> at its core was the unifying belief that the people of the polishlithuanian commonwealth descended from the ancient iranian sarmatians, the legendary invaders of contemporary polish lands in antiquity. this is only half-true, sarmatism was very simply the polish-lithuanian nobility inventing their own ethnic identity separate from the polish-lithuanian commoners as a way to reinforce their class-interests over their own ethnic and national interests. basically they (the nobles) were sarmatians while the average peasant was a naturally servile (not sarmatian) lech, balt or ruthenian who they were justly ruling over. as far as they did have sarmatian blood, the average szlachta would have no distinguishable difference of sarmatian blood considering their nationhood disappeared like 500 years before there even was a polish nobility and about 1000 years before sarmatism was a thing. to top it off most szlachta did not have, unlike most western nobles, an actual verifiable genealogy beyond like 2 or 3 generations prior. most szlachta were in fact illiterate even in the 17th and 18th century. sarmatism was also a way to remove their cognitive dissonance at the fact that they were actively suppressing an emerging, and competing, middle-class of native poles/lithuanians/etc by only allowing jews and other foreigners to serve in higher level professions, particularly as merchants, because they could not politically compete with the szlacta nobility. kind of similar to how our upper-class is often colluding with jews to fuck over white people in general right now. the polish-lithuanian commonwealth was in fact the most retarded and least developed state in post-medieval europe. the golden liberty meant they was no political cohesion beyond oligarchical class interest. it was heavily feudal in the 18th century, far behind even russia who constantly bullied them into submission and eventually destroyed them easily with prussia in the partitions.
Netherlands