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
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.