That's not true. The Almohads, unlike the almoravids, forced christian and jews to convert, under threat of death.
Bartolomé de las Casas relates stories of cruelty beyond belief, inhuman monstrosities beyond imagining, atrocities whose publication he delayed for more than thirty years, finally publishing pseudonymously. How many such true accounts have been forgotten because they were denied the Inquisitor's imprimatur? But the Aztecs' human sacrifices to the sun god, used to justify the bringing of "civilization" to the "savages", remain notorious today.
There wasn't much to start with, since the moorish conquest didn't displace the people but "incentivized"(ahem...) people to convert.
> How many conversos did the Inquisitors burn at the stake, generations after their ancestors converted, on the strength of rumormongering by jealous neighbors?
It's hard to know, but I've seen stimates around 3k-5k. Germanic wytchhunts probably had a much higher number of victims. The Inquisition was a pretty bureacratic institution, and it had proper trials with defence lawyers, questioning of witnesses, etc... Inquisitor [Alonso de Salazar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alonso_de_Salazar_Fr%C3%ADas) for example, saved probably thousands of people by setting high standards in Inquisition trials.
Yes, it was VERY BAD and TERRIBLE, I'm not condoning it, but it wasn't the worse that humanity has seen. By far.
I brought it up because the centuries-long intellectual blight that resulted from it is a salient example of the corrupt fruits of the poisoned tree of state censorship, a tree whose root in European history is that very Inquisition.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21397905 for a slightly longer disquisition on that theme.
Anyone that checks out historical records will also discover that the Moors and Jews represented a significant percentage of the population of Iberia before the expulsions, around half a million people out of a total of less than 9 million.
Furthermore, anyone that checks out historical records will discover that the Jewish ghettos were in fact established by Isabel and Ferdinand, the monarchs who also established the Inquisition and, a few years later, expelled the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people and Moors from their lands.
One of the few true statements in your comment is that many empires, not only the Spanish Empire, have been founded on genocide. Among the other abuses of human rights the Spanish Empire also practiced, an abuse which facilitated that genocide, was state censorship.
We should practice neither of these abuses. Do you disagree?
I don't know what the protestant countries had, or how they called it, but they were definitely doing something wrong because the casualties in Spain pale in comparison to those in Germany. It seems that the inquisition saved lifes, after all.
> hundreds of thousands of Moors and Jews fled or were expelled, and that only tens of thousands returned.
What you say is true, but you have to give the numbers: From 200k Jews living there, 100k were expelled and from those 50k returned. The conversion terms offered by the Catholic Kings allowed for quite a comfortable life in the peninsula, and you had to be a really fanatic believer not to take it. It seems, by the way, that you are talking in terms of race and not religion, which I find quite amusing.
> anyone that checks out historical records will discover that the Jewish ghettos were in fact established by Isabel and Ferdinand, the monarchs who also established the Inquisition and, a few years later, expelled the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people and Moors from their lands.
No, the Jewish ghettos were stablished by the Jewish population itself. Spinoza (whose parents were expelled) wrote about that; they were building an empire within an empire, which caused social friction and translated into popular killings or pogroms. One of the earliest tasks of Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordova was the protection of such converts from the mobs. The stablishment of the inquisition attempted to solve the problem institutionally.
> One of the few true statements in your comment is that many empires, not only the Spanish Empire, have been founded on genocide.
I didn't say nor imply that. To say that the Spanish empire is rooted in genocide, at least to the extent of the English and Belgian empire, or nazi Germany is laughable.
You speak with such harshness about the past, but you do it from the eyes of a pathologist, grounded from today's vision (which owes, by the way, a lot to the School of Salamanca and its contributions to natural law and the so called human rights) and so you have no autority, not only to judge it, but to use it as any sort of argument against the current secesionist situation.
> governments burn libraries
Not really.
> Catalan separatists are ... pedophiles
Is there really anyone who said so? Or are we a bit hyperbolical today?
Regarding the libraries comment, it happens plenty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyed_libraries#Hu...
GP may be a bit verbose and dramatic, but the parallels between the Inquisition (a form of censorship) and current events happening in the same geographical location seem to be quite appropriate. He also brings up China besides Spain, so maybe you read too much into the country-specific reference with regards to the original topic.
I think it's a valid warning. All humans equally deserve knowledge, and as long as we have centralized systems then some humans will attempt to censor others. Simple as that.
> Regarding the libraries comment, it happens plenty
Plenty? It happens, yes, but it is not just governments: individuals organize book burnings, authors too: Vergilius wanted to burn his Aeneis. Meanwhile, the RC church had another tool (the Index), and almost no government burns libraries. I think even the Nazis didn't, and certainly the government of my country isn't burning them. I can see one right across the street, and while it's ugly, it's not on fire.
The comment above mine is all hyperbole and whataboutism, probably meant to provoke.
I'm not condoning the approach of the Spanish government to github, BTW. All of their governments seem to shoot into a reflex when the unity is at stake, from the Second Republic up to Sánchez.
There is a thoroughly-substantiated and fairly comprehensive list of library burnings at the link in the comment above yours that you have apparently failed to read. Nearly every single one of them was committed by a government; one of the few exceptions was committed by Nazis.
The argument you are using here could as easily, and as falsely, prove that heart attacks do not kill people; it reads like a satire of illogical reasoning from anecdotes. "My heart attack didn't kill any people. There's a person right across the street from me, and while she's ugly, she's not dying of a heart attack." Still, about one out of five humans eventually die of a heart attack, and when libraries are burned, nearly always a government is the culprit.
Moreover, the entire reason we are discussing governments burning libraries is an attack by the current Spanish government on GitHub, an electronic library that is one of the greatest libraries humanity has ever created; among its endless collections of worthless trivia, it contains comprehensive repositories of mathematical, algorithmic, electronic, chemical, and physics knowledge, amounting to a substantial fraction of what humankind can be said to know.
This attack perhaps does not amount to a burning of a library, only a bookshelf within it — and a failed burning at that, since evidently the information has been preserved intact and remains available. But it takes a particularly extreme kind of arrogant foolishness to interpret that situation as demonstrating the nonexistence of the menace rather than its omnipresence.
In short, your vicious comment is simultaneously intentionally insulting, diametrically opposed to well-documented objective facts that you knew or should have known (which is to say, it is a lie), and very poorly reasoned. You should not have posted it.
Genocidal nightmares? I get that you are attempting to be poetic but do inform yourself about the historicity of your claims:
> The Inquisition was originally welcomed to bring order to Europe because states saw an attack on the state’s faith as an attack on the state as well.
> The Inquisition technically had jurisdiction only over those professing to be Christians.
> The courts of the Inquisition were extremely fair compared to their secular counterparts at the time.
> The Inquisition was responsible for less than 100 witch-hunt deaths, and was the first judicial body to denounce the trials in Europe.
> Though torture was commonly used in all the courts of Europe at the time, the Inquisition used torture very infrequently.
> During the 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition, between 3,000-5,000 people were sentenced to death (about 1 per month).
> The Church executed no one.
https://strangenotions.com/spanish-inquisition/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_revision_of_the_Inq...
From the Wikipedia article you mention:
>A number of procedures and protections restricted the torture of the accused, although much torture could be inflicted, and capital punishment was executed by secular authorities due to the clerical prohibition on shedding blood.
"We didn't execute anyone! We just decided who would be executed!"
For every Giordano Bruno burned at the stake, a thousand monks prudently refrained from exploring controversial issues, and a hundred thousand loyal Catholics remained fettered in an intellectual darkness so profound they could not even see their chains.
The cost of the Inquisition is not to be measured only in the smoking corpses of scholars and Jewish and Muslim people, or even those falsely accused of practicing Judaism, but in the lost memory of entire civilizations, and in the books that were never written. It is to be weighed by the end of Galileo's scientific career, in Descartes' cowardly refusal to publish his greatest work until after his death, and in his inability to learn from the criticisms that ensued. It is evident in the near absence of Iberian and Italian philosophers from the birth of physics, chemistry, and the calculus; even Lagrange left Italy in the end.
That today we fly through the air like birds; that we live in artificial mountains of glued-together stone; that we walk on the moon; that we use precious steel where our great-grandparents used wood; that only one in thirty children die before reaching adulthood, instead of one in five, as through all human history; that we routinely cure cancer; that I am writing you this note in letters of lightning playing over the surface of tiny stones from the other side of the world — these miracles are all thanks to the fact that the Inquisition did not reach England, or Prussia, or the Low Countries, except briefly. These miracles are thanks to the noble fruits of free inquiry.
About your comments, I can point to some excerpts in the Inquisition wikipedia article:
> The Inquisition was established as a genocidal institution against the Jewish and Muslim populace of Iberia,
"The Inquisition was originally intended primarily to identify heretics among those who converted from Judaism and Islam to Catholicism"
There was no genocidal intention, its a nuance but important. It wasn't established to "find every Muslim and put it on a stake".
> For every Giordano Bruno burned at the stake, a thousand monks prudently refrained from exploring controversial issues, and a hundred thousand loyal Catholics remained fettered in an intellectual darkness so profound they could not even see their chains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Censorship
"The censorship of books was actually very ineffective, and prohibited books circulated in Spain without significant problems. The Spanish Inquisition never persecuted scientists, and relatively few scientific books were placed on the Index. On the other hand, Spain was a state with more political freedom than in other absolute monarchies in the 16th to 18th centuries."
"Despite the repeated publication of the Indexes and a large bureaucracy of censors, the activities of the Inquisition did not impede the development of Spanish literature's "Siglo de Oro", although almost all of its major authors crossed paths with the Holy Office at one point or another."
> The cost of the Inquisition is not to be measured only in the smoking corpses of Jewish and Muslim people, or even those falsely accused of practicing Judaism, but in the lost memory of entire civilizations, and in the books that were never written.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Death_toll...
"evertheless, some authors consider that the toll may have been higher, keeping in mind the data provided by Dedieu and García Cárcel for the tribunals of Toledo and Valencia, respectively, and estimate between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed" [...] "In either case, this is significantly lower than the number of people executed exclusively for witchcraft in other parts of Europe during about the same time span as the Spanish Inquisition (estimated at c. 40,000–60,000)."
How many potential Spinozas did we lose to the Inquisition because they had the misfortune of being born in Spain instead of in the Low Countries?
England and Holland were certainly guilty of atrocities, at home and in their colonies abroad, but the indigenous peoples of many of their colonies retained their cultures. The Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee survives today, and possibly it inspired the revival of democracy in Europe. Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, and Buddhism survive in India today, as does knowledge of Vedic, Pali, and Sanskrit, despite centuries of English enslavement and exploitation. Contrast this with the fate of the cultural legacies of the Inka, the Maya, the Caribs, and the Quilmes.
Genocide does not require extermination. Cultural obliteration and mass expulsion — the explicit intent of the Inquisition, and to a very great extent achieved throughout Iberia and the Spanish colonies in America — are equally genocidal.
So, I say, do not accept censorship. It is a poisonous remedy, and it kills what is most precious in human culture before it begins to cure the illness for which it was prescribed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition
> he Spanish Inquisition is often cited in popular literature and history as an example of religious intolerance and repression. Some historians have come to conclude that many of the charges levied against the Inquisition are exaggerated, and are a result of the Black Legend produced by political and religious enemies of Spain, especially England.
Please, feel free to point me to any unbiased source.
> Jefferson's future or Stalin's
You know, there is an awful lot of space between the two, the entire globe doesn't need to adopt US mores on everything or is inevitably an oppressive dictatorship shipping folks off to the Siberian gulag. That kind of black and white expression of the "correct ideology" helps no one.
FWIW I happen to have a fair amount of sympathy for the Catalan separatists in light of the draconian Spanish response to a group seeking self-determination. Hopefully Spain can first achieve less anachronistic law on secession, as I generally think what the locals want is what matters most. They should have opportunity to vote for independence -- or remain part of Spain.
I have no sympathy for the Catalan separatists; I think they are a bunch of nationalist clowns. I think dark days will come to Catalunya if they succeed in their secessionist mission. But I think that is a far less important issue than preserving the intellectual heritage of humanity, rather than subjugating the noble pursuit of reason and freedom to the depraved animalistic contest of dominance that these "laws" serve.
Don't create central points of vulnerability to coercion. That multiplies the effectiveness of coercive force. Create decentralized systems. Git, not GitHub. Bitcoin, not Citibank. Email, not Gmail — although we still need to free email from DNS.
Never forget how the Spanish Inquisition — the origin, in the West, of these sorts of degraded "laws" against "criminal content" — treated the Jewish people and the keepers of the quipu. Reaching back further, remember how Qin Shi Huang treated the Mohists, infinitely his superiors in every respect.
People will say it's justified because the Catalan separatists are fascists, terrorists, pedophiles, or whatever. It's not justified. The rulers of al-Andalus were no angels either, but their abuses were nothing compared to the genocidal nightmares the Inquisition concealed with its censorship.
Today we are building the systems we will live in tomorrow. Do you want a future of a thousand Inquisitions or a thousand Miltons and a thousand Humboldts? Do you want Jefferson's future or Stalin's? A new Dark Age or a new Enlightenment? Will a thousand schools of thought contend, or will the people of the world suffer a sanitized environment devoid of "degenerate art" and "bourgeois ideals"? Will they remember what really happened, teasing the truth out of biased accounts written from many points of view, or will they only be able to read history as written by the victors, the version whose "correct ideology" earns it the censor's imprimatur?
It depends on how vulnerable our systems make human rights, and in particular the right to knowledge.
As a hacker, you decide what tomorrow's books are made of. Will they be printed on celluloid, which goes up like gunpowder with a spark? Or will they be etched in bright sheets of stainless steel?
Because governments burn libraries.
But cypherpunks write code.
† That's "states" to you Brits.
[edited extensively]