#Imperial Spain

[enjymemink]

Thank you Spain, we'll remember your good deeds.

[politijohn]

Source

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[toastedbiali]

[useless-catalanfacts]

Translation:

El Español (newspaper): The victory of parents like Sonia: 107 schools switch Valencian for Spanish because of the Mazón law.

Response: Is it possible that Spain is the only country where it's considered a victory the fact that your children will be only monolingual instead of bilingual?

Surely not the only one (imperialist countries very often try to exterminate the languages of the countries they occupy, which also means not allowing their children to learn the language of the place they move to), but Spain and France are particularly aggressive against the local languages that aren't Spanish and French, respectively.

Schools in the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands (where the local language is Catalan or Valencian, two historical names for the same language) are being pressured to remove the local language from the school and to teach only in Spanish. In fact, the Spanish nationalist and far right-wing government of the Balearic Islands has announced that Catalan-speaking children and Spanish-speaking children will be segregated in schools from now on (parents will choose which school to send them to, accompanied with the propaganda pushing them to choose Spanish schools), with the purpose of reducing every time more and more who gets to speak and learn the islands' language, imposing Spanish instead.

Everyone learns Spanish regardless because it's the government's language and it's everywhere (TV, radio, netflix, social media, etc), plus we study it in school as a first language anyway. It's impossible to grow up here and not learn Spanish naturally as you grow up. But the same is not true the other way around. If children from Spanish-speaking families, immigrant families, and those families who have believed the decades of being told "speaking Catalan makes you sound uneducated/rural/stupid/rude, only Spanish is good for your children's future and makes you normal", if their children are only exposed to Spanish at home and on media, and because Catalan speakers are already bilingual and have an inferiority complex so will always switch to Spanish when talking to a Spanish-speaker, these children will never learn the language of the place they live in, and they will be monolingual Spanish speakers. When the number of monolingual Spanish speakers grow, Catalan speakers will be even more marginalized and won't be able to access healthcare in our language (though we already don't half of the time), won't be able to go to the shops and talk in our language, won't be able to have services in our language, etc. And, thus, they will have made our language almost useless for our everyday life. We will disappear from public spaces, and people will stop passing down the language to their children. And the language will die, and with it our way of understanding the world, the words that describe our culture, or our ability to read what our ancestors wrote, our country's literature, or to understand the names of the places we live in.

The point was always to exterminate our language and culture, to create their made-up dream of a unified Spain where everyone is the same, which has never existed. As Franco used to say, "we want an absolute unit. With one language: Spanish. And one personality: the Spanish one".

Cultural diversity is a richness and beauty of the world, and every language has an equal right to exist. Don't let anyone convince you that your language and your people don't deserve to live.

[hero-israel]

DECOLONIZE PALESTINE!

White Eurocentrists are working overtime to colonize Middle Eastern politics, undermine national sovereignty and the rule of law, and make wars longer and deadlier.

The whole point of the ICC's existence is that it can intervene in countries that don't have independent court systems. In addition to Israel not being a party to the ICC anyway, past ICC leaders have said the Israeli court system is perfectly capable of prosecuting their own criminals - it isn't like some anarchic ex-Libyan splinter-statelet or eastern European dictatorship where all the judges are just store mannequins with the leader's face on them. Netanyahu is under active criminal indictment, his judicial overhaul FAILED. For the ICC to step in anyway completely undercuts their own value proposition and reason for existence, and also makes clear that having an independent court system doesn't matter at all AND ISN'T WORTH FIGHTING FOR. But, uhhhh, people should totally still act like their judgments are morally serious!

And then a bunch of Europeans went and "recognized" Palestine, even though Palestine does not have control of its borders, does not have unified leadership, does not have a monopoly of force... what the fuck are they "recognizing"? Why don't they just give a Grammy Award to Palestine as being the best new album? They are corroding language to a point where it means utterly nothing, but expecting us to take it seriously all the same. Oh and they "recognize" Palestine on the "pre-1967 borders," which don't exist, because the armistice - WHICH WAS INTERNATIONAL LAW - flatly says the armistice lines are not national borders and that national borders can only be established by direct negotiations. Europeans ignore the international law set up by Middle Easterners so they can center the process around themselves. (Flashback to COVID vaccine controversy: the international law signed between Israel and Palestine says the latter is responsible for its own vaccines, but Europeans want everybody to talk about the laws signed in Switzerland).

Right after Trump won in 2016, the Obama Administration signed off on a UNSC resolution saying all Israeli presence beyond the armistice line was illegal - thus totally abandoning the "land swaps" framework that all sides had acknowledged for 30+ years. Who could ever expect a Palestinian to negotiate a land swap ever again once the UNSC and USA all agree that Israel is entitled to nothing? This will make future negotiations HARDER and a future state LESS LIKELY. It is blindingly obvious that if Hillary Clinton had won, USA would never have gone along with such a revision; instead, Obama went panic-shopping for a symbolic victory at any price.

Europe - and, sorry to say, the last few Democratic U.S. presidents - is very clearly sending a message to Palestine: "You will never have to negotiate, just hold out longer and keep fighting and dying more." And also sending a message to Israel: "You can never trust a signed legal agreement, we will undermine any arrangement you make with Palestine." This toxic internationalism leaves peace even less likely.

If Europeans and "peace processors" really want to free Palestine, let them send their armies into Gaza and wipe out Hamas to the last man, seize all the weapons and crush all the tunnels, and help stabilize a new unified Palestinian leadership. That is the ONLY intervention they could attempt that would possibly help at all.

[illustratus]

Alatriste (2006) by Agustín Díaz Yanes | The Surrender of Breda by Diego Velázquez

[sscarletvenus]

an extract from an article published by the Middle East Eye, authored by Jonathan Cook (a/Jonathan_K_Cook on twitter) :

A handful of Israeli whistleblowers have revealed that Palestinians are incarcerated for weeks on end in Israel's secretive prison Sde Teiman as they are tortured – both through formal interrogations and through the conditions they are held in.

They are forced to sit blindfolded outdoors on a thin mattress through the desert heat of the day and sleep in the cold of the desert night. Continuously cuffed, they are forced to remain motionless and silent. At night, dogs are set on them. Anyone who speaks or moves risks being savagely beaten till bones are broken.

People’s hands and legs are tightly zip-tied for so long that, according to the report, some have needed limbs amputated.

As one Israeli whistleblower recounted to CNN, none of these abuses are about intelligence gathering. “They were done out of revenge,” he admitted. The inmates are punching bags for the Israeli soldiers and guards.

But this is about more than simple vengeance. Understanding what is happening at Sde Teiman provides a clearer picture of what is happening on a far bigger, even more industrial scale in the torture chamber of Gaza.

Especially revealing are the conditions in a field hospital at the detention camp, housing Palestinians either maimed in Israel’s savage destruction of Gaza or injured by beatings from Israeli soldiers.

They are handcuffed to gurneys in row after row, blindfolded and naked apart from an adult nappy.

They are not allowed to speak. There they lie day after day, night after night, in a state of utter sensory deprivation, with nothing to distract from their wounds and pain. In the midst of this, Israeli medical interns can use their exposed, vulnerable flesh as a canvas for experimentation.

According to one whistleblower, the detention centre has quickly gained a reputation for being “a paradise for interns”.

There, they are allowed to use Palestinians as little more than lab rats and encouraged to carry out medical procedures they are not qualified to perform.

A whistleblower told CNN: “I was asked to learn how to do things on the patients, performing minor medical procedures that are totally outside my expertise.”

Such procedures were frequently done without anaesthesia. Unlike doctors in Gaza, Israeli doctors have ready access to painkillers. It is a choice not to use them.

link for the full article :

Just one example of why there can absolutely be no coexistence with these monstrous colonisers.

[fafayayarhen]

i know i'm late and the game was won but i still wanted smth spaus so i promise i'll probably have another better doodle of the recent spain vs france match

funny story i didn't watch spain vs germany for like a good chunk UNTIL the extra time bcs i was keeping up to date with through the google live thingy open on my phone so i kept glancing at it

i blew up the gc when germany scored like eXCUSE YOUUU So i joined my mum in the living room and watched the rest of the game and it was wAY TOO TENSE (I'M NOT EVEN INTO SOCCER!!!!)

anyway yeah spaus but eurocup and u can't tell me austria didn't get a bit TOO passionate when he first started watching and he wasn't even interested at first but then...

roddi just wanna support his ex-hubby thank u 💜💛✨✨✨✨✌️

[beautiful-basque-country]

(English by me)

This was the case of many people not so long ago in EH: they only spoke Basque, and they would get ridiculed for it by Spanish speakers.

In this case, the poor kid had to bribe his friends with a dinner - in a time of poverty - to see if that changed their attitude towards him.

Love to see how proud he still is when saying he learnt Spanish in just one year 🥹.

[little-candy-store-of-horrors]

Day 4: «When on Earth was the last time you even fit into that?»

For @spaus-week because I'm ((unlicensed)) H*bsburg historian and closet h*talia veteran and im about to make it everyone else's problem

Franz I/II's proportions under the cut

[stellacadente]

ik the euros are over and i've also said this before but god i hate people giving stupid "political" reasons for supporting one colonizer european country over the other in fucking football. most of the time you're despising one country for things that the country you're praising also does/did IT'S DUMB. none of our countries are shit. i can't stop thinking of this (not great) pro palestine page on instagram being like pro palestine spain wins over zionist england! ....... spain literally still deals weapons with "israel" give me a fucking break. it's stupid it's stupid it's stupid just say you hate england and wanted to see them lose most of us did and you don't need to come up with reasons why the other western european country is actually morally superior

[fatehbaz]

[D]omesticated attack dogs [...] hunted those who defied the profitable Caribbean sugar regimes and North America’s later Cotton Kingdom, [...] enforced plantation regimens [...], and closed off fugitive landscapes with acute adaptability to the varied [...] terrains of sugar, cotton, coffee or tobacco plantations that they patrolled. [...] [I]n the Age of Revolutions the Cuban bloodhound spread across imperial boundaries to protect white power and suppress black ambitions in Haiti and Jamaica. [...] [Then] dog violence in the Caribbean spurred planters in the American South to import and breed slave dogs [...].

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Spanish landowners often used dogs to execute indigenous labourers simply for disobedience. [...] Bartolomé de las Casas [...] documented attacks against Taino populations, telling of Spaniards who ‘hunted them with their hounds [...]. These dogs shed much human blood’. Many later abolitionists made comparisons with these brutal [Spanish] precedents to criticize canine violence against slaves on these same Caribbean islands. [...] Spanish officials in Santo Domingo were licensing packs of dogs to comb the forests for [...] fugitives [...]. Dogs in Panama, for instance, tracked, attacked, captured and publicly executed maroons. [...] In the 1650s [...] [o]ne [English] observer noted, ‘There is nothing in [Barbados] so useful as … Liam Hounds, to find out these Thieves’. The term ‘liam’ likely came from the French limier, meaning ‘bloodhound’. [...] In 1659 English planters in Jamaica ‘procured some blood-hounds, and hunted these blacks like wild-beasts’ [...]. By the mid eighteenth century, French planters in Martinique were also relying upon dogs to hunt fugitive slaves. [...] In French Saint-Domingue [Haiti] dogs were used against the maroon Macandal [...] and he was burned alive in 1758. [...]

Although slave hounds existed throughout the Caribbean, it was common knowledge that Cuba bred and trained the best attack dogs, and when insurrections began to challenge plantocratic interests across the Americas, two rival empires, Britain and France, begged Spain to sell these notorious Cuban bloodhounds to suppress black ambitions and protect shared white power. [...] [I]n the 1790s and early 1800s [...] [i]n the Age of Revolutions a new canine breed gained widespread popularity in suppressing black populations across the Caribbean and eventually North America. Slave hounds were usually descended from more typical mastiffs or bloodhounds [...].

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Spanish and Cuban slave hunters not only bred the Cuban bloodhound, but were midwives to an era of international anti-black co-ordination as the breed’s reputation spread rapidly among enslavers during the seven decades between the beginning of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 and the conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865. [...]

Despite the legends of Spanish cruelty, British officials bought Cuban bloodhounds when unrest erupted in Jamaica in 1795 after learning that Spanish officials in Cuba had recently sent dogs to hunt runaways and the indigenous Miskitos in Central America. [...] The island’s governor, Balcarres, later wrote that ‘Soon after the maroon rebellion broke out’ he had sent representatives ‘to Cuba in order to procure a number of large dogs of the bloodhound breed which are used to hunt down runaway negroes’ [...]. In 1803, during the final independence struggle of the Haitian Revolution, Cuban breeders again sold hundreds of hounds to the French to aid their fight against the black revolutionaries. [...] In 1819 Henri Christophe, a later leader of Haiti, told Tsar Alexander that hounds were a hallmark of French cruelty. [...]

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The most extensively documented deployment of slave hounds [...] occurred in the antebellum American South and built upon Caribbean foundations. [...] The use of dogs increased during that decade [1830s], especially with the Second Seminole War in Florida (1835–42). The first recorded sale of Cuban dogs into the United States came with this conflict, when the US military apparently purchased three such dogs for $151.72 each [...]. [F]ierce bloodhounds reputed to be from Cuba appeared in the Mississippi valley as early as 1841 [...].

The importation of these dogs changed the business of slave catching in the region, as their deployment and reputation grew rapidly throughout the 1840s and, as in Cuba, specialized dog handlers became professionalized. Newspapers advertised slave hunters who claimed to possess the ‘Finest dogs for catching negroes’ [...]. [S]lave hunting intensified [from the 1840s until the Civil War] [...]. Indeed, tactics in the American South closely mirrored those of their Cuban predecessors as local slave catchers became suppliers of biopower indispensable to slavery’s profitability. [...] [P]rice [...] was left largely to the discretion of slave hunters, who, ‘Charging by the day and mile [...] could earn what was for them a sizeable amount - ten to fifty dollars [...]'. William Craft added that the ‘business’ of slave catching was ‘openly carried on, assisted by advertisements’. [...] The Louisiana slave owner [B.B.] portrayed his own pursuits as if he were hunting wild game [...]. The relationship between trackers and slaves became intricately systematized [...]. The short-lived republic of Texas (1836–46) even enacted specific compensation and laws for slave trackers, provisions that persisted after annexation by the United States.

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All text above by: Tyler D. Parry and Charlton W. Yingling. "Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas". Past & Present, Volume 246, Issue 1, February 2020, pages 69-108. Published February 2020. At: doi dot org/10.1093/pastj/gtz020. February 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[sprites4ever]

Extremely hard to swallow pills for the Western far Left:

The only reason Latin and Southern American countries can act like they're the victims of oh-so-evil US imperialism is because the native owners of those countries are all dead. The US American people are descendants of British colonists. Latin and Southern American peoples are descendants of Spanish colonists. The Spanish were far more thorough in their eradication of Natives, hence none of them protesting this misuse of a victim role.

The idea that imperialism and racism are bad was not invented by Brits, but it was popularized in the Western world by Brits.

Socialism was invented by Germans and Brits.

The French revolution may have been a bloody act of democracy, but didn't work. Napoleon and his Grande Armee used the chaos to declare themselves Emperor.

The Soviet Union was not a victim of capitalism, but collapsed because Communism does not work. It was also corrupt beyond belief, and its collapse has led to ex-Soviet countries, especially russia, becoming even more capitalist than before the establishment of the Soviet Union.

The People's Republic of China is less Chinese than the Republic of China aka Taiwan. The PRC was established in 1949 by Mao Zedong and his Chinese Communist Party, and Chinese nationalists fled to the island of Taiwan, establishing an exile government. They are the same people with the same culture, but mainland China is arguably less Chinese, because the CCP constantly revise historical records to suit their propaganda.

[useless-catalanfacts]

The Council of Europe has published a report about Spain's violations against the language rights of Catalan and Aranese people. It explains how Spain does not follow the European charters that aim to respect minority and minoritized languages, despite having ratified them, and also shows how Spain's mistreatment of the Catalan linguistic community has only gotten worse in the last 15 years.

And we appreciate this greatly, but there are experts proving Spain's human rights violations against Catalan people all the time, and yet nothing happens and the Spanish Government continues passing more discriminatory laws and the Spanish tribunals keep applying them in the worst ways possible. Is the Council of Europe ready to do something to make Spain respect the peoples whose land it occupies?

[hussyknee]

"7 coalition countries refusing to disclose who they were." Sure, Jan. 💀

I see the US is taking propaganda lessons from Israel's PR team. The entire fucking world is sick to death of Tweedledee and Tweedledum's shit.

Not the genocide, of course, there's no imperialist or colonizer that has a problem with genocide. Just the hypocrisy and incessant toddler tantrums and refusal to do anything to contain the US's rabid howler monkey. It's been nearly three months of this clown circus, people got shit to do. Lmao.

[kuramirocket]

These Native Americans are not a people of the past. It's us. We have just been rebranded as Mexican. Latino. Hispanic. It's called ethnic erasure or ethnic cleansing. You kidnap a people, you shove them in Indian boarding schools, force them to no longer speak their languages, remove their original names and force them to have Spanish names, English names, French names, Portuguese names. On paper we've been identifying as White. And that's how much ethnic cleaning has affected us. We've been blinded by the fact that they took away our names, our languages, our culture, everything that we are and replaced it with the colonizers identity, hence colonialism. They slaughtered our ancestors, they built their own "countries" on top of our corpses.

- Ricardo Ignacio