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Sturgeon's House

Swords And Their Historical Context


Sturgeon

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24 minutes ago, Sturgeon said:

 

It is in fact so bizarre a thing to tout that professional idiots like Lindybeige have made their careers on refuting it.

 

From what I understand, worship of the Oriental martial arts in general comes from the fact that they were the only ones to bother preserving their pre-gunpowder fighting methods, while the Europeans (who had their own - and often superior - martial arts) moved on to making war the proper way, with guns. The reason the Oriental techniques got so venerated wasn't because the Euros were shit at fighting, it was because they were shit at archaeology (at the time). They just didn't know very much about their own obsolete fighting arts from centuries prior, and this allowed the undoubtedly unique and beautiful and nigh-on useless Eastern ways to capture their fascination.

That's an interesting idea. 

 

I have a sneaking suspicion that part of orientalism is that the East was always where exotic (often luxury and/or high-quality) goods and ideas came from for Europeans. Then, when Europe started industrialising, this long-held understanding of the orient as that place where all the cool stuff comes from got transferred from material things (silk, spices, porcelain) to metaphysical things (spiritualism, mystical arts etc).

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On 5/23/2019 at 4:22 AM, Sturgeon said:

 

It is in fact so bizarre a thing to tout that professional idiots like Lindybeige have made their careers on refuting it.

 

From what I understand, worship of the Oriental martial arts in general comes from the fact that they were the only ones to bother preserving their pre-gunpowder fighting methods, while the Europeans (who had their own - and often superior - martial arts) moved on to making war the proper way, with guns. The reason the Oriental techniques got so venerated wasn't because the Euros were shit at fighting, it was because they were shit at archaeology (at the time). They just didn't know very much about their own obsolete fighting arts from centuries prior, and this allowed the undoubtedly unique and beautiful and nigh-on useless Eastern ways to capture their fascination.

 

This is exactly the case.

 

”Weebs” have been a thing in Western civilization for two centuries at least.

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