>
>
>Poland, especially the eastern part (an equivalent of the US South) has
>a history of pogroms, no doubt, but the prevailing mentality is
>"catching up with the West" rather than "leading the world."
I think things were somewhat more ambiguous in Russia in the Soviet era (and earlier, and today), which does have a history of manifest-destiny type of thinking. Actually I think that Russian and U.S. culture are rather similar on this point, maybe due to similarities in the histories of the countries -- big land empires formed through settlement of (relatively) unoccupied territory. The Russians sure treated the natives a lot more nicely than the Americans did, though! (Actually, Russia has historically been a very ethnically tolerant country, with the exception of 19th-century anti-Semitism, and that was medieval religious hatred, not ethnic.)
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