Comment on Yeah, turns out a lot of people belived that slavery was bad 500 years ago too
shawn1122@sh.itjust.works 1 week agoThs Spanish and Portugese were brutal colonists. While Protestant colonial powers would prefer to kill you via bureaucracy, Catholic ones wouldn’t hesitate to proceed straight to rape, murder, torture etc.
Perhaps by being the incumbent branch of Christianity, and having state support via the Papacy and its Terra Nullius (ie. land occupied by non-Christians doesn’t belong to anyone) doctine, they felt moral accountability was less of a concern. That or they felt like they were going to heaven regardless of their actions via the Pope’s blessing.
Vasco Da Gama, the Columbus of the East, is known for the following after arriving in Kerala India:
1) Setting a civilian boat returning from Mecca on fire and refusing even to take payment to end the suffering. It took several days for the boat to sink and Portugese accounts detail the wails of women and children as several hundred died slowly. It’s said that women held up their babies above the flames begging for mercy. The few children that did survive were kidnapped and forcibly converted to Christianity.
2) When the local ruler (Zamorin) refused to expel every Muslim from Calicut (who de Gama perceived to be his competition for trade), he kidnapped a group of fishermen, had their bodies cut to pieces, and sent it to the Zamorin with a note saying to make a stew out of it.
3) When trade negotiations failed, he pioneered European colonial “gunboat diplomacy” by pointing his naval fleet at the unfortified city of Calicut, opening fire on civilians.
These two are the OGs of European colonialism. Both are venerated to this day.
acockworkorange@mander.xyz 1 week ago
Which powers? The Brits, French, and Dutch? They were absolutely vile. Europeans were a very hateful boil on earth back then.
shawn1122@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
You’re absolutely right but they were more likely to say “ok here’s the rulebook we wrote for you” (however unreasonable) “oh, you broke a rule? You deserve what’s about to happen to you” (which is also probably unreasonable). This applies especially to the British. The Spanish and Portugese would just go straight to massacre.
This isn’t in any way meant to white wash their actions, just to bring light to the efforts they made to legitimize their cruelty, which was largely effective at the time. Many nations are still working hard to rid themselves of the colonial narratives and perceptions built off the outcomes of this bureaucracy of exploitation.
It’s much easier to say the Goan inquisition is bad/immoral but there are still people that argue today that British engineered famines were not Britain’s fault because points to the rulebook/bureaucracy. It’s an incredibly powerful tool for shifting accountability and victim blaming.