Where are my fellow spain haters?
I see a lot of hate here for the french and british which is valid of course but no one ever talks about spain. I’ve been learning a lot about colonialism in the Americas and honestly I wanna go back in time so I can strangle hernan cortez to death with my bare hands. I have shed genuine tears for people who lived centuries before me. I cannot die at peace knowing spain still exists.
This was supposed to be a sorta joke sorta serious post but I’m deciding to expand on the serious bit.
emotion dump
The more I learn about history the angrier I get about the state of the world. It’s incredible that it has come to this. How have we not gotten past this? It’s the same shit over and over with a different face, how do most people not see this? I feel so incredibly powerless to even begin to approach changing the problems I see in our world. Hell I feel powerless to affect even smaller local issues. Sitting here and watching the slaughter and abuse perpetrated by our ruling class is sickening but what am I to do really? So I sit in my room and shake with rage, I sob for people I can never even meet and everyday that pressure in my chest grows. I feel this insatiable desire to do something but there is genuinely so little I can do where I am. Reading helps I find, developing myself political helps me feel like I am atleast doing something, not just pretending these problems don’t exist like I see so many others doing. I find though, that reading history has the opposite effect. It’s cathartic in that I can let out those awful turbulent emotions through my empathy with different subjugated peoples and my anger at their oppressors. I can let these emotions fill me so that I may understand them better and fuel my revolutionary spirit. This was true in the beginning at least. These days however, its just depressing and awful. I come out of these journeys into the past wondering if things will ever change when they have gone on like this for so long. Will I ever see the world I dream of? Will the slaughter ever end? Idk really, no one ever does I suppose. I smoke a lot more these days.
I know many of you here are likely more educated than me on both history and theory so I ask. How do y’all cope? How do you maintain hope?
Shit genuinely has me like
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Probably because spain has been an irrelevant shithole for much longer than the anglos, frogs etc
Spain gets a pass only because there are so many horrible countries in Europe that let it hide in the crossfire.
France: racist post-colonial nuclear power with a neoliberal fash-baiter running the show
Germany: trying to revive the Nazi legacy is half a dozen countries at once
Italy: Run by the granddaughter of Nazi sympathisers
UK: [the horrors]
And that’s only the ones I could be bothered to list. Not that Spain isn’t worthy of joining them but there’s more than a few targets for hate when it comes to fucking awful European powers.
I don’t do it because here in portugal it’s very common to do it, and it feels gauche because they’re literally our biggest trading partner
Spain is one of the top 3 “countries that are barely held together” in Europe. It’s inclined to break up, but for the next half century at least there’s too many stitches keeping it intact.
Balkanize Western Europe, lessen the concentration of capital and political blackmail.
anger is more acute the closer to the present events are, almost everywhere the spanish empire was it has been eclipsed more recently by anglo, US, or French imperialism. while people can be angry about multiple things at once, a longstanding historical grievance is less visceral than the people/systems that are making people hungry and poor today.
also this is a predominantly anglo forum people here are as a rule uneducated about it
The fact that damn near 100% of Latin Americans speak Spanish and are Catholic speaks to how thorough Spanish colonialism is. Hell, the fact that “Latin American” as a racial category even exists is a testament to their indigenous erasure. There’s so much Zionist apologia from Western powers about how Jews need a homeland to protect their religion and culture. Well, where’s the fervor for a Maya state? And a Muisca state? And a state for the dozens of other peoples that also suffered genocide at their hands?
The damage caused by the Spanish empire is so extensive that reparations are never remotely entertained, or even fucking mentioned, because it would ruin smol bean Spain. And we can’t have that! Not Spain!!!
brb, going back in time to devastate the Spanish with a series of wars against Portugal so that neither side has the capacity to colonize
But as a kindness, I will still bring potatoes and tomatoes to the Old World, but say that I found them in the ruins of Atlantis
Tell them that Atlantis will kill anyone who tries to sail across the Atlantic because they own the ocean.
Poseidon is real and he is very, very angry that we killed all the Cyclopses
Yes, it exists, still has a monarchy and practices forms of neo-colonialist corporatist oppression, both in its former colonies and in the territories within its borders.
Next to them is Portugal, which also did its own. What about Holland, Belgium or Germany, with smaller empires but ruled with special brutality?
Reading about the Shark Island concentration camps and the broader Herero and Namaqua genocide convinced me that the imperial Germans were as bad as anyone else.
We usually get tired after considering the depths of atrocity of USA, exhausted after remembering Brutish Empire, completely flattened when we next turn to mention France, so we don’t have much of energy of hate left to properly dispense among all the colonial powers :(
Also don’t forgot those who might not have had big empires themselves but who profited from supplying and enabling the big empires. When it comes to imperialism, no European nation is free from sin.
Columbus may have been Italian, but he sailed and killed and enslaved under the Spanish crown. Somehow Spain gets let off the hook.
I think it’s because Spain bankrupted itself and became a sickly shadow of its former self that everyone kinda bullied around for a couple centuries so it’s not as “fresh” in people’s minds but Spain did some really fucked up things. The legacy of their “castas” system can be found in the racist jim crow laws of the USA south, for instance.
There are cool stories of indigenous resistance most people don’t know of, though. Like how the Mapuche in what is today Chile taught themselves how to ride horses and stole Spanish steeds and in the foothills of the Andes waged pitched cavalry battles against Spanish soldiers.
Death to the tapas empire.
