KimKardashian Wrote:If you look at the haplotype heatmap up top in the image (section A), you can see that Mediterranean (C6) contains not a small part of the slave populations of C4 and C5. The graph in section C is either ineptly or dishonestly put together, leaving the impression as if C4 and C5 slaves simply vanished after Late Antiquity, whereas in actuality they had intermixed into C6, while also the proportion of C6 from the whole population had increased.
It may also be relevant that the study relates only to Rome and its vicinity (Lazio), so while it may have been an immigrant magnet during the imperial years, after its decline it may have been less intermixed than South Italy.
It's inaccurate to say that the C6 population contains admixture from the C4 and C5 populations. A C6 population with higher affinity to Caucasian groups, as the graph shows, is exactly the result one would expect if the pre-Indo-European population of southern Italy were a Minoan-like group with some CHG ancestry. A relatively higher genetic affinity between two groups is not evidence of admixture from one to the other. A Middle Easterner would have a higher genetic affinity to a Bavarian than to a Fennoswede. This doesn't mean that Bavarians have MENA admixture.
There is quite a long discussion about this topic
here. Obviously Jovialis and friends have an agenda, but I find their arguments convincing. The crux of the problem is the paucity of Neolithic and Iron Age samples from southern Italy. As you noted, there is a disproportionate number of samples from Lazio in that study. As far as I'm aware, there are zero samples from Oscan speaking groups in the south like the Samnites and Lucanians. Currently, people are looking at ancient samples from North and Central Italy, and comparing them to southern samples from the Medieval period on. Population replacement is a perfectly good explanation if one takes it on faith that these non-southern samples are representative of the ancient South. It is more likely, in my opinion, that the pre-Italic population of the South was simply a Minoan-like, CHG-enriched population. It's worth noting that the Ancient Greeks believed that the earliest inhabitants of southern Italy were Pelasgians who came from Greece. This would explain why the Mycenean-like C6 population shows up fully formed in the Imperial period (along with one outlier Iron Age sample from Rome), rather than later (as one might expect if it was the product of long-term interbreeding). I'm confident that as samples from Iron Age Italic groups in the South become available, they will show this to be true. In any case, were there large-scale genetic influence it would seem to be Greek rather than MENA.
KimKardashian Wrote:They also mention MENA in South Italy and Sicily, particularly related to the Arab conquests.
I cannot speak to Sicily as well (although I recall seeing a study where they tested Muslim and Christian burials and found that the two generally remained distinct), but I have done a lot of reading regarding Muslims in peninsular Italy, due to a particular surname in my family which actually has a very straightforward Italian origin, but bears a coincidental resemblance to an Arabic word. I would be extremely surprised if there were a Saracen genetic legacy anywhere in the peninsular South, let alone generally dispersed across it. Muslim presence was almost exclusively limited to bands of mercenaries brought in by various duchies and what-have-you for internecine conflicts, whose main interaction with the local population involved raiding and taking slaves. There were a few very short-lived attempts at creating Islamic states on the peninsula, most notably the Emirates of Bari and Taranto. Some towns in the interior such as Tricarico also saw brief periods of Islamic rule which are not well-recorded. Regardless, after the Norman conquest, Muslims across the South were treated like Jews. All the remaining Muslims in Sicily were resettled in a few towns on the peninsula, separate from Christians, before eventually being expelled from Italy altogether.
august Wrote:Unfortunately I'm going to sound like a faggot libtard for saying this but I'm increasingly convinced that the modern-day poverty, crime, and low education of the South is due to political mismanagement or neglect of the region over the last few centuries. IIRC the economy and trade from Sicilian cities like Palermo under Norman rule made it one of the richest regions in all of Europe. There also seems to be other factors in more modern times, unique to the already laggard region's political situation, that exacerbated many of the problems that were already present. For example, from the times of Napoleonic control until after Italian unification, political instability only made brigandage much worse. Brigand Life in Italy by Monnier gives a good history of the political instability during those times. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society by Edward Banfield, as recommended by , is also good from a 'social science' perspective:
The Moral Basis of a Backward Society has been on my list since I saw it mentioned here. I read
Christ Stopped at Eboli years ago but it is much less analytical. I'm willing to believe that the South's current situation is a combination of both factors to an extent, but generally I agree with you.
Here are a couple excerpts from a lesser-known work by Gramsci called
The Southern Question among other things. Take it with a grain of salt, if you will, but I think Gramsci is one of the clearer thinkers as far as communists go.
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Spoiler
Apologies for the formatting
Gramsci Wrote:The South can be defined as a great social disintegration. The peasants,
who make up the great majority of its population, have no cohesion among
themselves (of course, some exceptions must be made: Apulia, Sardinia,
Sicily, where there exist special characteristics within the great canvas of
the South's structure). Southern society is a great agrarian bloc, made up
of three social layers: the great amorphous, disintegrated mass of the
peasantry; the intellectuals of the petty and medium rural bourgeoisie; and
the big landowners and great intellectuals. The Southern peasants are in
perpetual ferment, but as a mass they are incapable of giving a centralized
expression to their aspirations and needs. The middle layer of intellectuals
receives the impulses for its political and ideological activity from the
peasant base. The big landowners in the political field and the great
intellectuals in the ideological field centralize and dominate, in the last
analysis, this whole complex of phenomena. Naturally, it is in the
ideological sphere that the centralization is most effective and precise.
Giustino Fortunato and Benedetto Croce thus represent the keystones of
the Southern system and, in a certain sense, are the two major figures of
Italian reaction.
The Southern intellectuals are one of the most interesting and important
social strata in Italian national life. One only has to think of the fact that
more than three fifths of the State bureaucracy is made up of Southerners
to convince oneself of this. Now, to understand the particular psychology of
the Southern intellectuals, it is necessary to keep in mind certain factual
data.
1. In every country, the layer of intellectuals has been radically modified by
the development of capitalism. The old type of intellectual was the
organizing element in a society with a mainly peasant and artisanal basis.
To organize the State, to organize commerce, the dominant class bred a
particular type of intellectual. Industry has introduced a new type of
intellectual: the technical organizer, the specialist in applied science. In the
societies where the economic forces have developed in a capitalist
direction, to the point where they have absorbed the greater part of
national activity, it is this second type of intellectual which has prevailed,
with all his characteristics of order and intellectual discipline. In the
countries, on the other hand, where agriculture still plays a considerable or
even preponderant role, the old type has remained predominant. It
provides the bulk of the State personnel; and locally too, in the villages and
little country towns, it has the function of intermediary between the peasant
and the administration in general. In Southern Italy this type predominates,
with all its characteristic features. Democratic in its peasant face;
reactionary in the face turned towards the big landowner and the
government: politicking, corrupt and faithless. One could not understand
the traditional cast of the Southern political parties, if one did not take the
characteristics of this social stratum into account.
2. The Southern intellectual mainly comes from a layer which is still
important in the South: the rural bourgeois. In other words, the petty and
medium landowner who is not a peasant, who does not work the land, who
would be ashamed to be a farmer, but who wants to extract from the little
land he has - leased out either for rent or on a simple share-cropping basis
- the wherewithal to live fittingly; the wherewithal to send his sons to a
university or seminary; and the wherewithal to provide dowries for his
daughters, who must marry officers or civil functionaries of the State. From
this social layer, the intellectuals derive a fierce antipathy to the working
peasant - who is regarded as a machine for work to be bled dry, and one
which can be replaced, given the excess working population. They also
acquire an atavistic, instinctive feeling of crazy fear of the peasants with
their destructive violence; hence, they practise a refined hypocrisy and a
highly refined art of deceiving and taming the peasant masses.
3. Since the clergy belong to the social group of intellectuals, it is
necessary to note the features which distinguish the Southern clergy as a
whole from the Northern clergy. The Northern priest is generally the son of
an artisan or a peasant, has democratic sympathies, is more tied to the
mass of peasants. Morally, he is more correct than the Southern priest,
who often lives more or less openly with a woman. He therefore exercises
a spiritual function that is more complete, from a social point of view, in
that he guides a family's entire activities. In the North, the separation of
Church from State and the expropriation of ecclesiastical goods was more
radical than in the South, where the parishes and convents either have
preserved or have reconstituted considerable assets, both fixed and
movable. In the South, the priest appears to the peasant: 1. as a land
administrator, with whom the peasant enters into conflict on the question of
rents; 2. as a usurer, who asks for extremely high rates of interest and
manipulates the religious element in order to make certain of collecting his
rent or interest; 3. as a man subject to all the ordinary passions (women
and money), and who therefore, from a spiritual point of view, inspires no
confidence in his discretion and impartiality. Hence confession exercises
only the most minimal role of guidance, and the Southern peasant, if often
superstitious in a pagan sense, is not clerical. All this, taken together,
explains why in the South the Popular Party (except in some parts of
Sicily) does not have any great position or possess any network of
institutions and mass organizations. The attitude of the peasant towards
the clergy is summed up in the popular saying: "The priest is a priest at the
altar; outside, he is a man like anyone else."
Gramsci Wrote:The nexus of relations between North
and South in the organization of the national economy and the State is
such that the birth of a broad middle class of an economic nature (which
means the birth of a broad capitalist bourgeoisie) is made almost
impossible. Any accumulation of capital on the spot, any accumulation of
savings, is made impossible by the fiscal and customs system, and by the
fact that the capitalists who own shares do not transform their profits into
new capital on the spot, because they are not from that spot. When
emigration took on the gigantic dimensions it did in the twentieth century,
and the first remittances began to flood in from America, the liberal
economists cried triumphantly: Sonnino's dream will come true! A silent
revolution is under way in the South which, slowly but surely, will change
the entire economic and social structure of the country. But the State
intervened, and the silent revolution was stifled at birth. The government
offered treasury bonds carrying guaranteed interest, and the emigrants
and their families were transformed from agents of the silent revolution into
agents for giving the State the financial means to subsidize the parasitic
industries of the North. Francesco Nitti, on the democratic level and
formally outside the Southern agrarian bloc, might seem an effective
realizer of Sonnino's programme; but he was, in fact, Northern capitalism's
best agent for raking in the last resources of Southern savings. The
thousands of millions swallowed up by the Banca di sconto were almost all
owed to the South: the 400,000 creditors of the Banca Italiana di Sconto
were overwhelmingly Southern savers.
Over and above the agrarian bloc, there functions in the South an
intellectual bloc which in practice has so far served to prevent the cracks in
the agrarian bloc becoming too dangerous and causing a landslide.
Giustino Fortunato and Benedetto Croce are the exponents of this
intellectual bloc, and they can thus be considered as the most active
reactionaries of the whole peninsula.
We have already said that Southern Italy represents a great social
disintegration. This formula can be applied not only to the peasants, but
also to the intellectuals. It is a remarkable fact that in the South, side by
side with huge property, there have existed and continue to exist great
accumulations of culture and intelligence in single individuals, or small
groups of great intellectuals, while there does not exist any organization of
middle culture. There exist in the South the Laterza publishing house, and
the review La Critica .210 There exist academies and cultural bodies of the
greatest erudition. But there do not exist small or medium reviews, nor
publishing houses around which medium groupings of Southern
intellectuals might form. The Southerners who have sought to leave the
agrarian bloc and pose the Southern question in a radical form have found
hospitality in, and grouped themselves around, reviews printed outside the
South. Indeed, one might say that all the cultural initiatives by medium
intellectuals which have taken place in this century in Central and Northern
Italy have been characterized by Southernism, because they have been
strongly influenced by Southern intellectuals: all the journals of the group
of Florentine intellectuals, like Voce and Unità; the journals of the Christian
democrats, like Azione in Cesena; the journals of the young Emilian and
Milanese liberals published by G. Borelli, such as Patria in Bologna or
Azione in Milan; and lastly, Gobetti's Rivoluzione liberale.
Unfortunately much of the conversation about Italians in DR circles is characterized by a sort of vulgar Nordicism, which infects the discussion about Alpinids here as well. People act as if anyone who isn't Nordic might as well be a nigger. Or that more steppe = better. If that were the case, modern Greeks would be superior to ancient Greeks. There is an unholy alliance of vulgar Nordicists and libtards which seeks to prove that modern Italians and Greeks are unrelated to ancient Romans and Greeks. The Normans settled Northerners from Piedmont all over the South, and today there are areas of Sicily and Basilicata where they speak Gallo-Italic languages. Linguists even consider many of the Neapolitan dialects of northern Basilicata to be strongly influenced by Gallo-Italic. Why not search for their genetic legacy? Northern Basilicata certainly has higher rates of blondism and light eyes than southern Basilicata. Why not search for Albanian genetic admixture? Some number of Albanians certainly assimilated rather than live in Arbëresh enclaves, and you can find Italians all over the South with Italianized Albanian names (like Musacchio, which comes from the noble Albanian Muzaka family). But there are a million attempts to prove that southern Italians are mongrelized with Arabs or Africans and that northern Italians are actually Germans. It's all nonsense. Propaganda. What matters is eugenics vs dysgenics. All the steppe-related ancestry in the world won't save a nation from dysgenic pressures.
EDIT: Just a little historical note on Gramsci's characterization of the south. The "democratic" role he ascribes to the northern intelligentsia and clergy was played also by their southern counterparts here and there prior to reunification. Maybe this was no longer true by his time. The establishment of the Parthenopean Republic in 1799 was eagerly participated in by many lawyers and clergymen. Priests were political and even military leaders. Much of what has been written about this event is very ideological and portrays the Republic as some kind of alien tyranny, but many parts of the country were firmly Republican and raised the tree of liberty before the French came anywhere near them.