7 ms·

Why is that worth noting?

hnidiots3 1y ago
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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - nickpp 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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...
    - hopelite 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - jacobolus 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  Duh. But not all Romans!
- hopelite 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - hopelite 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
wtcactus 1y ago
Because a previous commenter wrongly said, "the Spanish made a point of seeking out all the Maya books". It wasn't "The Spanish" it were some individual actors clearly acting against "The Spanish" crown wishes.
- alex_smart 1y ago
  If that is the case, why did the trial absolve him of all crimes and why did get consecrated as a bishop by the king of Spain?
  - wtcactus 1y ago
    I'm guessing that his 1st person description of the human sacrifices carried out by the Mayan and establishing a connection between those and the need to erase the culture that enabled them and that he - wrongly or not, we can't know anymore - saw as enabled by those books had some weight there... The Spanish crown didn't have in mind to destroy other people books, but then again, they also didn't have in mind that they casually, recurrently and nonchalantly offered human sacrifices to their "gods". Probably the order of priorities for the Spanish crown was books < human sacrifices. Strange times, those, eh?
hopelite 1y ago
I would say because it highlights that even back then there was the same kind of tension as today between those who believe they are doing right, those who also believe they are doing right, and right never ending up being done in the end. It’s like ideological, metaphysical, and psychological border disputes and skirmishes, i.e., human nature. Also, failing upwards of those who serve the dominant system is clearly not just a modern phenomenon.
vintermann 1y ago
Because it's not what most people expect. There was pushback against a lot of the evils of colonialism - most of them unsuccessful, like this one. Maybe we can learn lessons for fighting against the institutional evils of our time.
- rayiner 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - BigTTYGothGF 1y ago
    > Was Spanish colonization “evil?” It's hard to look at the on-the-ground details and come to any other conclusion.
    - rayiner 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - Larrikin 1y ago
        Before anyone wastes their time, this is the same start of the other bad faith argument that the enslavement of Africans was for their own good and they were better off being slaves than being in Africa.
        rayiner 1y ago
        [flagged]
        jacobolus 1y ago
        Probably not, but this counterfactual depends on the circumstances, and depends on your values. For example: people might argue about the relative harms of various kinds of slavery vs. cultural genocide vs. land dispossession and forced displacement .... After contact there were waves of mass die-off of people throughout the Americas due to disease brought from Eurasia: are we positing that those deaths still occurred? Because they were extraordinarily destabilizing. For example, if we hypothetically imagine that the balance of disease severity was the other way around and 90% of the population of Eurasia was wiped out over a century in several waves of horrific pandemics, then history would look quite different indeed, and it's all but impossible to predict precisely how. European states other than Spain also did horrific atrocities in their conquests and colonial projects. Are we positing that we just replace Spanish kingdom(s) with some alternative European monarchies? Or are we imagining a situation in which peoples of the Americas retained some autonomy?

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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - nickpp 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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...
  - hopelite 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - jacobolus 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
Duh. But not all Romans!
hopelite 1y ago
[flagged]
- hopelite 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

wtcactus 1y ago

Because a previous commenter wrongly said, "the Spanish made a point of seeking out all the Maya books". It wasn't "The Spanish" it were some individual actors clearly acting against "The Spanish" crown wishes.

alex_smart 1y ago
If that is the case, why did the trial absolve him of all crimes and why did get consecrated as a bishop by the king of Spain?
- wtcactus 1y ago
  I'm guessing that his 1st person description of the human sacrifices carried out by the Mayan and establishing a connection between those and the need to erase the culture that enabled them and that he - wrongly or not, we can't know anymore - saw as enabled by those books had some weight there... The Spanish crown didn't have in mind to destroy other people books, but then again, they also didn't have in mind that they casually, recurrently and nonchalantly offered human sacrifices to their "gods". Probably the order of priorities for the Spanish crown was books < human sacrifices. Strange times, those, eh?

hopelite 1y ago

I would say because it highlights that even back then there was the same kind of tension as today between those who believe they are doing right, those who also believe they are doing right, and right never ending up being done in the end. It’s like ideological, metaphysical, and psychological border disputes and skirmishes, i.e., human nature. Also, failing upwards of those who serve the dominant system is clearly not just a modern phenomenon.

vintermann 1y ago

Because it's not what most people expect. There was pushback against a lot of the evils of colonialism - most of them unsuccessful, like this one. Maybe we can learn lessons for fighting against the institutional evils of our time.

rayiner 1y ago
[flagged]
- BigTTYGothGF 1y ago
  > Was Spanish colonization “evil?” It's hard to look at the on-the-ground details and come to any other conclusion.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - Larrikin 1y ago
      Before anyone wastes their time, this is the same start of the other bad faith argument that the enslavement of Africans was for their own good and they were better off being slaves than being in Africa.
      - rayiner 1y ago
        [flagged]
        jacobolus 1y ago
        Probably not, but this counterfactual depends on the circumstances, and depends on your values. For example: people might argue about the relative harms of various kinds of slavery vs. cultural genocide vs. land dispossession and forced displacement .... After contact there were waves of mass die-off of people throughout the Americas due to disease brought from Eurasia: are we positing that those deaths still occurred? Because they were extraordinarily destabilizing. For example, if we hypothetically imagine that the balance of disease severity was the other way around and 90% of the population of Eurasia was wiped out over a century in several waves of horrific pandemics, then history would look quite different indeed, and it's all but impossible to predict precisely how. European states other than Spain also did horrific atrocities in their conquests and colonial projects. Are we positing that we just replace Spanish kingdom(s) with some alternative European monarchies? Or are we imagining a situation in which peoples of the Americas retained some autonomy?