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| Graphic courtesy of Europa Invicta |
My ancestry is pretty simple: my father’s family is Polish, my mother’s family is Irish. While that makes me 50/50, I have always embraced the Polish side more than the Irish, which makes sense as a man to see more fellowship with my father’s people. Not to mention that I look more like a polack than an Irishman.
The relationship I have had with my Polish ancestry has been mixed. As a kid I grew up hearing lots of polack jokes like “How many polacks does it take to screw in a light bulb? Four, one to hold the light bulb and three to turn the chair.”. It was only as I got older that I started to appreciate that part of my heritage. Along with that has come an appreciation for the broader Slavic culture.
As a nation of people that was settled and dominated by Western Europeans for centuries it is understandable that we don’t learn as much about Eastern Europe in school. While the great powers of the West: England, Germany, France, dominated the history of Europe, Russia was the main force in the East and for people of my generation it is difficult to separate Russia from the now dead Soviet Union.
The Slavic people in general have been considered the backwards cousins of their Western European counterparts. Polack jokes used to be quite common and the Russians are often, perhaps not without reason, thought of as a frequently drunk peasant people.
As we pass through the 2020s and beyond, I think that the Slavs might have the last laugh over their Western cousins.
Virtually every Western nation is seeing the same scenario playing out. The heritage White population has stopped having children and the elites have been pushing mass migration from the third-world. This is inexorably shifting the Western populations away from the people who built London, Paris and New York City and toward the people responsible for Lagos and Mogadishu.
On the other hand, most of the Slavic nations have thus far resisted mass immigration and remain overwhelmingly populated by heritage White Europeans. The big downside is that they are also not reproducing at replacement rates but at least they aren’t replacing their European people with south Asians, Middle Easterners and Africans.
The Slavs have other advantages that give them a potential edge in the days to come.
– There are lots of them.
There are somewhere around 350 million people of Slavic heritage in the world. The largest numbers are in Russia, around 130 million Slavs, Poland with 60 million and the Ukraine with somewhere betwen 40-50 million Slavs. Hundreds of millions of Slavs is a big number. Not compared to some areas but still a lot.
– Slavs can fight.
Maybe not well but doggedly. In 1943, after five months of brutal fighting with around 2 million causalities, the Soviet forces finally turned back the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad. On paper a poorly equipped army of conscripts fighting for a Soviet regime should have been no match for the best trained and equipped army in the world but somehow they managed to turn the tide and drive the Germans back all the way to Berlin. You can argue about things like Western supply aid and the Germans fighting a multi-front war but in the end the Soviets defeated the Germans in the East and made possible the allied victories in the West. Most Slavs have been engaged in some kind of war since forever and in general are far less soft than their Western cousins.
– Slavic nations are resource rich
Russia alone is by far the largest nation on earth in terms of landmass, some 6.6 million square miles. Canada is a distant second at 3.8 million square miles. China is only about half as large as Russia and the U.S. is about the same, both around 3.7 million square miles. The country has lots of oil and minerals and enormous agricultural capacity. Who knows how many millions of acres of forest and most importantly, a huge reserve of fresh water (13% of the total landmass). That will matter a lot in the future.
– Slavic nations are not as woke as their Western brethren
Not to say there isn’t some wokeness going on but compared the West? Not even in the same conversation. I attribute that to Eastern Europe and Russia still climbing out of the mire of communism. When you and your parents and grandparents spent much of your life living in a commie shithole, the prospects of going back to that are not appealing at all.
– Slavs are pretty smart
We get a bad rap but a lot of the smartest people in the world are from Slavic nations. While the U.S. dominates the list of Nobel laureates, followed by other Western nations, Russia still boasts of 31 winners. Poland has 18. The closest African nation is South Africa with 11 and all of them are White South Africans except for three bullshit Peace Prize winners.
There are lots of smart scientists, poets, authors, artists and composers in Slavic nations and freed from Communist rule they can start to really innovate and explore.
So I think the Slavic nations are well poised for ascending to a leading role in the world as the West fades, provided they can keep from being overrun by migrants and start having babies of their own.
Maybe the Polacks will have the last laugh in the end.
I'm what you would call an ancestor of a European gang bang. German/Slavic on my Father's side and French/English/Welsh on my Mother's side with perhaps an inkling of Native American blood.
Interesting tidbit, according to my ancestry on my Mother's side, Lady Godiva was in our family tree. And my wife, French/English is/was related to Princess Diane from a split a few generations back.
My wife is like that, a cornucopia of different European ancestry. Mine is a lot simpler.
@ Arthur Sido
The nations of Eastern Europe are bellwethers for traditional greater European civilization is the fact that nations like those of the Visegrad Four (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary) have been under the boot of the Nazis, the communists and the Muslims – all three of them – at one point or another in their history. They know or have historical memory of these forms of tyranny and know well the costs of surrendering those things which define them (and us) as a civilization.
"The nations of Eastern Europe are bellwethers for traditional greater European civilization is the fact that nations"
Should read: ""One important reason that the nations of Eastern Europe are bellwethers for traditional greater European civilization is the fact that nations…"
Apologies for the error… that'll teach me not to proof-read!
This is what you have to expect from the birthplace of the original & perhaps greatest freedom fighter of all time, the Cossack. The word actually comes from the Turkic word qazaq, which means free man. The only thing worth fighting for in a world on the verge of collapse.
Great point, and you can't underestimate the power of memory as you can clearly see what happens when you forget all across the westt.
Yes to that, we need a reawakening of where we came from.
Yup. World War II was won in the East. Western Europe was a sideshow.
I see it as a chicken and egg sort of question. Would the Soviets have prevailed without the material aid from the U.S. and the Germans fighting in North Africa? If the Germans had knocked out the Soviets and all of those hardened battalions were waiting for the landing craft at D-Day, the outcome would have been very different. Hitler waged a two front war and that killed the Reich.