Remyth Project: Savage Hordes

[yeloson]

They say we'll come...from the East, from the South, from the lands where we speak strange languages and worship foreign gods. They say we'll conquer, enslave, kill, rape, pillage, that we will destroy their civilization, topple their cultural institutions, destroy their language, burn their children.

I open their history books. I read their invasion. Their genocide, their slavery, their racism, their sexism. I read their priests kidnapping children. I read systemized rape, languages for "half-breeds" and a thousand other words than person, human, father, mother, brother, sister, friend. I read about napalm dropped in wars upon children. I read about our stories co-opted, removed. I read about our heroes changed colors.

In their books they admit this.

Yet, we are the threat, the unwashed hordes who will bring horror upon the land.

Comments

[unusualmusic.livejournal.com]

YES. YES. YES!!!

[buria-q.livejournal.com]

this

[l-the-fangirl.livejournal.com]

Not enough Truth Points in the world...

[profxuanwu.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I find even among the most otherwise erudite academic, "China" is synonymous with either "oppression" or "backwards."

As someone who studied the History of Chinese Science and Technology (along with a more practical major in the sciences), I know well how this bias presents itself in the formal literature. Joseph Needham was one of the few to get it right, but there's literally an entire academic culture out there dedicated solely to saying, "China didn't achieve anything special." And they do it because they want the cultural narrative to be that the west is "civilized" and the east is not.

[yeloson.livejournal.com]

I wasn't speaking about China specifically. This has been applied to many POC groups, throughout history. It's applied to many POC currently, and for my experience, both within and outside of the US.

[sanguinity]

I read this when you first published it, and very much agreed with it then.

Then today I learned the etymology for horde. Apparently it's from the Turkish for "royal encampment," and "the Mongol horde" meant the Mongol khanate. The government. Which, in my mind, means that the word, at least as it is used in English, is racist all the way down.

I must say, the double-meaning of "government of empire" and "evil swarming mass of people who will overrun and destroy you all" makes your usage of it here all the more effective.