6 ms·

Because it might not have been the “Spanish”, but certain people who ruined history. So it’s not fair to blame a whole country for the actions of a few.

jacobolus 11mo ago
It's pretty fair to blame the entire social and political system of 16th century Spain, which at that time was centered on religious persecution, mass murder, large-scale theft and exploitation, and quasi-slavery, leading to centuries of profoundly racist tyranny in the Americas. The book-burning cultural genocide was just the cherry on top. (As is common for feudal occupiers of foreign lands, and by no means unique to Spain) the worst kinds of psychopaths were continually elevated to positions of authority and then granted almost complete impunity to do what they wanted, with an ideology that treated the recipients of their exploitation as sub-human.
- ffsm8 11mo ago
  It's really not sane to do so, today. You're literally applying birth sin for it to make sense, because none of the Spanish people alive today had anything to do with it Even worse, what hnidiots3 was trying to convey: 99% of the population that were alive during the time period you'd have described as "Spaniards" were entirely uninvolved in these actions, and wouldn't have supported them either, likely. While the Mayan culture was literally doing human sacrifices - the average person living in Spain wasn't inherently evil and wanting to cause suffering to other people. Despite their culture being kinda shit. They just wanted to live their live, which was mostly being a farmer and working.
  - jacobolus 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - nickpp 11mo ago
      You guys remind me of the old joke: A Mexican goes to Spain, accosts the first Spaniard he sees, and lays into him: “I demand an apology, sir - your ancestors pillaged my country!” The Spaniard blinks. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Your ancestors did that. Mine stayed home.”
      - darkwater 11mo ago
        I understand it's a joke and it is partially true but also there are still direct descendants of Central and South America original peoples, and also many Spanish families that exploited the conquered lands came back to the "mother land" and kept their families there.
        jacobolus 11mo ago
        The Spanish crown also repeatedly sent new waves of political allies to take over political control in the Americas, to counter the consolidation of power of the descendants of previous generations of Spanish rulers. There was a fair amount of conflict and intrigue between the two groups.
        reactordev 11mo ago
        Mmmmmm, Black Sails… Let’s not forget the slaves sent to the fields after Spanish conquest. Irish, African, Portuguese, Indian, all found their ways to the sugar canes. That era was literally groups of humans exploiting every other group of humans they could find. The first wave owners children found themselves going to war with the crown or being a member of the crowns second wave to further entrench the royal riches. It became extremely political.
    - somenameforme 11mo ago
      The wrongs of religion throughout history are typically exaggerated in modern times and the Spanish Inquisition is one of the best examples of this. It lasted more than 350 years and during this 350 years a very high-end estimate of executions is 5000. So the death toll from it ranges probably from one person every ~3 months to one person every month. [1] So for some comparison, 2-5x more people die in the US of lightning strikes each year than died during the Spanish Inquisition per year. Obviously any death is undesirable, but describing it as a horrific mass-murder is hyperbolic. It was rather more a mass public shaming campaign like the Chinese Struggle Sessions, but many orders of magnitude smaller in scale. For that matter even the Mayans were likely sacrificing people on a far larger scale. We lack exact numbers but know that they did group sacrifice, often of children, and that this was regularly done when building new structures, or for hopes of a good crop season and the like. And I think the thing that makes human sacrifice particularly primitive in its nature is that obviously doesn't work. Whether you killed a dozen kids or not has no bearings on how your crops grow. And so they would have to, over centuries, continue to reject the evidence before their eyes. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Death_tolls_and_sentenced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Death_toll...
      - jacobolus 11mo ago
        The Inquisition was mostly about mopping up the last few practicing Jews and Muslims in the Iberian peninsula, terrorizing them into conversion and conformity. Millions of people (on all sides) were killed in the Reconquista, over a few centuries, with many others enslaved, imprisoned, driven out of the peninsula, or forcibly converted. Those who converted to Catholicism were rewarded with centuries of further discrimination and persecution. (Disclaimer: I am not expert enough to know detailed figures here; feel free to search for expert sources if you want something precise.) Scattered lightning strikes are not meaningfully comparable to large-scale genocidal war.
        somenameforme 11mo ago
        The Reconquista was a large scale genocidal war with millions dead? Try to find a single reliable source supporting this claim. You might be surprised to find that it doesn't exist, and that it's also an example of citogenesis. [1] This is another perfect example of what I'm talking about. After Muslim armies invaded the Iberian Peninsula they created a system of government with a tiny minority of Arabs at the top with everybody else treated as distant second class citizens. They started trying to force people to convert and imposed taxes and other penalties on those who did not. The predictable rebellions against this were the start of the Reconquista. It spanned many hundreds of years but was almost all extremely small scale. And they weren't driving anybody out in large numbers. The Arab and Berber tribes never engaged in mass migration or anything like that. Iberia remained overwhelmingly native Iberian with a tiny Arab elite. The same Spaniards and Portuguese you know of today are the ones that were there under Islamic rule as well. [1] - https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
    - StarGrit 11mo ago
      > The Spanish state (crown, army, church) had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain, where the most brutal and sadistic thugs were politically elevated. That is one hell of a gloss over of the the previous 500-600 years before the Inquisition and massively over-simplifies what happened. There wasn't really a Spanish state either, certainly not as we would understand it today.
    - pqtyw 11mo ago
      > had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain, Well it varied, but such behaviour was not strictly unique to Spain in those days. Being a Catholic in England wasn't terribly exciting either. Then you have the witch hunts across must of Europe which resulted in probably well over 10x times more people being murdered in Germany alone compared to the inquisition and they weren't really a thing in Spain. In a way the Spanish Inquisition was quite similar to the NKVD or the Gestapo/etc. since the persecutions were usually intended to impose ideological/social conformity (or inherently racist in how it targeted even perfectly honest Jewish or Muslims converts) rather than "ritualistic". Of course Christian Spain is interesting in the sense that it turned from one of the most of tolerant societies in Europe to the one of the most intolerant ones in a couple of centuries. e.g. during the Almohad invasions you had Christians, Jewish and even moderate Muslims fleeing to the Christian kingdoms which generally were much more tolerant at the time. > Can you see how this absurd double standard may come across as racist? That's not particularly new in Europe though. e.g. the Greeks and Romans found Carthaginian mass child sacrifices extremely abhorrent yet at the same time didn't see much of an issue with "exposing" unwanted infants. Treating violence due to economic/utilitarian/political reasons differently that doing it for ritual/religious reasons was is still pretty ingrained into western culture.
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      - StarGrit 11mo ago
        Why do people always ignore what happened before a few hundred years before? The Moors invaded Spain and were advancing into Europe and moved into what is modern day France. It also ignores that Muslims and Christians would in-fight between themselves in what is now modern day Spain.
        pqtyw 11mo ago
        Well... I was talking about about what was happening a few centuries ago. Regardless why is it strictly relevant what happened 250-800 years before the Iberian kingdoms expelled or exterminated their Muslim and Jewish population? > It also ignores that Muslims and Christians would in-fight between themselves Seems tangential?
    - ffsm8 11mo ago
      I wasn't calling the descendants of the Mayans out for anything. I was specifically talking about the culture. Which is synonymous with the people in the upper class, which did ritual sacrifices of peasants. the term Spaniards however targets the average people. Which are precisely farmers. I do not see any double standard whatsoever, and frankly: you're brainwashed if you do.
  - hopelite 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - jacobolus 11mo ago
      Just to be explicit, you are now calling Jewish people "the most unhinged and narcissistic people" who have "perpetrated that endless abuse [of denouncing the Holocaust and Naziism] upon the German [..] people"?
      - hopelite 11mo ago
        Where do you get "jewish people" from? It's an odd but also very interesting conclusion of yours. Do you feel that the jewish people are implicated when someone says "the most unhinged and narcissistic people" and "perpetrated that endless abuse upon the German people"? What else would you call what has been done to the German people for 80 years now and seemingly for the foreseeable future as they are very psychologically and emotionally broken people from the perpetual "blood libel" abuse that has been perpetrated against them and their children from the earliest memory on throughout all their life? Is that healthy, to forever fixate and obsess and bring up and accuse people of things that happened several generations before they were born, and perpetrated by very specific and limited people who were punished for it? Do you think the German people are uniquely due for the most utterly evil and vile practices of collective guilt? Since you seem to assume the "jewish people" qualify as being referenced with "the most unhinged and narcissistic people", why would you think that people are collectively guilty, not even to mention across generations? What we witnessed in Gaza is an evil that is far worse than what was perpetrated 85 years ago, will you also collectively shame and abuse and berate all jewish people of the world with constant references of how they deliberately played games of shooting starving children in different body parts for points? You really should reexamine your messed up perspective if you want to believe yourself a good person. No people deserve collective guilt, unless they are collectively engaged in something. What humanity should make of the polling in Israel and the USA among Jewish communities about their views of whether a genocide was happening, whether it should happen, and whether there are any innocent people in Gaza, is something that may need to be reexamined. At least the Nazis lied to their populations about what was going on, because it was a totalitarian dictatorship (as you were told all your life too). What is to be made of the fact that Israel is a democracy and a very civilly engaged and politically aware democracy? Maybe think about some of those things instead of just reading with Automatica response tricks you have been trained to perform.
  - vacuity 11mo ago
    Are you saying that the average person in Spain did not support colonialism (let's suppose after the benefits of colonialism became apparent)? Would they be horrified that Spaniards had killed "barbarians" and "savages" (as they were described) and gained great riches? Other people have brought up religion; how many Christians condemned the Crusades?
    - ffsm8 11mo ago
      How specifically do you think the average Spaniard benefited by the crown building a colony? Do you think the crown then went and splurged on their farmers, reducing their taxes or something? Because no, that didn't happen. The benefits for this was entirely with the aristocracy and wealthy, not with the average Spaniards.
      - vacuity 11mo ago
        Going by some of the statements in this thread, if Spain-after-colonialism becomes richer and more developed, such that the average citizen's standard of living increases, then colonialism benefitted the average citizen. Benefit to the colonized peoples aside, surely many other people benefitted, even if they weren't immensely enriched.
- pqtyw 11mo ago
  The initial conquests and the immediate atrocities that followed them (arguably the worst period) were mainly quasi private enterprises. The state even tried to reign them in to some extent due to significant social/religious pressure at home. Of course that was largely superficial and hardly enforced after boatloads of silver and gold started arriving. The priests and missionaries that followed them were likely the group that was most sympathetic to the natives (of course only in relative terms compared to the "conquistadors" which is a very low standard).
jasonvorhe 11mo ago
Duh. But not all Romans!
hopelite 11mo ago
[flagged]
- hopelite 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]

jacobolus 11mo ago

It's pretty fair to blame the entire social and political system of 16th century Spain, which at that time was centered on religious persecution, mass murder, large-scale theft and exploitation, and quasi-slavery, leading to centuries of profoundly racist tyranny in the Americas. The book-burning cultural genocide was just the cherry on top. (As is common for feudal occupiers of foreign lands, and by no means unique to Spain) the worst kinds of psychopaths were continually elevated to positions of authority and then granted almost complete impunity to do what they wanted, with an ideology that treated the recipients of their exploitation as sub-human.

ffsm8 11mo ago
It's really not sane to do so, today. You're literally applying birth sin for it to make sense, because none of the Spanish people alive today had anything to do with it Even worse, what hnidiots3 was trying to convey: 99% of the population that were alive during the time period you'd have described as "Spaniards" were entirely uninvolved in these actions, and wouldn't have supported them either, likely. While the Mayan culture was literally doing human sacrifices - the average person living in Spain wasn't inherently evil and wanting to cause suffering to other people. Despite their culture being kinda shit. They just wanted to live their live, which was mostly being a farmer and working.
- jacobolus 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - nickpp 11mo ago
    You guys remind me of the old joke: A Mexican goes to Spain, accosts the first Spaniard he sees, and lays into him: “I demand an apology, sir - your ancestors pillaged my country!” The Spaniard blinks. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Your ancestors did that. Mine stayed home.”
    - darkwater 11mo ago
      I understand it's a joke and it is partially true but also there are still direct descendants of Central and South America original peoples, and also many Spanish families that exploited the conquered lands came back to the "mother land" and kept their families there.
      - jacobolus 11mo ago
        The Spanish crown also repeatedly sent new waves of political allies to take over political control in the Americas, to counter the consolidation of power of the descendants of previous generations of Spanish rulers. There was a fair amount of conflict and intrigue between the two groups.
        reactordev 11mo ago
        Mmmmmm, Black Sails… Let’s not forget the slaves sent to the fields after Spanish conquest. Irish, African, Portuguese, Indian, all found their ways to the sugar canes. That era was literally groups of humans exploiting every other group of humans they could find. The first wave owners children found themselves going to war with the crown or being a member of the crowns second wave to further entrench the royal riches. It became extremely political.
  - somenameforme 11mo ago
    The wrongs of religion throughout history are typically exaggerated in modern times and the Spanish Inquisition is one of the best examples of this. It lasted more than 350 years and during this 350 years a very high-end estimate of executions is 5000. So the death toll from it ranges probably from one person every ~3 months to one person every month. [1] So for some comparison, 2-5x more people die in the US of lightning strikes each year than died during the Spanish Inquisition per year. Obviously any death is undesirable, but describing it as a horrific mass-murder is hyperbolic. It was rather more a mass public shaming campaign like the Chinese Struggle Sessions, but many orders of magnitude smaller in scale. For that matter even the Mayans were likely sacrificing people on a far larger scale. We lack exact numbers but know that they did group sacrifice, often of children, and that this was regularly done when building new structures, or for hopes of a good crop season and the like. And I think the thing that makes human sacrifice particularly primitive in its nature is that obviously doesn't work. Whether you killed a dozen kids or not has no bearings on how your crops grow. And so they would have to, over centuries, continue to reject the evidence before their eyes. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Death_tolls_and_sentenced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Death_toll...
    - jacobolus 11mo ago
      The Inquisition was mostly about mopping up the last few practicing Jews and Muslims in the Iberian peninsula, terrorizing them into conversion and conformity. Millions of people (on all sides) were killed in the Reconquista, over a few centuries, with many others enslaved, imprisoned, driven out of the peninsula, or forcibly converted. Those who converted to Catholicism were rewarded with centuries of further discrimination and persecution. (Disclaimer: I am not expert enough to know detailed figures here; feel free to search for expert sources if you want something precise.) Scattered lightning strikes are not meaningfully comparable to large-scale genocidal war.
      - somenameforme 11mo ago
        The Reconquista was a large scale genocidal war with millions dead? Try to find a single reliable source supporting this claim. You might be surprised to find that it doesn't exist, and that it's also an example of citogenesis. [1] This is another perfect example of what I'm talking about. After Muslim armies invaded the Iberian Peninsula they created a system of government with a tiny minority of Arabs at the top with everybody else treated as distant second class citizens. They started trying to force people to convert and imposed taxes and other penalties on those who did not. The predictable rebellions against this were the start of the Reconquista. It spanned many hundreds of years but was almost all extremely small scale. And they weren't driving anybody out in large numbers. The Arab and Berber tribes never engaged in mass migration or anything like that. Iberia remained overwhelmingly native Iberian with a tiny Arab elite. The same Spaniards and Portuguese you know of today are the ones that were there under Islamic rule as well. [1] - https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
  - StarGrit 11mo ago
    > The Spanish state (crown, army, church) had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain, where the most brutal and sadistic thugs were politically elevated. That is one hell of a gloss over of the the previous 500-600 years before the Inquisition and massively over-simplifies what happened. There wasn't really a Spanish state either, certainly not as we would understand it today.
  - pqtyw 11mo ago
    > had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain, Well it varied, but such behaviour was not strictly unique to Spain in those days. Being a Catholic in England wasn't terribly exciting either. Then you have the witch hunts across must of Europe which resulted in probably well over 10x times more people being murdered in Germany alone compared to the inquisition and they weren't really a thing in Spain. In a way the Spanish Inquisition was quite similar to the NKVD or the Gestapo/etc. since the persecutions were usually intended to impose ideological/social conformity (or inherently racist in how it targeted even perfectly honest Jewish or Muslims converts) rather than "ritualistic". Of course Christian Spain is interesting in the sense that it turned from one of the most of tolerant societies in Europe to the one of the most intolerant ones in a couple of centuries. e.g. during the Almohad invasions you had Christians, Jewish and even moderate Muslims fleeing to the Christian kingdoms which generally were much more tolerant at the time. > Can you see how this absurd double standard may come across as racist? That's not particularly new in Europe though. e.g. the Greeks and Romans found Carthaginian mass child sacrifices extremely abhorrent yet at the same time didn't see much of an issue with "exposing" unwanted infants. Treating violence due to economic/utilitarian/political reasons differently that doing it for ritual/religious reasons was is still pretty ingrained into western culture.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - StarGrit 11mo ago
      Why do people always ignore what happened before a few hundred years before? The Moors invaded Spain and were advancing into Europe and moved into what is modern day France. It also ignores that Muslims and Christians would in-fight between themselves in what is now modern day Spain.
      - pqtyw 11mo ago
        Well... I was talking about about what was happening a few centuries ago. Regardless why is it strictly relevant what happened 250-800 years before the Iberian kingdoms expelled or exterminated their Muslim and Jewish population? > It also ignores that Muslims and Christians would in-fight between themselves Seems tangential?
  - ffsm8 11mo ago
    I wasn't calling the descendants of the Mayans out for anything. I was specifically talking about the culture. Which is synonymous with the people in the upper class, which did ritual sacrifices of peasants. the term Spaniards however targets the average people. Which are precisely farmers. I do not see any double standard whatsoever, and frankly: you're brainwashed if you do.
- hopelite 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - jacobolus 11mo ago
    Just to be explicit, you are now calling Jewish people "the most unhinged and narcissistic people" who have "perpetrated that endless abuse [of denouncing the Holocaust and Naziism] upon the German [..] people"?
    - hopelite 11mo ago
      Where do you get "jewish people" from? It's an odd but also very interesting conclusion of yours. Do you feel that the jewish people are implicated when someone says "the most unhinged and narcissistic people" and "perpetrated that endless abuse upon the German people"? What else would you call what has been done to the German people for 80 years now and seemingly for the foreseeable future as they are very psychologically and emotionally broken people from the perpetual "blood libel" abuse that has been perpetrated against them and their children from the earliest memory on throughout all their life? Is that healthy, to forever fixate and obsess and bring up and accuse people of things that happened several generations before they were born, and perpetrated by very specific and limited people who were punished for it? Do you think the German people are uniquely due for the most utterly evil and vile practices of collective guilt? Since you seem to assume the "jewish people" qualify as being referenced with "the most unhinged and narcissistic people", why would you think that people are collectively guilty, not even to mention across generations? What we witnessed in Gaza is an evil that is far worse than what was perpetrated 85 years ago, will you also collectively shame and abuse and berate all jewish people of the world with constant references of how they deliberately played games of shooting starving children in different body parts for points? You really should reexamine your messed up perspective if you want to believe yourself a good person. No people deserve collective guilt, unless they are collectively engaged in something. What humanity should make of the polling in Israel and the USA among Jewish communities about their views of whether a genocide was happening, whether it should happen, and whether there are any innocent people in Gaza, is something that may need to be reexamined. At least the Nazis lied to their populations about what was going on, because it was a totalitarian dictatorship (as you were told all your life too). What is to be made of the fact that Israel is a democracy and a very civilly engaged and politically aware democracy? Maybe think about some of those things instead of just reading with Automatica response tricks you have been trained to perform.
- vacuity 11mo ago
  Are you saying that the average person in Spain did not support colonialism (let's suppose after the benefits of colonialism became apparent)? Would they be horrified that Spaniards had killed "barbarians" and "savages" (as they were described) and gained great riches? Other people have brought up religion; how many Christians condemned the Crusades?
  - ffsm8 11mo ago
    How specifically do you think the average Spaniard benefited by the crown building a colony? Do you think the crown then went and splurged on their farmers, reducing their taxes or something? Because no, that didn't happen. The benefits for this was entirely with the aristocracy and wealthy, not with the average Spaniards.
    - vacuity 11mo ago
      Going by some of the statements in this thread, if Spain-after-colonialism becomes richer and more developed, such that the average citizen's standard of living increases, then colonialism benefitted the average citizen. Benefit to the colonized peoples aside, surely many other people benefitted, even if they weren't immensely enriched.
pqtyw 11mo ago
The initial conquests and the immediate atrocities that followed them (arguably the worst period) were mainly quasi private enterprises. The state even tried to reign them in to some extent due to significant social/religious pressure at home. Of course that was largely superficial and hardly enforced after boatloads of silver and gold started arriving. The priests and missionaries that followed them were likely the group that was most sympathetic to the natives (of course only in relative terms compared to the "conquistadors" which is a very low standard).

jasonvorhe 11mo ago

Duh. But not all Romans!

hopelite 11mo ago

[flagged]

hopelite 11mo ago
[flagged]
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]