and was itself assimiliated instead. Ancestors of the French as late as high middle ages formed two distinct ethnic groups with separate languages (never mind fuck tons of local dialects in each), until the southern group was absorbed, in no small part due to defeats in wars. And so on.
DSMatticus wrote:I mean, fuck - there is a startlingly large amount of cultural difference between predominantly black and predominantly white communities given the level of economic and political interaction between them. The idea that the failure of a group to assimilate turns them into a "shoot on sight" villain is absurd.
I'm not going to be baited into a present-day politics debate. How about you try to provide an argument on how Imperial Rome wasn't really assimilating the conquered people, instead?
