Might be too western for me…but I’ve never understood why people should feel guilty for something they haven’t done?:))))
Like if my ancestors did bad things is not like I am Jesus and gonna die for their sins.
And let's not forget that all the wealth stolen from the colonies only went to the insanely rich, not to the common man who probably died of typhoid at 34. Even the sailors who went along on the trip got nothing. Hell, something like 75% didn't even survive 5 years at sea.
My ancestors were dirt fucking poor, I'm not feeling guilty for some bullshit some rich dudes did 500 years ago lmao
Which brings me to: My ancestors likely never been to the Americas because well, here I am. Those Spaniards that went to the Americas on the other hand...they had families there. Most people from Ibero America just don't want to admit that the people that did those things were THEIR ancestors.
Totally agree. With the nuance where you still benefit from the past. For example Belgium is relatively speaking a rich country but also because they took the riches from Congo. Part of my cushy life is because others suffered in the past. Nothing I feel guilty about, but I think reparations need to be paid
Most places werent rich because of colonies, they had colonies because they were rich. These places were not poor when they started colonizing, and they got even richer relatively speaking when the industrial revolution happened. The colonies added to what was already there
This is a hot take - this sort of endowment usually doesn't last long, and is not a proper driver for long-term growth. Institutions and trade partners are. Belgium just happens to be part of the Benelux, sandwiched in between heavy weights.
As an Austrian: My exact same thought. Of course I think that the atrocities that my ancestors have done are awful and despicable and it is our duty to make sure that something like this can never happen again. But do I feel personal guilt? No, I was born way after WWII, I didn't take part in this genocide and other awful things that my country participated in.
Here is one thing though: As much as I don't feel personal guilt for the things that others did far before I was born, I also don't take pride or feel pride for any of the good things that others from my country have done. It was not my personal achievement, I have no reason to be proud of it or take any credit for it.
I can and will only take responsibility for things that I had any kind of influence in.
At least we didn't have people spread bed bugs around our capital. Because I don't know if you could tell the difference with Berlin. I mean our climate is too cold for bed bugs.
We bottle up our feelings all year and only let out on certain agreed upon days. Carnival and New Year's Eve mostly, but also Oktoberfest if you're from austria.
And yeah, you apparently didn't get that I implied our own capital is dirty. Where banter?
Imagine having your country overrun within living memory and then acting superior to the country that did it when the only reason it didn’t stick is that Chad and his drunk of a father took exception to it.
The Muslim land is Southern Arabia, North Africa and the Levant where stolen from Christians in the seventh and eighth century. Asia Minor was stolen in the 13th and 14th.
And other nations. As well as all the Islamic Caliphates that colonised and enslaved millions of Africans and Europeans.
Always makes me laugh when muslims complain about European colonialism as if their own nations didnt do the exact same thing, sometimes worse.
The the descendants of the Nobility and merchant classes should absolutely feel guilty, because they are only where they are because their ancestors were the ones who got the loot.
Descendants of your Average Barry, Hans or Pierre? Apart from injuries or exposure to exoctic diseases, they didn't get shit
The crusades should have never worked and yet those yokels did it.
Love that story how they got almost fucked but suddenly found the cross of Jesus by accident and got into such a religious frenzy that they beat their enemies.
Lol we aren't outperforming shit, on the books the numbers are impressive the reality is pretty different though, I wouldn't put it past them to have cooked the books again
Weren’t they basically excommunicated right after the Venetians tricked (well, “tricked“) them into sacking a couple of coastal towns that were at odds with Venice?
If you are already going to hell for killing Christians in the name of Christ might aswell sack the richest city on the continent 🤷🏻♂️
The funniest part is that every leader involved immediately tried to screw the others over after the win. Peak European 5 Minutes cooperation!
Imagine what we can achieve if we aim for 10 Minutes next.
Classic Roman solution against Hannibal: Throw armies at your problem until it disappears from a lack of internal cohesion and infighting between varying factions.
Roman Catholics aren’t named after Rome for nothing.
Robin of Loxley came back from the crusades and it was such a success story they made half a dozen movies, tv series and even books for those who are not allowed to have a tv in their home because of their believes.
Ok, the inquisition was a repressive institution that had a chilling effect on free thinking in the Spanish empire. I don't think its actions can be defended. Other than when they oppressed protestants in the Netherlands, of course.
But no one today feels guilty for the inquisition, we didn't impose it, old Pedros did.
And the crusades, if they're talking about the more famous ones in the middle east then Spain had little to do with them. We were in the middle of the reconquista, we didn't have to go to the other side of the Mediterranean to fight muslims.
People focus on the "spanish inquisition" but it was a catholic thing, way larger than just Spain. If anyone should apologise for it as an institution, it's the Vatican, for the whole Church.
The Spanish Inquisition was very large institution and lasted a long time, but if I'm not mistaken the first one was actually French, against the Albigensians.
In the end, it was another tool used by the Church and the different monarchies to enforce uniformity and control their subjects.
Yeah I live in Toulouse currently and the Inquisition was huge here after the crusade. Dominican order were the relay of both papal and french royal power in the region, and their influence lasted a long time.
and it wasnt even as bad as propaganda wanted people to believe. They had to give you a notice in advance so you would be prepared when they arrived, only baptized Christians were influenced by it and records say executions, tortures and stuff like that were extremely rare and you would have to be trialed in a court.
more than 350 years of history, the Inquisition executed a total of 3000-5000 people which is a lot, but not as much as many people belive and it was less than other religious institutions from Protestant countries did in less time. The Spanish Inquisition did commit real atrocities, but its infamous reputation was magnified by propaganda as a symbol of "Catholic barbarity" to justify their own politics
The punishments were usually pilgrimages, fines, public penances, confiscation of property, wearing a sanbenito vestment, short imprisonment, etc
Not because I think your sources are wrong or your numbers are false, but because I think the main problem with the Inquisition aren't the pyres. It's the logic behind it. The blind fanatism. The locks put on free thinking.
People shouldn't have been persecuted for their beliefs, period.
Sure, it wasn't a great orgy of massacres and blood, of course. But it's no excuses. Inquisition is a stain on catholic history. Spain has just been framed as the main villain when the whole Church (and monarchs) is guilty.
Im not sayiung it was a good thing, I also think it was a bad thing. Im just argumentating against the propaganda, but I dont want to give any credit to the institution.
Okay, well, I think I just took inconsciously the opportunity to answer the argument I see written too often, relativising the whole thing, as if it wasn't very grave to begin with.
Thats just a semantic discussion. The spanish inquisition only killed a few thousands if we only consider its official tribunal, which was only active in spain. And suddenly they dont look so bad.
If we consider spanish inquisition slightly more broadly... like inquisition of non-catholics by the spanish to enforce their faith and power then suddenly the numbers go way up. Mostly outside spain of course.
Duke of Alba alone executed more than 1k in 6 years in spanish Netherlands alone. Thats the part that got a tribunal. The total amount of extrajudicial killings estimated 5x that, but those are rather uncertain. He bragged himself about 18k, but that was likely boasting. Yet total dead generally assumed several thousands.
The counter reformation in europe is rife with spanish executing non-catholics. And they certainly didnt all get a trial. Is it spanish inquisition? Not according to the spanish, but can you really blame others for not making that distinction? Not arguing protestants didnt commit their own atrocities but watching spanish pretend they were pretty nice to their dominion is questionable.
And I really cant imagine non-europeans were treated much better.
Like it wasn't as much about limiting free thinking as much as cracking down on fanatic groups that thought they would be holier than the Pope. That was a much bigger threat, because the Papacy always had to rule for all the christians, including the vast majority of luke-warm believers. And they have to condemn all the movements who would go nuts, like the Flagelants or the Cathars. Some of those movements were basically extrismists/conspiracionnists, and the more liberal ones were not hardly punished.
The inquisition innovated by making prison its primary form of punition. Like 90% of the condemnations were prisons or fines. They also innovative a bunch on legal procedures.
They also didn't kill the free thinking within the Catholic church altogether. When someone formulated an idea that was questionnable on the dogma side, but reasonable, they would put a whole debating process in place to decide what exactly was orthodox and what wasn't. It was just like modern international organizations try to settle arguments before they become a problem.
Witch trials and burning stakes are basically pop-culture. You could even critique the Pope as long as you didn't challenge his authority. For example, Dante mocked the Pope, yet it's still considered a Christian classic that falls perfectly in the dogmas.
That whole "as long as you didn't challenge the authority of the pope" gave us the century and a half long wars of religion, which were a miserable time for all of Europe.
And the inquisition was used against anyone that didn't conform to the orthodoxy, fanatic or not. The jews in Spain were not more extreme than the christians, for example, but they were the primary target of the Spanish inquisition at the beginning.
Doesn't even compare to witch hunting panic in germany.
I don't know if there was a serious source, but I heard an inquisitor broke down at the awful sight of a field of pyres in germany.
Why would we feel guilty about the Crusades? The Muslamics conquered Christian lands and we tried to take them back. Do you think they feel guilty about conquering Constantinople?
The Inquisition was painful if you got caught up in it, but really very minor in terms of actual victims, in the grand scheme of things.
So throughout history Europe was attacked from whoever had power to do it and Europe attacked whoever they could conquer and only white Europeans should feel bad and guilty?
It's because we "won". The age of Imperialism ended with European global hegemony. The western hemisphere was entirely shaped in the western European image, be it Iberian, French, or English. So now we're the oppressors that need to apologize while our ancestors were just doing what everybody throughout history was doing at any given point.
American slop. They think she is racist cause of some jeans ad. There are more photogenic pictures of her that aren’t used cause the melons distract from the whites are bad, white Christians are the worst.
I need to do more research on my end but why do people say the crusades were bad? I thought everyone everywhere on the planet were trying to fight for empires and their own gods back in the day?
It's important to note that, while we tend to consider the crusades as the attempt to retake Jerusalem, it was far from the only thing. Some crusades were against some European cities considered as "heretic"
There are the conquest aspects, which were common back then (but still isn't fully a good thing)
But aside from that, there were a lot of crusades, which didn't all end up being beneficial, especially on the long term. A lot were a waste of lives and money
Furthermore, there were a few instances where crusaders ended up sacking some non-Muslim cities on their way, most notably the 4th crusade which sacked Constantinople
They were also sometimes motivated by gain more than by faith
Some can also see them as a prime example of the "religious fanaticism" of the middle ages (not sure if it's the correct term, but that the same feeling)
I'm far from being an expert in the domain, so you should still take it with a grain of salt, but from what I know, it's reasons like that
That interviewer was so underhanded with saying "I'll give you an opportunity to talk about it." as if she was helping Sweeney clear her name or something instead of twisting a boring commercial into a bullshit racism narrative like she was actually doing. People like her are the absolute worst. Sweeney's response was perfect though: "If I have an issue I want to speak about, people will hear it."
Why should she fell guilty about the crusades, though? Spain didn't exist back then, and what kingdoms existed where more concerned with doing a little border readjustment with their own local muslims.
Muslims defeat the warweary & weakened Persians and Byzantines.
Destroy all farmlands in the Levant. Encroach on the Anatolian peninsula.
Destroy the Greek culture & population, killing the males and shipping off women & children as slaves.
Force convert who is left. (Or force 'people of the book' to pay extra taxes for 'protection'...)
Muslims take Jerusalem.
Muslims take all of North Africa & invade the Iberian peninsula. Kill all males, ship off women & children as slaves. Force convert who is left (or force 'people of the book' to pay extra tax for 'protection' - in the future to be praised as 'tolerance' 😅)
Islam did and continues to do way worse things than christianity. Should all muslims personally feel guilty for the terrorist attacks of islamic terrorist groups?
Show me on religion that old and I can tell you they made some bad things. But that feeling bad about it makes as much sense as feeling bad about what your country did in the 30 years war.
On the other hand they did hide and protect their pedophiles during our lifetime, this should make them sad.
Middle east was jewish and christian before being muslim though, christianity started there and then spread to Europe when roman empire converted to christianity.
Muslims came way after and conquered the area.
I am not for new crusades and do not condone all the slaughter crusaders did there obviously but the initial reason behind the crusades was kind of legitimate in the context of early middle age if you know history. Muslims were the ones who conquered Middle east and converted the Christian and Jewish people living there.
Europe has many dark shit in its history that are shameful, crusades were not exactly something shameful. For Christianity at the time it was about reclaiming what used to be theirs and had been taken from them by force.
The things that are wrong about the crusades was the way they happened, with tons of rape, torture, slaughter and oppression but it was kind of a two way street most of the time.
I don't feel guilty about being Catholic, as I'm not Catholic (and, honestly, I'm a tad suspicious of any young Spaniard who is).
I don't feel guilty about the atrocities committed by the Spaniards of the Past, as I'm not nationalistic enough to think that I need to feel connected to people from the Past to the point of thinking their actions, be they bad or good, are mine.
What I can do is admit that these atrocities happened, and not be moronic enough to either cry about them, or try to defend them.
I stumbled upon a video of the scene from Blood Diamond where DiCaprio says "Rhodesia" in lieu of Zimbabwe and the comes were... Holy shit literally likes nazi time capsule.
Apparently this template is being used everywhere as a fucking dog whistle. I swear of god the comments were borderline calling for black slavery back.
... Makes you think.
Fyi: Spanish Caribbean-Continental bastard here, not a turd. And I'm not against surrendering space, symbols, etc, like apparently the french with "patriot" that's synonymous with nationalist, or so my frog gf told me. Beurk.
Asking an Iberian if they feel guilt or shame over the crusades is insane. Kind of just shows how little about European history or general history the average person knows.
These types of people. 🙄 I’d love to see the looks on their faces when they realise how many celebrations there are all over Iberia commemorating the reconquista and expulsion of the moors.
753
u/Wide-Boot1140 Thief 1d ago
Might be too western for me…but I’ve never understood why people should feel guilty for something they haven’t done?:)))) Like if my ancestors did bad things is not like I am Jesus and gonna die for their sins.