Thursday, May 28, 2020

Why some nations and cultures venerate Ancient and Medieval kings

Eastern Europeans like to dignify long past kings as their greatest countrymen. I can tell you why. It's because the countries of Eastern Europe were dominated by one major power or another from the East or the West throughout the modern era. And I'm defining modern from the French Revolution and 1789 onwards.

Whether it was Napoleon's France rushing in from the west, or the Germans too many times to count or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the former Eastern Bloc countries were dominated for an insane quantity of time by people who didn't speak their own language. Heck Poland didn't exist for much of the 19th century and Ukraine hadn't been independent since the Middle Ages (unless you count a short while during the Russian Revolution).

As the Communist dominated countries during the Warsaw Pact, they did not feel particularly free, having been won from their previous domination by Nazi Germany. So after 1989 when the Warsaw Pact ended and after 1991 when the USSR dissolved, was when any country east of Germany that was not Russia finally had an independent state and character.

You also see this among Hindu nationalists in India, where the people who like Modie revere and talk up Hindu kings from the Middle Ages and Ancient eras. They feel that India was dominated for a thousand years by who they define as foreigners, recently for a few centuries up till 1947 by the British and previously before that by Muslim kings or emperors.

Hence large groups of people who feel that the era of "modernity" (1789-?) has done them and their culture wrong resort to idolising ancient kings or princes.

 Thank you for reading my essay on the veneration of ancient and medieval potentates.

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