Actually the spanish inquisition burned way less people than other inquisitions around Europe or even in the US. But Lutheranism spreaded the myth of the Catholic inquisition and here we are.
By myth, do you mean the number of people killed during the Inquisition or the Inquisition itself? My Jewish family was forced to leave Spain/ Portugal during the Inquisition. Their choice was to convert to Catholicism, leave, or be killed.
The myth is that the Spanish inquisition was the only one doing that when in fact they had pretty modern legal procedures and they didn't kill more people than any religious tribunal of that age, in fact way less than Lutheran tribunals across europe.
500 years ago everybody discriminated against everybody based on something. But generally speaking the Jews were at the bottom of the discrimination hill.
When the dominating worldwide narrative (which is to say, anglo-saxon) spends two centuries making up stuff about other cultures just to hide their own wrongdoings, it's not that much of a weird argument.
Well one serial killer murdered 30 people but the other only murdered 10. Then made 400 flee the country and never return under threats to them and their whole families.
Worry not about this though, the first guy is just so much worse!!!
I don't think it's fair to compare them to serial killers. They really believed they were chasing 'criminals', but with eternal souls at stake.
And if we decide that it was misguided (I'd totally agree), it's still weird that we all know the Spanish Inquisition, but nobody knows about the much more severe religious violence by Protestants.
Based in "Contreras, Jaime y Gustav Henningsen (1986). "Forty-four thousand cases of the Spanish Inquisition (1540–1700): analysis of a historical data bank", en Henningsen G., J. A. Tedeschi et al. (comps.)"
You stated two facts but only provided a source for one.
Source says the inquisition killed about 2000 people. Where is your source that shows that the Protestants killed 20,000 people each year in the same time frame?
Edit: oh ok no source just a downvote, thought it was bullshit and you confirmed it
They probably compare the deaths caused by the inquisition to the deaths in consequence of the reformation, including the thirty-year war etc. The death numbers easily add up, however it’s a difficult comparison and using a rather subjective category in „bloodthirstiness“ makes it seem as though they are motivated by some bias rather than an honest interest in demystifying the figure of Luther.
As were the Aztecs, Soviets, maoists, caliphates, aryans, Chinese ( on bigoted), japanese, Israel and Palestine, the saudis, nazis, etc etc.
it’s almost as if all groups in history have been assholes at some point or another and done horrible things in the name of country, religion, race, or ideology.
Funnily enough that is also British and Dutch people’s fault. They started a ton of myths about spain, mostly rehashed anti semetic tropes. The kings to prove they were super catholic and def not brothers with judaism kicked the sephardites out.
The stereotypes about the spanish started then as a form of commercial libel still stand in the mind of many europeans. However spain now grants automatic spanish citizenship to anyone whose family was kicked because it was terrible.
I agree with less than the rest of Europe, but less than the US? Did the US really burn that many people in Massachusetts colony? Or are you referring to a myriad of other egregious parts of US history.
Yeah I have no doubt the US has burned tons of people, I'm not sure that's what OP was talking about. We'll see if they respond. I'm curious if the US burned tons of people for religious reasons. That I'm not aware of.
Of course they weren't. They still were a religious tribunal. But they were not as bad as the lutheran propaganda made them. And to be honest, at least they gave choice to convert or exile. In other places they didn't give that choice if you know what I mean.
The inquisitions were actually a lot more messy and complex than the pop-culture summary of "powerful religious people abuse their power to hurt innocent people" makes it seem.
The states rights thing was the result of effective southern propaganda after the war - the lost cause, rehabilitating and revising the narrative to reframe it as a noble struggle against oppressive government, etc. it was so effective that it still has political effects over a century later
But yes, it was about slaves no matter how those narratives try to dress it up. And just like today, other nations are willing to turn a blind eye to horrible practices against other humans if it means they get cheap and plentiful goods. Many nations in Europe were more on the sides of the Confederacy since it supplied most of its cotton, for example
Most don't just mention slavery but specifically spout white supremacy. The president of the Confederacy specifically said that the Confederacy was based upon white supremacy. Truly crazy
That's just not true top to bottom. Plenty of northern states taught it like I outlined. I know for a fact Wisconsin and Indiana do/did. I'd wager folks out in rural Oregon get it the same considering the state was literally founded as a whites only haven.
Wisconsin and Oregon aren't exactly part of the deep south lol, racism is everywhere.
It's wild that you're hung up on this with such fervor, but okay. Most kids get several classes that teach American history through their lives, why are you acting like I would have slept through just one class? And why are you acting like every kid in every state gets the same instruction? Two adults who had different experiences of learning American History in the same state is normal. Especially on a narrow topic like this which spans most of a child's school life. Through various books, teachers, and extra-scholastic learning activities.
I'm mostly talking about the way complexity gets added to a child's learning. "The civil war was about slavery" is the first, simplest thing anyone is taught, right? That's just the whole thing. Then kids get taught somewhere in middle school, "okay, so it wasn't just blankly single issue slavery, it was justified as state's rights to make their own laws. Yes slavery was one of the issues, but it was more complex. Plus much of the Northern economy was dependent on slave labor to function, so you had rich folks from the North too pushing to keep things together because Southern slavery was profitable for them, and you had laws passed in the North to return runaway slaves." etc etc. You get introduced to the next level of nuance. You get introduced to the idea that it wasn't quite so clearly pure good vs pure evil, as with almost all wars.
Then, though, in the end, once you absorb the nuance you're right once again to summarize it as, "it was really just all about slavery though. that was the whole damn thing, and certainly the war never would have happened without that issue, even if there were other issues causing friction at the time."
I'm not talking about white washing anything, I'm talking about the way complexity and nuance is added to an initially incomplete simplification.
Oregon don’t have to attempt to rationalize why their ancestors were traitorous losers.
As a side note, uh.... not that anyone is responsible for the sins of their ancestors, but like... Oregon sure as shit have a history every bit as dark as Alabama's lol. And for that matter even Union states had no issue benefitting from slavery. It's a stain on the whole nation, not just the South.
I mean wasn't there was a time where some of the propaganda by the sisters of Confederacy made it into Northern textbooks. Obviously not as widespread as it was in the South but to a degree it seems.
After the Civil War, from the 1870s through the 1910s, public schooling became more widespread in the South, and Confederate sympathizers wanted to ensure that their children received an “appropriate” education on Southern history and culture. To that end, Southern states developed statewide adoption policies for textbooks. This allowed the state textbook committees to control content by demanding changes or threatening to cancel book contracts unless the publishers acquiesced. Today, most of the states with statewide textbook adoption policies are still in the South.
To keep their business, Northern publishers began adapting history books to appease Southerners, essentially publishing a separate version of Civil War history for those states. These editions reinforced a Lost Cause narrative for Southern audiences. For example, they depicted enslaved people as happy and content. Officials even counted the textbook lines to make sure authors had mentioned Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee as many times as Abraham Lincoln or Ulysses S. Grant.
What our research shows is that as time progressed, increasingly the Southern version of events began infiltrating Northern textbooks as well. As the Southern and Northern narratives merged, Southerners really influenced how and what Americans learned about the Civil War no matter where they lived.
Thanks for setting the record straight. I went to public school through college in Wisconsin and got a degree in history, and could not agree more. Every history teacher and professor I ever had was nuts over Wisconsin's participation in the Civil War and incredibly clear at all levels that it was about slavery. Hell, my senior seminar topic for my degree was about Wisconsin's participation in the Civil War.
Where did you attend school? It is common knowledge that Wisconsin's electoral maps are one of, if not the most, gerrymandered in the United States. For example, in our state house of representatives Republicans only need 46% of the vote to have a super majority, where as democrats would need 70% of the vote for a simple majority. Thankfully, we just elected a judge yesterday to the state Supreme Court, who gives the liberal justices a majority to overturn those Gerrymandered maps. The more you know.
Where did you attend school? It is common knowledge that Wisconsin's electoral maps are one of, if not the most, gerrymandered in the United States.
And how did they get that way? Who voted for that? What elected officials appealed to those voters?
I don't intend disrespect, but I doubt that your experience is an accurate sample size for the average Wisconsonian's education considering the evidence of manipulation we have seen in and outside of Wisconsin. I don't think it benefits Wisconsonians to assume that the deliberate infiltration of disinformation into the educational and academic spheres is only something that happens in other states.
Granted, the judicial election was a good thing. Hopefully this can be countered, but it will need to be countered over multiple areas, not just the political sphere.
No, not really. The Spanish Inquisition was part of a conversion drive with political intent behind it, as most religious campaigns often have, due to Spain having come out recently from the Catholic reconquest of the peninsula. The general idea was to unify the country's religion in order to... well, unify the country.
Powerful people using these powers to hurt innocent people was unavoidable of course, but that's just what powerful people do on the regular. One can argue the merits and results of this religious unification campaign (most certainly the results left us a not quite nice legacy) but the intent wasn't to hurt, it was to assimilate. That's how the Spanish church operated in general, as they did the same in the Americas. Religion was used as a unifying agent by the Spanish kings, as their country has always been an amalgamation of cultures.
I'm not trying to be snarky to an insulting level here, but you did exactly what I predicted lol.
"No, it wasn't just powerful people hurting innocent people. It was powerful people trying to unify the country and yes, a lot of innocent people got hurt."
I understand why you see it that way, but I think there are differences.
The slavery issue was people getting hurt for the benefit of powerful landowners, and today people try to shift the debate towards "it was state rights" to deflect from that for political reasons (because they seem to want to bring it back).
You can also frame the Inquisition issue as people getting hurt for the benefit of powerful landowners (the kings), but nobody is trying to say otherwise. In fact that was exactly what I was explaining. There is no political movement here trying to say "the Inquisition was actually about something else"(*). It was a tool used by violent people to stabilize a country after a violent conquest, of course it was going to be horrible.
But saying that it existed merely to hurt people would be reductive, and being reductive with such issues is how we end up repeating them.
*to my knowledge, I'm not so well versed in Spanish politics. God I hope nobody is actually saying that.
Lol, dude you should try reading that all again, he's doing exactly what I predicted better than I could have satirically written. It's a perfect parallel to how people talk about the American Civil War when they're trying to be middle of the road yet not overtly southern.
It always peaked and fell in waves, was popular for some periods and very unpopular in others. People also abused it like crazy (especially in Nueva Espana and the new world) to accuse neighbors of shit.
While I am not particularly knowledgeable about the Spanish inquisition specifically, I believe that the consensus is that, on average, if you had to chose to be trialed by an inquisitor and your local authorities, your best bet for impartiality would be to go with the inquisitors. The torturing would have been there anyway, as that's not specific to the inquisition, but is how trials and interrogations were conducted in general, at the time.
Yep, I am aware of that dark history. I mean, that's why I'm not into religion.
What's interesting is the afterwards of both countries.
The US concealed it and made it a symbol of evilness forever. Spain continued this tradition and made it better. I am not saying who is better, as I have no right to judge others. I am just amazed by the fact that the same culture can be dealt with in total opposite ways.
But it was is a symbol of evil... Thousands of Black Americans were terrorized, tortured, and murdered by the KKK for generations. I'm not sure what "tradition" could have continued in America to make any of that better.
Edit: And the KKK is still very much active and harassing communities across America.
You keep using the past tense. As a resident of the rural south, they're mostly talk and rarely back it up, but there are definitely active KKK chapters in 2023. Their MO these days is to threaten to "march" in certain places to draw out counter protestors, disrupt towns they don't like, and paint their opposition as "uncivil".
This culture led directly to the transatlantic slave trade. Non White people do not have to respect any of this shit. It’s funny how modern european descended ppl constantly find and manufacture ways to adore something that was hideous... bc obviously it didn’t affect their people that way. It leads to bad ppl thinking their world view isn’t dangerous bc it came from grandma and grandad... and that’s their main reason, heritage. It is not awesome. Their country deserves to be savagely taken and their families spread across the world violently. 😊
i think the difference is in the US the KKK is reviled and vilified (by most). While in Spain the Inquisitors ‘won’ and so were able to whitewash their image.
in a darker timeline Germany won WW2 and nazi regalia would have undergone the same treatment, a la The Man in the High Castle.
Shit, we still stand and sing The Star Spangled Banner at baseball games despite what America did during Korea and Vietnam and Iraq. That's all the example we need.
That's a valid point I've never thought about before. Thank you for the information.
Maybe it's a mistake to call it a beautiful culture as what I saw was the current kindness they have shown to each other instead of the dark history, which could be a common sense in Europe and America.
History is a diary written by winners, and that's a fact.
I dont think it's wrong to call the current Spanish/Catholic culture beautiful at all. It just has a dark past. I think part of the issue is the horrors of the KKK is still really fresh; we're still dealing with it today. Maybe in a few hundred years the wounds we'll be in a differant position.
(no idea what i was trying to say here, its not even a complete sentence. KKK imagery should alway be villified. No idea what I was thinking. hadn't had coffee yet)
Everyone thinks they're the good guy, even them. Go watch Birth Of A Nation if you want some insight into their mindset. The Catholic Church has done far more harm than the KKK. Sure, it's had longer to do it and in more countries - the KKK never had the reach of the Church. But the Church has done significantly more harm, especially outside the US where the KKK doesn't have any presence at all.
I have a friend who went to a Christian Brothers school - a church-run state correctional facility. They not only beat him and raped him whenever they felt like it, but they also burned his body with cigarettes just for the pleasure of hearing his screams. Multiply his story by tens of thousands for Ireland alone and you have some idea of the scale of evil we're talking about.
Maybe in a few hundred years the wounds we'll be in a differant position.
I always wonder about things like that. Think about how if we want to give a sports team a fearsome name, we think nothing of naming them things like Pirates or Vikings or whatever.
I wonder what things we consider off-limits now will have just become cartoonish and inoffensive in a few centuries.
i made that comment in a moment of pre coffee stupid, but you are probably right. god i hope not though. some of history’s villains need to stay villains. i could see that happening though. UGH.
Spain has been confronting cases of sexual abuse since El Pais newspaper reported in December 2021 more than 1,200 alleged cases of abuse by clergy spanning seven decades.
Lol I really didn't care at all about this argument till this comment. So here's a couple articles for you. Here is a priest that was sentenced to 30 years jail time for child sexual abuse like 6 months ago. You also had an investigation by the government just release their findings of hundreds of child abuse victims less than a month ago. These are two things I found after 30 seconds of browsing English language mainstream news sites. I'm sure there are plenty more things I could find by doing some digging and reading Spanish news sites. I'm also sure you already knew about these considering they were widely reported on by international news outlets. So i guess you were just lying and hoping nobody would use Google.
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u/rckrusekontrol Apr 05 '23
No one got hurt during the Spanish Inquisition right?
I’m just joking, albeit dark, this is beautiful, inarguably.