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Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, Hanania was right again *
Two months ago, Richard Hanania predicted that Nick Fuentes and the groypers would become a major force in mainstream Republican politics. At the time, there was a fair bit of TheMotte discussion (including by me) which could be described as dismissive. Some choice quotes:
Yeah, about that... A few days ago Nick Fuentes did a full interview with Tucker Carlson. This was a mild surprise at most, given that Tucker has been dabbling in less-than-sympathetic viewpoints on Israel and Jews as of late. A lot of people thought that this would be the nail in the coffin cementing Tucker as a fringe figure, and that his days headlining major conservative events would end.
This appears not to have happened:
The Heritage Foundation is the Conservative Establishment think tank. It doesn't get more mainstream than them. What is striking is that the statement doesn't just contrast America with Israel, it contrasts Christians with Israel, a tacit acknowlegement of the legitimacy of Christian discomfort with Israel specifically because of their rejection of Christ. This isn't quite total groyper victory, but one can see it on the horizon.
From a realpolitik perspective, I think this is bad. The groypers are right that Israel doesn't act in America's interests and that many American Jews have dual loyalty. That's how coalitions work. A few billion dollars in aid and geopolitical cover is a small price to pay for having the ethnic group that controls international finance and global media on your side. Rooting-out infidels might be a good strategy if Christ is King, but if he isn't, and it turns out we're all alone on this big round rock, then the groypers are blowing-up the conservative intelligentsia for no good reason.
*Apparently this is a series now.
Not even then. Generally speaking Christianity has looked down in that sort of thing.
Bloody Verdict of Verdun: widely condemned by the Church at the time, contemporary historians considered it a black mark on Charlemagne’s record.
Various Pogroms: not looked on fondly today, often bishops and priests would take on Jews to try to protect them from mobs.
Spanish Inquisition: Widely considered a mistake that didn’t work.
And honestly Jews make good allies against the Muslims, which are the real threat to Christendom. A quarter of the planet is Muslim, Jews are single digit percentage.
The Inquisition coincided with the Spanish Golden Age, the height of the Spanish Empire, the height of Spanish music and art, and the expansion of Spain into the New World where now hundreds of millions are Spanish-descended Catholics. If God worked in superstitious ways, you can hardly imagine an act more commended by Him than the Inquisition. Would there have been a flourishing of Catholic Spain if a larger percent of the rich were Sephardic Jews? No. They did not fund any music and barely any pictorial art, let alone Christian music and art, but directed their profits to their own communities.
The inquisition was a monarchist attempt at gentling, centralizing, and regulating the series of irregular popular riots and local parish manias which had previously characterized concerns about false conversions and other anti-jewish sentiments. Ironically, the papal attitude was that even these efforts were far too harsh, and that the spaniards were just targeting people in order to seize their wealth rather than out of any actual proof of heresy/insincerity.
Well, yes, that's what happens when you've just finished a century-long process of reconquest of some of the richest lands in Europe, and then just-so-happen to have oodles of now-unoccupied fighting men laying around right when an explorer bumps into a whole new civilization sitting on some of the biggest silver mines in the world, and who has no resistance to any of the diseases that you're accustomed to. The inquisition had nothing to do with any of that.
Yes, because increasing the percentage of wealthy spaniards which were jewish wouldn't have changed anything about the quality of Toledo steel, the tactics of the proto-Tercios, or the susceptibility of Aztecs, Maya, and Incas to old world diseases. Nor would jews have done anything to decrease the quality or output of the mines at Potosi.
Correct me if I'm wrong but Spain proper always had a low population density, at least through the spanish golden age. Crazy-big Spanish armies were due to new world extraction that was more due to Spain happening to conquer two gigantic ancient empires, one of which sat on a literal mountain made of silver, and a technological breakthrough in metals refining allowing the spanish to exploit more marginal mines in the new world. You can maybe blame the latter on something to do with Spain but Spanish military exploits were more like a random third-world dictatorship striking oil and suddenly buying top of the line military kit for long running wars in their near abroad than anything else. The Spanish army wasn't even mostly actual Spaniards.
Catholic Spain's cultural flourishing, on the other hand, mostly was the crown. Again, Spain's native military, cultural, and technological edge was not their, most of their soldiers and inventors and artists and a weirdly high percentage of conquistadors were literally not Spanish(Holland and Northern Italy and Greece all birthed notable 'Spaniards' in the period). The decision to keep launching moonshot expeditions at conquering parts of the new world, and not start moonshot ventures at eg invading China(a real plan that was presented to the Spanish crown), was the Spanish government. The decision to import the absolute best artists and engineers was the crown. There simply weren't enough Spaniards. Spanish armies were hilariously small when they actually enforced the de jure requirement for Spanish blood.
And Latin America being like 90% Spanish speaking Catholics(until recently) was also a crown priority; they could easily have been a normal conquering empire, just give us tribute type thing. The Incas sat on a literal mountain made of silver and could pay whatever bribe. The Spanish crown just really wanted to spread their culture and religion.
Which one is that? I haven't heard that one.
The patio method allowed the spanish to use silver ores that wouldn't have been profitable otherwise; like all pre-industrial regimes, their ability to mobilize labour(very much including soldiers but also the craftsmen, farmers etc to equip and feed those soldiers) was rate-limited by their net production of silver coins to pay for that labour(proles in history expect to be paid in silver, not gold, gold isn't the equivalent of a ben franklin- it's the equivalent of $100k bill, basically a year's salary for the upper end of the class that does actual work. Soldiers and labourers are paid in silver alloyed coins, gold alloys are used for big budget transactions between large companies[mostly reconciling accounts] and pure gold is mostly an accounting fiction for budgets and the like). Economics is just really different in an era where the labor theory of value isn't BS. The patio method allowed silver mines which had the high value ores tapped out to be continually exploited, giving Spain a revenue stream to equip its armies better(remember the labour theory of value is actually true until ~1750) and recruit more soldiers. Most Spanish soldiers, armorers, farmers feeding their armies, etc were Germans who had to be paid in cash to prevent defection; that's not to say Spanish armies in the eighty years war were particularly well run(they were a logistical disaster, the same as the modern day Saudi army- again, this is the equivalent of a third world country striking oil and suddenly having an unlimited credit line for military equipment) but at a certain point blacksmiths can just not cooperate particularly well, you have to fork over the money. Spanish army chits were worth the paper they were printed on because Spain had unlimited cash reserves due to the ability to reopen tapped out mines with superior refining methods- even the loot from the inca and aztec empires runs out fast.
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