Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition
pnas.org
pnas.org
These include the Nguyen Lords persecutions and ethnic cleansing of Chams people that used to live and control more than half of modern Vietnam, for more than a thousand years [1],[2].
Interestingly, both of the Catholic Church of Spain and Nguyens Lords of Vietnam regimes employed Pig or Pork Policy as a control measures to forcefully integrate the remaining Muslims community that were not migrated away but chosen to stay behind [3],[4].
[1] Nguyễn lords:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguy%E1%BB%85n_lords
[2] History of the Cham–Vietnamese wars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Cham%E2%80%93Vi...
[3] Pork politics and the Spanish Inquisition:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/06/pork-politics-...
[4] Spain decides to make up for its persecution of Jews — but won't do the same for Muslims:
https://theweek.com/articles/445777/spain-decides-make-perse...
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170929-the-unlikely-sau...
Yup, like the Coptic Christians of Egypt. Or Christians in the Middle East/Near East more generally.
Because they rebelled against the Spanish Crown, lost the war and left of were expelled [1].
Through the history of Spain there has been waves of conquerors that have forced their culture to the natives (with different level of success): Carthage [2], Rome [3], Goths [4] and Arabs [5]. Most of the time, the natives converted to their masters' language, culture and religion. Of course, most of the time, those who refused to assimilate, were then battled, exterminated and those that were alive left or were expelled (Numantians in the case of the Roman conquest [6], Christians in the case of the Arab/Muslim conquest, Muslims in the case of the Christian re-conquest). It's not pretty but it's the history of the Iberian Peninsula.
- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebellion_of_the_Alpujarras_(1568%E2%80%931571)
- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthage
- [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_conquest_of_the_Iberian_Peninsula
- [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visigothic_Kingdom
- [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umayyad_conquest_of_Hispania
- [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NumantiaIf you don’t understand the meme, it’s an old Monty Python skit[1].
Smoothly done, but obvious to anyone that knows the reference.
The big possible confounder might be that the inquisition correlates with Muslim ("morisco") or Jewish presence. There's a big literature arguing that ethnic heterogeneity weakens trust, and that might persist over time even when the ethnic heterogeneity has vanished. But: "adding a control for pre-expulsion morisco population has little impact on the results."
Being rich tends to coincide with having some kind of power. The poor people are more likely to be targeted by oppressive campaigns of any sort, because rich people use their power to protect themselves.
There would be nothing exceptional about targeting poor rather then rich and powerful.
Maybe the CCP can do a randomized controlled trial.
They dont? Religious minorities tend to worst then majority. They do sometimes get accused to be too rich by propaganda.
Jew in Europe nor in Germany specifically before WWII were not actually richer, statistically. They were on average lower middle class. Many of them were poor and refugees from eastern europe. Where individuals have been more successful, majority resented that and wanted to punish all Jews for it.
Yazidi are not richer then average in Iraque. Kurds are not richer then majority.
In other words, defund the Spanish Inquisition?
(The white bit doesn't really count because afaik is empty anyway)
The vast number of commentators seem to be taking the insanity at face value. A lot of comments like 'Wow, that's an interesting perspective' of 'I've never heard that, they don't teach us everything in school'.
While I'm not worried about that meme, it's just shocking to see how easy it is to delude people.
Combined with the Pew polling showing young people don't really get their news from normative sources, it's a bit worrying. Cable news is all Senior Citizens while Gen Z is off on Twitch and TikTok.
You can see evidence of that sort of thing in every online community, even right here on Hacker News. No community is immune from being weaponized to spread outright nonsense. The question is what you can do about it.
2. Even if she was serious, the reaction amongst most users has been extremely incredulous and negative. Her follower count has stalled/slipped and the various anthropology/history/other social science creators have had a great time debunking her.
3. If you’re not seeing the negative assessments of her content in her interactions, it’s due to how she handles contradicting comments and duets/stitches.
Both of those are garbage sources. It's a lateral move, in my opinion.
TikTok, Reddit etc. is mostly just fantasy, opinion.
Older people are much better informed about current issues.
Watching the Kyle Rittenhouse coverage, pre-trial, from Fox and MSNBC was like watching the Soviets and Americans combat each other with propaganda.
Actually watching the trial and the information as it came out felt truly enlightening.
My view is that the press 'narratives', even if they technically 'do not lie' (i.e. standards) are more damaging than for example, QAnon or Flat Earth.
We are being told what to believe and I think this has a much stronger effect than we realize, because it even works on people who are pretty smart. Self Awareness takes effort to accept that there is bias, to really open one's mind, to search for uncomfortable facts, to accept them at face value, and then to think about it outside the concept of some accepted ideology or worldview, and the social/group pressures that apply. It's just too easy to be influenced by talking heads.
I would disagree here. We are being told what to believe but that's nothing new, just look at how much press coverage minority issues got 100 years ago. Qanon, on the other hand, isn't misrepresentation but outright misinformation that turns some into outright insane conspiracy theorists believing JFK Jr is returning from the grave.
And one of the more insane subreddits, I got linked from a nursing subreddit, is a "penectomy" subreddit for people who want to remove their members, not because of gender dysphoria, but because of a sexual fetish. I regret to say there were pictures as well. That's straight up mental illness, but it's got a whole community to validate peoples delusions. The power to normalize is as worrying as the power to fashion a narrative. It's more than political, it encompasses everything.
Anyone who's been on /b/ can tell you, while the media is awful, places where CP is so common there are memes about it represent another level entirely. In a sense that's being told what to believe through social concensus. It'd sound insane to say one of the most popular websites in the early 2000s regularly had CP posted but it's okay because that's just free speech. Unless you've been there, which many people here have, in which case it becomes normalized and just "one of those bad things that happens regardless of policing". That's so much more worrying to me than governments and the media trying to control information as they always have.
In 2019 the median white household held $188,200 in wealth—7.8 times that of the typical Black household $24,100.
Touche
How many people understand the converso crisis and its antecedents that threatened the very existence of Spain? The widespread social unrest that resulted that the Inquisition was brought in the resolve? Or that the judicial standards of the Inquisition were ahead of their time?
Persecution and forced conversion were not the objective, and indeed, the very notion of forced conversion is understood as not only evil by Catholics since it violates the conscience of the unbeliever, but it is an impossible feat because conversion can only be done freely. Rather, it was the widespread fear of feigned conversions, to obtain high offices, among the general populace that led to widespread unrest (many conversos had attained high ranking positions in the Spanish government). Whether there was any truth to these fears is another story, but the unrest was such a threat to the stability of Spain, that the Spanish Inquisition was called to resolve this crisis by subjecting the matter to an orderly judicial process. Some may argue that the later ultimatum of conversion or expulsion is a kind of de facto coerced conversion, but that's debatable, especially given the number of Jews who left for places like Poland.
We can criticize the affair (which, despite the investigation of claims of heresy, was actually of a secular character), but the attention it has received though the "Black Legend" as some egregious orgy of evil (committed by the Protestant's favorite punching bag, the Church) out of step with even the common practices of the day is simply wrong. Sadly, these sorts of things can seep into historical accounts and curricula, especially when they agree with prejudices. So I wonder about the substance of an article that uses this episode as a basis for investigating this question.
- 1066 Granada Massacre (Granada was a Muslim Kingdom at that time)[2]
- England: 1190 York Massacre [3]
- Castile & Leon: 1391 Massacre [4]
- Brussels: 1370 Brussels massacre [5]
- ... [6]
Thus, jews were expelled from countries in Europe all the time [7], Spain was in fact one of the last countries to do so, on a side note, most countries expelled jews much earlier e.g.
Most of the Spanish jews chose to be baptized (among them the Abraham Senior, a senior member of the Castilian hacienda [8]) and is estimated that from a population of 400,000 a half of them remained in Iberia. Other sources (Henry Kamen) claim that [from] "80,000 Jews and 200,000 conversos, about 40,000 emigrated".
Of course, those who remained were subjected to discrimination as conversos, but that's another issue that even them was subjected to criticism by some important figures like Ignacio de Loyola (founder of Jesuits).
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/anti-Semitism/Anti-Semitism-in-medieval-Europe
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_Granada_massacre
[3] https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/cliffords-tower-york/history-and-stories/massacre-of-the-jews/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_1391
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_massacre
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medieval_anti-Jewish_pogroms
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsions_and_exoduses_of_Jews
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_SeniorHowever, I'm afraid that the popularization of the Spanish Inquisition [1] is due to propaganda. It is called Black Legend in academic circles and the publication in England and The Netherlands (and their orbits) of exagerated stories about the atrocities of the Spanish Crown, Spaniards and the Spanish Inquisition is because of that.
Most of the sufferers of the Spanish Inquisiton were Spaniards, and the Holy Office had the aim of control (with an iron fist) the population, not exterminate them. In fact, during its 4 centuries of life, the Inquisition executed around 6,000 people [2] (according to Henry Kamen). For example, you can compare to the 57,000 - 70,000 people killed during the reign of Henry VIII (only 40 years)[3][4]
- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend_(Spain)
- [2] https://strangenotions.com/spanish-inquisition/
- [3] https://www.history.co.uk/article/the-killer-king-how-many-people-did-henry-viii-execute
- [4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/how-could-you-survive-in-tudor-england/znvmkmnWhat I want to highlight, is that the behavior of the Spanish Inquisition, while abhorrent to our XXI eyes, were not uncommon during those times. Note please that I'm not justifying anything, I'm making a point that Human History has been horrible during almost of its existence: discrimination, wars, slavery, segregation, etc. Human Rights are a "new thing".
Funny you say that, given how one of the cornerstones of Catholicism is forced conversion of children.
And it’s definitely a forced conversion: the whole purpose is to explicitly ignore one’s will, and is used to “trap” children into religion, generally followed by indoctrination about alleged “obligations” and “duties”.
Even so is it isn't forceful-- you'll find children in fact want to be like their parents, and even go out of their way to imitate their behavior and beliefs.
Catholic child conversion is forceful in that it ignores the will of the subject. You'll find that even though children tend to follow their parents, many/most of children of Catholic parents don't want to have anything to do with that religion once they grow up. You'll also find that the chance of someone becoming a Catholic is close to zero unless they have been indoctrinated from very early age. You'll find a lot of statistics showing both.
Except you are defining what logic is, while many would disagree so it's still enforcing your own world view on others. The only difference is instead of enforcing a creator, it enforces lack of a creator.
>Catholic child conversion is forceful in that it ignores the will of the subject.
I was talking about religion, and now you're talking about the sect of one religion. Are jainists subject to this problem? Buddhists? Is shinto? Your making big sweeping statements and giving granular defenses.
>You'll find that even though children tend to follow their parents, many/most of children of Catholic parents don't want to have anything to do with that religion once they grow up. You'll also find that the chance of someone becoming a Catholic is close to zero unless they have been indoctrinated from very early age
[Citation needed]. Your adding a lot of qualifiers, sure there are statistics that reflect a fraction of what you're saying but you're creating a huge narrative around it that's unfounded.
>Religious conversion is by definition a conversion to a religion
Okay and conversion just means "a change in character, form or function". Sounds like exactly what school is designed to do. What difference religion makes is up for debate-- brainwashing political or social values is just as dangerous for example but you took no issue with that.
Religiously motivated, but conducted by laypeople, yes?
> Rather, it was the widespread fear of feigned conversions, to obtain high offices, among the general populace that led to widespread unrest (many conversos had attained high ranking positions in the Spanish government).
Sounds like the same tropes used to spread racism and fear of migrants in our times.
Except they set up an institution to investigate people from other races and cultures who tried to integrate and assimilate, tortured them for confessions and burned them alive if they were found to still secretly maintain any traditions of their own culture.
I can see why people with a Catholic identity would want to whitewash the history of their church, if they feel singled out for criticism. But you are right that it wasn’t only Catholics who did bad things, and the Inquisition probably didn’t do them _because_ they were Catholic. Doesn’t make it any less evil though.