Have European/Near Eastern people ever faced oppression, persecution or genocide in history?

[Caravels of Portugal]

Disclaimer: This is a highly contentious and subjective question involving race, ethnicity and other related topics. Do not post current politics, flamebait or generally offensive content, otherwise the moderators will lock the thread. Keep the discussion civil as possible. This thread is for educational and writing purposes only.

Reading world histories, I've read about events and stories involving non-white people being oppressed by white people. Periods like the Atlantic Slave Trade, colonization of the Americas, the nadir of American race relations and other events in history are examples. Most examples involve oppression, enslavement, persecution, genocide and prejudice by white people acting as the oppressors.

What about the white people? The main purpose of the thread is to find and collect examples of white people facing oppression, persecution, enslavement, genocide and prejudice in history. To prevent debates about the definition of 'whiteness', the main definition of white means anybody from Europe and the Near East or with ancestry originating from Europe and the Near East.

What events that is an example of white people facing oppression, persecution, enslavement, genocide or prejudice in history?

 

[Rridgway]

Look up Irish history with respect to England.

 

[Madhukar_Shah]

Ottoman treatment of Balkan Christians, although it wasn’t racially motivated and there was a simple way out for those open to it- conversion.

 

[Kerney]

Julius Ceaser bragged about killing 1 in 3 Gauls, who were at the time, barbarian savages, at least according to most Roman definitions.

Or you could start with the often violent Christianization which, in places like Prussia crossed the line into genocide.

Cromwell wanted to wipe put the Irish but decided it was too expensive and the 1848 famine was so bad that slaves and Indians were sending charity to the poor starving Irish (If I ever write a CSA victory scenario, I'd make Patrick Cleburne the ambassador to the court of St. James to silently say, "how can you object to slavery when you leave your people to starve") .

 

[GauchoBadger]

Define "white people". Racial definitions vary from country to country -- the minority Caucasian peoples (Chechens, Nakhs, Ossetians, Circassians, etc.), iirc, are not considered "white" by the Russians who have nominal control over them in Moscow.
If we have, in the traditional sense, then it is safe to say they have indeed been opressed historically -- by other white people.

 

[Ameck16]

Holocaust and every non Aryan person under Nazi occupation, Poles between the first partition to their independence, Ottoman slave trade, as stated earlier the Irish under English rule (unfun fact Ireland had more people in 1848 than today), Finns under Swedish rule the list can go on and on.

White have been persecuted, oppressed and genocided. The only difference between them and their oppressors it that they both had the same skin colour. What people have to realise is that outside of the Americas most white people don't consider themselves white, but French, German, Russian etc.

 

[twovultures]

To prevent debates about the definition of 'whiteness', the main definition of white means anybody from Europe and the Near East or with ancestry originating from Europe and the Near East.

Oh hey, this definition includes Jewish people. Fancy that.

As for whites facing enslavement, they most certainly did and for a large chunk of history through the Medieval and Early Modern eras faced slave raids from North African slavers. While these slavers may fall under white with your chosen definition, so were their victims in the Mediterranean and Atlantic.

In more recent history, Zimbabwe comes to mind where white farmers had land seized by the government and faced violence for resisting, though the recent regime change seems to have ended that and is even working on offering (limited) restitution to the farmers whose land was seized.

 

[Skallagrim]

Europeans have been treating other Europeans horribly for thousands of years. Consider the Romans going to town on Gaul, or Charlemagne fighting a highly destructive campaign against the Saxons. Or the Albigensian crusade. Or the Irish being treated ever-so-gently by the English. Or the countless people forcibly "transported" to the colonies (which was quite often a death sentence). In fact... the Holocaust also qualifies, obviously.

Then there's stuff like the Barbary slave trade: raids up to England, truly vast amounts of Europeans carried off into slavery. If the Near East counts: Armenians being exterminated by the Ottomans probably qualifies.

History is an endless parade of horrors. I can just as easily rattle off examples of Afrcans being monstrous to other Africans, for example. The idea that there is a defined, colour-coded group of 'victims' and an similar fixed group of 'oppressors' is a belief exclusively held by imbeciles.

 

[Lalli]

Europeans have treatened each other with terrible way at least since Ancient Greece. Slavery, ethnic cleansings, religious persecutions... And don't forgot Armenian genocide, Holocaust and envents in Balkans during Yugoslavian Civil War. And how Stalin's acts...

Frankly, I don't know what think about person who asks have Whites ever faced slavery, persecutions and genocides.

 

[Albert.Nik]

There has been. For example Roman and Greek Slavery was overwhelmingly white and many times sourced from Indo-European tribes outside the empire. There were Slaves of other origins too.

Then you have the Mongols. Mongols heavily attacked and committed Genocides on Russians,Poles,Iranian peoples in Central Asia,Middle East,Eastern Europe,etc. I think Mongols led by Ghengiz Khan are the trophy holders on this list.

Tocharians. Now,coming to this,we really don't know what happened as doesn't Wikipedia too. It's purely speculative. Tocharians were a White Peoples who lived in the Tarim Basin repeatedly attacked by Chinese,Turkic confederations and East Asian confederations. Today,these are extinct. We don't really know if there was some kind of oppressions and Genocides in the times of the Uyghur khagnate and the invasions prior to that. Today's Uyghurs seem to be having some Tocharian component with many almost looking fully European. I don't know what happened here so there's a disclaimer.

Scythians. Scythians were thought to be persecuted or something but this purely remains on the White Nationalist and Alt Right circles. Scythians in most to all probability joined the other confederations and formed other peoples today. There might have been some to less persecution which is unknown but Genocide is in purely WN propaganda. Some Scythians joined a confederation called Magyars,probably themselves Fully or mostly White,becoming the Hungarians of today,some Scythians adopted Tatar language and traditions and hence becoming the Tatars today,who are White,remaining Scythians probably came into Europe and assimilated and an another remaining portion assimilated by Slavs. Just because Scythian is extinct doesn't mean there was a Genocide. I mentioned this point to clear a misunderstanding.

The Ottomon Empire gets the second/third place in this. The Ottomons can be considered White and Muslim Empire and their Slave trade of Balkan people is on one side but what speaks loudest are the horrendous atrocities and persecutions against Greeks,Armenians,Balkan Christians and some Caucasians(?) is something that doesn't need to be spoken about. Just three days ago,it's been 104 years since that happened.

Arab Slave Trade is also said to have included some Balkan peoples and some Coastal European peoples. Less confirmation on this.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis score the second place after the Mongols. Almost all the victims of the Nazis were White.

Russian treatment in the Caucasus

British treatment of the Irish.

Visigoths in Hispania by the Arabs and some Arab attacks in Western Europe before the defeat at Tours as I saw in the History Channel.

Charlamagnes persecution killing of the Saxon Pagans.

Several times,those who persecuted the "White" people were White people themselves.

 

[Caravels of Portugal]

Frankly, I don't know what think about person who asks have Whites ever faced slavery, persecutions and genocides.

The thread is for educational purposes only. We're listing examples of white-on-white oppression and nonwhite-on-white oppression in history. This may be a controversial statement, but understand history isn't rosy and history must be shown in a frank way. Now, we're discussing about periods or events of history involving white people facing oppresion and all sorts of discrimination in many ways that is not limited to Europe but all over the world in scope.

I have to add my example: the Holodomor.

 

[Jan Olbracht]

Nazi Germany killed tens of millions of white people, that is the most obvious example.
If you exclude whites oppressing other whites-Mongol invasion of Ruthenian duchies, Poland and Hungary and Tatar slave hunting in Eastern Europe.

 

[yoted17]

I’m not going to list specific examples, it seems I’ve been beaten to the punch on that.

But yes.

If you look hard enough at pretty much ANY race or religion or group of people whatsoever at some point in their history that group has been oppressed by another group because of that identifying feature. I couldn’t name a group that hasn’t truth be told.

It’s easy enough to find examples if you look hard enough

 

[Admiral Fischer]

Don't know what's the purpose of this thread, but I know that White colonials in the Dutch Formosa and the French Haiti met a gruesome end.

 

[Kerney]

I do think there is a Frontier effect underlying Western Civilization going back to classical times were those who see themselves as part of the hybrid Christian/Classical tradition have been expanding and assimilating and those in turn go and conquer and assimilate the next people down the line. It's not a perfect but the pattern is there.

In this sense, the Gauls, Britons and Germans facing the Romans are as much "Indians" as the Cherokee or Iroquois facing English and French settlers.

 

[H.Flashman(VC)]

If there's one constant in history, then it is that 'strangers' are not treated as equals. So yes.

 

[walmart]

Define "white people".

Looks like OP is using a rather a expansive and non-traditional definition of white. Only ambiguity I can think of is whether or not Pakistan and Afghanistan count as near eastern.

To prevent debates about the definition of 'whiteness', the main definition of white means anybody from Europe and the Near East or with ancestry originating from Europe and the Near East.

 

[Deleted member 114175]

In this sense, the Gauls, Britons and Germans facing the Romans are as much "Indians" as the Cherokee or Iroquois facing English and French settlers.

Well yeah, because neither group was from India.

 

[Deleted member 109224]

Most oppression in history was one group oppressing its neighbors, with genocide and ethnic cleansing being something of a norm. Europeans and "white" people oppressed one another plenty. The word slave arguably derives from slav, right?

How are you defining white? As Europeans and only europeans? The slave trade from the slavic lands through the Ottoman Empire was comparable in scale to the trans-atlantic slave trade. The Barbary Slave trade was pretty big. I'm of the impression that pretty much everybody from Ireland to the Indus is more or less white, but if you want to use a strict definition of "europeans only" as the whites being oppressed (which is in itself iffy, because what do you do with Georgians, Circassians, Greeks, etc?)



1 to 1.25 million people were enslaved by Tunisia, Algeria, and Tripolitania/Libya alone from ~1500 to ~1750. If you put Morocco and other nations on top of that, it's a bigger number.

If you look at the Tatar-Ottoman slave trade (per wiki)

Estimates of the number of people involved vary: according to Alan W. Fisher the number of people deported from the Slavic lands on both sides of the border during the 14th to 17th centuries was about 3 million. Michael Khodarkhovsky estimates that 150,000 to 200,000 people were abducted from Russia in the first 50 years of the 17th century.

The first major Tatar raid for slaves occurred in 1468 and was directed into south-eastern border of Poland. Crimean Khan Devlet I Giray even managed to burn down Moscow during the 1571 campaign. The last raid into Hungary by the Crimean Tatars took place in 1717. In 1769 a last major Tatar raid, which took place during the Russo-Turkish War, saw the capture of 20,000 slaves.

Wikipedia puts the paper strength of the Janissary corps by year at
1400: <1,000
1484: 7,841
1523: 7,164
1530: 8,407
1547: 12,131
1574: 13,599
1582: 16,905
1592: 23,232
1609: 37,627
1654: 51,047
1666/67: 47,233
1687/88: 62,826
1699: 67,729
1710/11: 43,562

I don't think it's unreasonably to put the number of people from the balkans who were enslaved by the Ottomans in the hundreds of thousands.

 

[Mort the Reaper]

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the Cagots yet.