To the person who wrote the following remark:

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Since when did Italy fight the Mafia? I thought they were too busy taking cash from them.

This is not about me any more. This is about my country. This is about the dead. This is about hundreds upon hundreds of heroes, judges and policemen, politicians and journalists and businessmen and common people, who have been killed in decades of creeping civil war trying to resist and turn back this murderous cancer of our life. This is about my country and my people. You are a vile, gutless, anonymous little racist who knows nothing except her miserable prejudices and who insults generations of heroes of whose existence she has not the least idea and whose courage she would never in a million years be able to conceive of, let alone feel, because her whole life is one long despicable grovel - to her own ignorance, to her contemptible little notions - to whatever social milieu spawned her. You are a despicable little anonymous coward with not the least notion of courage and independence; who would never risk her little finger, let alone her life, for anyone; who, if she really ever had anything to do with the Mafia, would sell them her mother, her father and all her relatives and friends just for the sake of an easy life and a quick buck. You are born to crawl, betray and insult.

To all my other enemies: God knows I have had enough to say about you. But I would like to be reassured that none of you would sink to this level of abjection. This is racism, pure and simple. If I had been Jewish, this scum would have written darkly of Jewish influence; if I had been black, she would have making "jokes" about cannibals and missionaries. This is the level to which you consent if you do not disassociate yourself, as I am asking you here and now, from this filth.

A few of you have more reason than others to do so. Heidi8, you have made a fuss about using inclusive language: let us see whether all vile prejudices bother you, or only prejudice against women. Aerynalexander, the same goes for you, twice over. Narcissa Malfoy, you are supposed to be Catholic: the Church has always condemned racism of all kinds. Let us see if any of you have principles, or only postures.

Comments

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First: I said the Catholic Church. Read about Bartolome' de Las Casas and ST.Peter Claver (among many others) before you open your mouth about things you know nothing of. Second, whatever the Inquisition and the Crusades may have been, they were NOT racist. The Crusades, in particular, were a matter of small brown Mediterranean men (Italians and French) fighting other small brown Mediterranean men (Arabs and Turks) over the possession of a specific city, Jerusalem. The Inquisition was a court of law that had power over all citizens of certain given countries, whatever their colour. You know no history and are full of stupid prejudice to boot. I, on the other hand, am a historian. What you did here was equivalent to teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, and I am afraid that the worst of it is that you are too ignorant to even feel the point of this response. At least Narcissa Malfoy knows some history; her reply, if it ever comes, might be more to the point.

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The period concerned is not my field of study, but I know enough to be simply astonished at your remarks. Let me quote you a basic anthropological principle: "if you want to know what people are doing and why, ask them"; and every Crusader would have told them that they were on a pilgrimage to the Holy City. The bizarre idea of a pilgrimage in arms is exactly what the Crusades were; and the pilgrimage was aimed at nothing but Jerusalem. The Crusades were exactly about Jerusalem (even though the Fourth was deviated to Constantinople, for reasons too complex to describe, and with disastrous long-term results), and the largest contributors in terms of men and means were the Italians and French. Some time later, another lot of small brown Mediterranean men, the Spanish, got started on a parallel enterprise, the Reconquista.

As for the rest, the Inquisition was a Church court of law established on late-Roman principles derived from the collections of Justinian I; that is why it was called the Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition was a State imitation. The remit of the Inquisition was, always, heresy, and its establishment was in the context of the Albigensian war. (Incidentally, most history textbooks make this a matter of Catholic and North French aggression of a peaceful Albigensian South France; which is nonsense. The war began with Albigensian violence against Catholics, including the murder of a Papal envoy who had been judged to be too successful in debate. For what happened afterwards the Albigensians could only blame themselves, as those who start wars always should. But they were not short of intellectual accomplices in after years.) I cannot imagine what kind of corrupt misrepresentation of the evidence can have implanted in your mind the notion that any kind of Inquisition, Church or Spanish, was in any way primarily racist; although in this age of Political Correctness one should not be surprised at anything.

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That is one specific event, and it is in a much wider context (the long-drawn-out saga of the expulsion of Moriscos and Marranos. To judge the action and purpose of the whole historical phenomenon of the Spanish Inquisition on it would be like judging the whole history of the American Supreme Court on the Dred Scott decision. And more to the point, even if one agrees with the general opinion that the expulsion of these two minorities was a grave injustice, there still is the point that it was a religious, not a racial matter. Genetically, Moriscos and Marranos were just like other Spaniards, since most of them were the descendants of converts from the original Spanish stock. (Incidentally, one frequently-heard canard on the matter is that the expulsion of these minorities hastened the economic and political decline of Spain. This is nonsense: as the unfortunate Jews and Muslims were being thrown out, Spain was entering upon its greatest decades - the age of Cervantes and of the great playwrights. Spain began to decline two generations later, because of its inherently weak position on the edge of Europe, its overextension over an empire it did not have the strength to defend, and the growing and steady pressure from its French neighbour.)
If you can find no better to declare the Spanish Inquisition racist than the expulsion of Jews and Muslims, I suggest you try harder. I could have made a better case myself. Meanwhile, read Kamen's recent and excellent work on the subject.